Our Oro Valley Writers’ Forum recently challenged the members to write a story in six sentences. I took up the challenge. It is fun to practice writing in a variety of ways. There were no restrictions as to genre or topic. Below is my story.

In the darkness of the midnight hour, the lines clang against the main mast as the little sloop, Step Two, is released from anchor and begins to float out of the cove in a rising tide. The jib unfurls in the freshening wind from starboard. She sets the wheel aiming toward open waters, then bends to her task. Her back and shoulder muscles strain as she heaves the body overboard, head first, and watches it slice through the inky waters into the deep along with the bloody knife. She exhales a deep sigh of freedom realizing he’ll terrorize no more. Light from the quarter moon creeps from between clouds casting shadows across her scarred face.

A few months ago I wrote another six sentence story for an on-line challenge. This is that story. It is titled Bi-polar. I feel I must add that it is not auto-biographical. I shared it with some in my writing group and they immediately expressed sympathy for me. I had to explain it was made up but comes from observation, reading, and listening to other people’s stories.

It comes without warning, unexpected, expected, furious, fierce, brittle, hateful. It goes the same, expected, unexpected as sweetness returns. calm consideration and laughter. My lover is possessed by a djinn called by many names, bi-cycles, bi-polar cycles, stealthily stealing love. I am thrown as from a swiftly moving car into brambles of pain, reason unknown, known, unknowable. My heart is calloused, trust gone an unbridgeable distance, leaving shredded tatters of love with only a gossamer thread remaining. The darkness of her despair, unreachable, unclaimed grasps my helpless heart building an unbreachable wall between.

Fiction is based on so many things from a writer’s experiences, reading, and research. While there may be tiny pieces of me in my fiction writing, it is mostly made up in my head. It is the inhabiting of other realities that makes writing fun for me. Some of them are dark. Some are ridiculous and some are funny. These two examples are on the dark side. I don’t think anyone thought the first story was autobiographical…but you never know. I have owned a sailboat.