Six Sentences

A Reasonable Share of the Work

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sat, 3 Oct 2026 12:07:48 -0400

by George Polya

One of the most important tasks of the teacher is to help his students. This task is not quite easy; it demands time, practice, devotion, and sound principles. The student should require as much experience of independent work as possible. But if he is left alone with his problem without any help or with insufficient help, he may make no progress at all. If the teacher helps too much, nothing is left to the student. The teacher should help, but not too much and not too little, so that the student shall have a reasonable share of the work.

6S

George Polya (1887-1985) was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. His six sentences are excerpted from How To Solve It, his guide to problem solving.

A Conversation

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 10:53:55 -0400

by Maung Htike Aung

You’re broken like me, a windowpane said. That’s true, but we are different, I said, looking outside. It was a fine evening, people walking their dogs. I have a life to live. I have a soul to talk to. We both went quiet again.

6S

Maung Htike Aung is a Burma-based writer. His poems and stories have appeared in Portside Review, Wasafiri, Mekong Review, SUSPECT, and elsewhere.

Various Forms of Self-Expression

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Thu, 1 Oct 2026 17:24:06 -0400

by John Harrison

Everyone else was asleep. I sat down quietly and draped a bath towel over my head. I was instantly transformed into all the TV monsters that I loved. When I took the towel away, I went back to being the monster I had become. My parents don’t know this yet, but they will. Soon.

6S

John Harrison studied cultural anthropology to PhD level at Oxford University. New to writing, he has had a number of poems and stories published in magazines and books, including Hollow Point Books, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Samizdat.

Before There Was ASMR

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:17:37 -0400

by Amy Lerman

I can’t study anymore. Even If I do, I won’t be able to explain ideal marriage in Faulkner when my professor asks during tomorrow’s exam. I walk to campus town, the one department store that still uses the pneumatic tubes from when it was a bank. I find a register’s corner. There, I anticipate patrons depositing their credit cards. A moment of silence until my eyes involuntarily close, each transactional suction like a dusty metronome’s steadying ticks.

6S

Amy Lerman, by way of Florida, Illinois, England, and Kansas, lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press) won the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Scapegoat, The Queen's Review, Atticus Review, Solstice, Prime Number, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and other publications.

The Raw Human Experience

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:45:14 -0400

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Almost everyone suffers from depravity at some point, and a crisis is a good dramatic element in a story. I’m interested in people, in their complications, and I think writing is a way to exert some kind of authority or control over the form that depravity takes. And I not only think it’s valuable to share imaginations of these depraved characters, though I never really use the word "depraved"—I’m not really sure if it’s resonating exactly—but I think it’s important that there’s a frank and honest space in writing where people can acknowledge their humanity in ways different from what is celebrated in mainstream culture. For example, something like trauma is mediated so carefully in Hollywood and online that it sometimes feels fake. I would be more interested in the experience of really understanding what something feels like rather than looking at its moral or social justice implications. Really getting down to the raw human experience is what’s valuable to me, and I think the only thing I’m really capable of doing anyway, so there it is.

6S

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American novelist and screenwriter. Her six sentences are excerpted from an interview in Desperate Literature.

I’m the Expert Around Here

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:50:45 -0400

by Brad Rose

I have a small car. It’s economical. Yesterday, as I drove by the neighbors, I waved. Their lawn is dead, too. They told me that it wasn’t because of extraterrestrials. What the hell do they know?

6S

Brad Rose's latest book is I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly.

Understand

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 22:03:23 -0400

by Susan Isla Tepper

You won’t understand. How miserable I am. How sad and lonely. Now that he’s gone. I know about death. That doesn’t help.

6S

Susan Isla Tepper is the author of seven published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent is a novella titled GIRL UPSIDE DOWN.

Tick vs Tock

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:25:29 -0400

by Steven Lemprière

Tick; Harry, Grandfather’s antique wall-mounted dining-room clock. Tock; Father’s nineteen-sixties General Electric—appropriately named—bedside timepiece. Tick; dinnertime and Harry chimes, summoning family as metronome-like, he conducts us to our traditional Sunday roast. Tock; dawn, beep, beep, beep—the sun rises, as does Father, and therefore, without choice, so do I. Tick; Father has clocked out. Tock; no longer alarmed, I roll over and return to sleep—Zzz-Zzz-Zzz…

6S

Steven Lemprière's work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Drabble, Friday Flash Fiction, 50-Word Stories, 50 Give or Take, Punk Noir Magazine, The Hoolet’s Nook, Literary Garage, Suddenly and Without Warning, and Paragraph Planet. He took a creative writing course while a patient at an Irish psychiatric hospital, and shortly after his discharge, the Cúirt International Festival of Literature shortlisted him for the New Writers Prize. When not writing, he’s seeking the sleep he lost as a child.

Good

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:01:29 -0400

by Wesley Morris

“Good” meant trying hard and helping out and listening and being a devoted friend. It meant only the best news for my parents and being liked. But goodness as a personal policy is strange for a child to have. It’s for grown-ups; not for kids. Teachers like good kids; some teachers prefer them. The kind of goodness I’m talking about is suspicious to other kids.

6S

Wesley Morris has won two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism, including in 2021 for a set of essays that explored the intersection of race and pop culture. His six sentences are excerpted from "My Mustache, My Self."

Revenge

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:29:51 -0400

by Thomas Baron

There’s a crow in the front yard and I’m pretty sure it hates me. Every time I leave, it caws at me and, if I go too close, it pegs juniper berries from the tree and drops them on me. My wife says I must have done something to upset it, that crows are famously vengeful, but I don’t know what I did to deserve this. Maybe it’s mad at me for cutting down that tree in the spring that was already dead, or for being too loud when I pull into the driveway, or maybe it wants me to feed it and is angry that I don’t. Maybe it saw what happened that night in the parking lot behind the Wendy’s and wants me to know that somebody saw and that somebody knows and that the world will remember even if the people forget. Either way, I don’t think I’ll leave the house today—there are more crows out there now, and I don’t know what it’s telling them.

6S

Thomas Baron is a British writer living in Northern Colorado.

Coming of Age

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:53:40 -0400

by Victoria Melekian

The women in my family grow wings, big and feathery white, hard to hide and hard to manage when sorrow weighs you down and the wings don’t work and you land in faraway places having to think about narwhals and pollywogs, happy things, until you’re light enough to flap back home, ignoring the houses beneath, the people inside with not enough to eat or enough insulin or enough hope to want to wake up in the morning. Soaring above glimmering grids of light is gorgeous, but maintaining a constant cheeriness as the world below churns—well, I understand why Mom and Grandma gave up their wings years ago. It’s difficult to sustain concern for anything other than staying aloft. I assured Grandma I wanted to care. She clipped my wings using her small sewing scissors. It stung, but now I can feel all of it: despair, outrage, grief, delight, the whole earthbound mess.

6S

Victoria Melekian writes poetry and short fiction. Her poetry collection “The Accidental Courage of Our Lives” is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. “Unhoused,” Victoria’s novella-in-flash, won first place in the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Awards. For more, see her website.

Versions

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

by Elodie A. Roy

In some versions of her story, her husband was “a botanist.” In some others, he was “a porter” and “dense.” In yet another, she called him “a good egg.” I never met him. I occasionally wondered whether she had married several men, or only that one who contained several beings, a tangled infinity of lives. And I wondered whether that made her free.

6S

Elodie A. Roy's fiction appears in The Stinging Fly, 3:AM Magazine, Flash Frog, New World Writing, Blink-Ink, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. She is based in Berlin.

Stuffed Shirt

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

by Marc Nash

My new spouse laid my freshly ironed shirt on the newly made bed. She folded the sleeves onto the shirt's body, cuff resting on cuff, rather than stretched out to the sides. Like a straitjacket. Like a seppuku. Like a burial shroud. I bought drip-dry shirts from then on.

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Marc Nash has written five flash fiction collections and seven novels. His 2018 novel, Three Dreams in the Key of G, was short listed for the 2018 Not the Booker Prize. He lives and works in London.

Some Things are Best Left Alone

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:01:03 -0400

by Amy Hernández Matsumoto

Sea foam floats near my feet. I want to lie down in it, play with it, rest in its cumulus shape. My instinct is to interrupt and scatter the innocence of the ocean’s clouds. My mind and hands argue; “stand and admire them only” wins. Carefully, I lunge over the foamy meringue and refuse to look back. This time, I saw the sign: Harmful Algal Blooms.

6S

Amy Hernández Matsumoto is co-owner of a Southern Italian restaurant in Vancouver, WA, and an adjunct instructor at Washington State University, Vancouver. Reading, writing, working in the community, and cuddling with her three Shih Tzus are what bring her peace.

The Divine Tease

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:32:42 -0400

by Woody Allen

In the Hamptons he was up and dressed at 6:00 a.m. and enjoyed a walk on the cool white sand. Alone on the endless coastline, the huge dawn sky gray and moody, the vast ocean, up and back in its rhythm signifying only that time moves in one direction, naturally his thoughts turned to the eternal and from there to the religious. It was here, under these conditions, if ever God's plan was meant to become apparent, this was the setting. Staring out into the horizon he awaited some sign. When no message emerged, no sacred instructions to go along with his ineffable intuition of "something greater" materialized and God was a no-show he began to miss the city where intimations of immortality were scarce, but in trouble you could dial 911. So much for the divine tease, a hustle for suckers.

6S

Woody Allen is a writer, director, and actor. His six sentences are excerpted from his first novel, What's with Baum?

Deleting Granny

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:50:12 -0400

by Joseph Manwill

I have to delete something. My neurolink needs the space. Sorry, Granny, there is no need to remember you singing "Happy Birthday" to me at five. Still not enough. I'll remove the rest of your catalogue. I need that space for the hamburger.

6S

Joseph Manwill. He is no good at bios and always makes the same joke, which he just made, about being bad at writing bios. He has no links to share.

The Known Harms of Microplastics

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:23:45 -0400

by Julia Rajagopalan

With a surly, lip-glossed frown, the judgy grocery store cashier scans my cases of bottled water. She glares and tells me about a TikTok she watched about how microplastics appeared in 100% of semen samples. As I hand her the carton of eggs, I ask her about the health effects of microplastics, but she admits she doesn’t know. When I explain I don’t have semen, testicles, or TikTok, she rings a bell for her manager. The island-shirted man, bearded and verbose, tells me I can’t harass the cashiers with words like semen and testicles, and that “she said it first” isn’t a defense. So I get in my car and scream while pounding on my steering wheel, then drive to another store.

6S

Julia Rajagopalan is a writer of speculative fiction who lives just outside of Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and their very grumpy dog. For a list of her publications, check out her website. This piece was originally published in Ink in Thirds.

Drowning in Sleep

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:44:03 -0400

by Brad Rose

I’m paying off my sleep debt, one dream at a time. As it so happens, I’m the invisible man. I sport transparent tattoos. Last night, I had a few choice words with the naval dead and they gave me this submarine sandwich, in case I were to fall overboard. At first, I thought this was funny. But I’m not laughing anymore.

6S

Brad Rose's latest book is I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly.

Boy

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:25:03 -0400

by Maddie King

Every person was a ‘boy’ no matter who it was. A ‘boy’ would take us to Etna, if we asked. Another ‘boy’ could sell us black-rock bracelets from the base; they were cheap, only 15 lira. A certain 'boy' scaled the side of the crater every day to look into its depths and every day would climb back down to tell everyone that the volcano was still dead. This boy’s father had held this job until 1949, when lava had flowed down to Randazzo (“where the allied beetches come”). A few years later, ash clouds spread as far as Libya.

6S

Maddie King is a writer and filmmaker living in Portland, Maine. Her short fiction has been published in HOOT, Fleas on the Dog, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. Once, she had a dream about setting up a palmistry practice by a lake. It didn’t impact the course of her life, but it sometimes amuses her to think about a version in which it had.

Intra-Stellar

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:29:18 -0400

by Wim Coleman

It is said that our Hollow Sun holds 1.3 million earths. Just how much those earths resemble our own is purely a theoretical matter, since no information can escape the event horizon of the photosphere. Nevertheless, the laws of physics suggest with a high degree of certainty that there is an earth where coincidences never happen, which itself is an astonishing coincidence. Lent is perpetual on one of these earths, while Carnevale is never-ending on another. There is an earth where everyone's fifteen minutes of fame is divided and subdivided into imperceptible nanoseconds. Most interesting of all to the layperson is an earth where every snowflake has its exact double.

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Wim Coleman (he/him) is a playwright, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. In a literary culture divided into "highbrow" and "lowbrow," he strives to remain resolutely "brow." (Wim's website)

Sample People

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:40:47 -0400

by Patrick Parks

They were a small couple, elegantly dressed, but very small. They looked to me like sample people, something you might see in a shop, a display for the full-sized variety. They were so dainty and so delicate in their movements that I was overcome by the wonder of them and tears sprang to my eyes. It must have been a common reaction. They looked at me with something like pity as they passed. Each raised a tiny hand and gave me a brief, knowing salute.

6S

Patrick Parks authored a novel, Tucumcari (KERNPUNKT Press, 2018), and has had fiction, poetry, reviews and interviews appear or forthcoming in a number of places, most recently The Millions, The Writing Disorder, TYPO, Change Seven, Ocotillo Review, Bridge Eight, Another Chicago Magazine, and Full Stop. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and lives with his wife near Chicago. For more, visit his website.

Never Boring

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 06:23:06 -0400

by Anonymous

I liked Reddit for a while. I liked reading people’s conversations. There were people from all walks of life talking about what they did. Teachers, nurses, police officers, blue-collar workers. As an immigrant, I found America’s ever-squabbling population fascinating. They can be annoyingly ignorant about the other parts of the world, but they are almost never boring to observe.

6S

Anonymous is an anonymous female. Her six sentences are excerpted from "The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention."

Autumn Leaves, Autumn Lives

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:21:45 -0400

by Pablo Libedinsky

The old man shuffled along the solitary path, crunching dead leaves under his feet. The cold breeze, the autumn smell, and the spectacle of red, gold, brown, and ochre leaves dancing in the wind made him feel alive. He spotted an empty bench, sat down, leaned back, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. The wind surged, and layer by layer the leaves began to pile on him. When the wind stopped, the man had disappeared, buried under a silent mound of dry foliage. A sudden gust shattered the stillness, blowing the leaves away, leaving a clean, desolate bench.

6S

Pablo Libedinsky is a retired computer programmer living in San Francisco. He wrote a few stories when he was 12 years old and then stopped, later returning to writing as an adult. His stories have been published in Down in the Dirt, Let Me Tell You a Story, The Gorko Gazette, 10x10Flash and CommuterLit.

The Act of Looking Up

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sat, 5 Sep 2026 20:59:42 -0400

by Lili Taylor

I've discovered something interesting about the act of looking up. Try this experiment when you're next out on the street. Stand on the sidewalk, look up, and stay looking up for a good couple of minutes. I guarantee you a fellow human walking by will pass you, pause, and then look up too. I don't know where it comes from, this instinct to look up when another human is looking up. Is it from the way, way old days when scary creatures jumped down on us from the tree branches above?

6S

Lili Taylor is an American actress. Her six sentences are excerpted from Turning to Birds, The Power and Beauty of Noticing.

The Gorge

sixsentences@yahoo.com (Robert McEvily) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:01:34 -0400

by Lisa Lahey

When Amos found me, I looked like a wet bundle of rags lying at the bottom of the gorge. My long, brown hair was tangled across my chalk white skin and my glassy brown eyes stared at the clouds, seeing nothing. My legs were splayed in an obscene pose. I’d been thrown into the gorge, not placed there. My long, heavy skirts wrapped around my waist leaving nothing to the imagination. If I wasn’t dead, I’d die of embarrassment.

6S

Lisa Lahey's work has appeared in magazines such as 34th Parallel, Spadina Literary Review, and others.