Litmus Collective

Six-Word Stories, Episode 1

Ed Kearns

Bury the dog before you go.

Grab a gun on your way.

Charcoal, chlorine, and an empty crib.

Patrick Michael Finn

Sniffer

The day old Max Dog died, he was already deaf from all the secrets his lady had stuck into his ears. She was always pulling secrets out from her…

Where You Won’t Meet the Girl of Your Dreams

This woman I loved, Trinity Sunshine Riggs, stole all my guns while I was at work and put them up on ArizonaArmsDealer.com. She sold them by lunch, driving all over Phoenix and Mesa to meet with the buyers in parking lots outside of grocery stores and…

Atlantic City

Some sick sonofabitch decapitated the guy next to him on a Greyhound to Winnipeg. Couldn’t help himself. It’s in the paper beside my…

Temescal Canyon, 1989

Four weeks after they’d moved to Temescal Canyon, her father lost his job managing the parts department at the auto shop. He’d been there for sixteen years, since she was a baby.

“It’s fine,” he told her. “I’ll land something new by the end of next week.”

The Commitment

This girl as a girl, this girl with her friend, this girl with a journal, a pen, a habit of handwriting, long-handing the stories she finds. This girl a promise, I’ll be out soon, we can go soon, then, then, just one more she tells herself, just one more. Over-writing, writing over, moving the…

We Are the Mad Ones

I hitchhiked to Flagstaff when I was nineteen, then turned around, then kept going. Started with a dollar-eighty-five in my pocket, went four good months, wrote it all down in a big black book. Professors, friends, a campus preacher called Padre, they all said Do it while you’re young. Do it…

Everyone I Knew Was Gone

Tuesday mornings I cleaned Lady Blue’s windows before I drove to my commercial jobs. Her house didn’t seem like the kind of place occupied by a lady who could pay a guy to clean her windows every week. Two spaces down was a fifth-wheel in a lot overgrown with dead nutsage, and next…

Recoil

I’m doing yoga, body cocked between the cobra and locust poses this morning, when I’m struck with the vision of shooting an elk, eyes dying as I…