6-minute Stories

Joe Brown is a retired building contractor. He lives on a small family farm in the Bethania area of Winston Salem NC. He now has time to do all those projects that a busy work schedule didn't allow. He enjoys his grandchildren and great grandchildren and as time allows likes to reflect on his life and write stories about his adventures. Several of those stories have been shared through The Personal Publishing Project. His prayer is that his family can appreciate the history he has lived.

– “Why am I still here? Why can't I die?” Then, a single, wispy white cloud appeared and wafted its way past me in an otherwise cloudless blue sky.

– “Let’s face it. We’re lost.” Our speech is breathy, our lips are parched, and our tongues are like sandpaper.    Suzanne Cottrell, a Buckeye by birth, lives with her husband in rural Granville County, North Carolina, where she’s a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network and the Taste Life Twice Writers. She’s the author of a hybrid book, Nature Calls Outside My Window, A Collection of Poems and Stories, and three poetry chapbooks (Kelsay Books). A retired teacher, outdoor enthusiast, and nature lover, she enjoys monthly misadventures with her best friend Deborah Forbes, her co-author of “Preserving Freedom.” Besides writing, Suzanne enjoys reading, researching, knitting, and Pilates. www.suzanneswords.com. Deborah Forbes, a retired educator, lives in eastern North Carolina with her husband and their Greater Swiss Mountain puppy. She enjoys fitness, gardening, needlework, reading, and video calls with her granddaughters. This is her first published piece, marking an exciting new chapter in her life. After retiring, Suzanne and Deborah rekindled their friendship, beginning monthly adventures. Suzanne’s encouragement and guidance have been instrumental in Deborah’s journey as a writer, offering patience, knowledge, and unwavering support. Though still learning, Deborah hopes this piece will be the foundation for more stories to come.

“Before Liberty”—again! Even through the misty lenses of history, they were not giants—neither are we.

– “I’m Gus. Climb in; I’ll give you a ride.” The gravitational force pushed the seat straps into my shoulders and my stomach leaped. I couldn’t breathe.

– I was unwilling to pour out good beer. I received their conversation and stories and momentary camaraderie as an exchange for the communal feast.

– He wasn’t cheap; he just liked free things. He charged into snake-infested palmetto bushes with gusto, flinging balls out to the fairway like a crazed Walmart shopper on Black Friday.

– Going barefoot is fun…if you have shoes in your closet. Even in old age, Mama remembered hopelessly tugging down the faded blue dress, trying to hide her feet.

–He could not send others into dangers that he was not willing to face himself. The locals know that date. They honor it. They value it because it gave them freedoms that they live to this day.

– There are all kinds of marriages. Freedom is not cheap. And it is never “pure.”

– The cows? The cows were a problem? I walked each check to the bursar's office, fully aware that the cost of my education was far greater than the value of the check.

– I am certain we had more fun. There was nothing like the feel of the wind slapping hair in our faces as we leaned out the window and yelled fervent taunts at the opposing cars.

– Not so fast, my slowly dying friend! Out there my heart easily held you with the thrum of ancestral music, song, and dance, as consistent as air.

“Sister, that sounds like fortune telling. Isn’t that a sin?” What would happen to the rest of us who die swallowing pennies and buttons? But not wanting to be the rooster, I stay silent.

Freedom and scot-free or freeloader and free-for-all We acknowledge those blessings and those curses in the stories we tell.

– I have always told myself I’m not a runner. Race day in November dawned bright and crisp.

– Faint music drifted through the rows of vendors. Our stories entwined like dancing angels, each part fulfilling the whole.

Not all the lessons learned in school came from our teachers. This is a story of unarmed power. .

A father wrestles with expectations and acceptance.

– longing for family. Separated as children, a relentless desire to find one another spawned a frustrating search.

your wingman with angels An engineering prodigy arrives in the South, fascinated with an ancient relic and searching for the aerodynamic laws of angel wings, all the while nurturing his grove of Carolina dogwoods. It’s a good life.

—a brush with my bugaboo. A brother’s seeming “betrayal” awakens a loyal kid sister as his fiercest champion and ally.

— You durn fool Waves of hot lava washed down my throat, past my lungs, and hit my stomach like an acid avalanche.

Each of us would have a dress made specially. My ears perked up. I imagined, over and over, the blue of my dress, deep and velvety, the color of evening, just as the stars begin to come out.

– Truth is, she’s sitting here beside me right now.. I was looking at the mismatched attire of poverty and fatigue.

a foretaste of glory divine yet to come - Artist, writer, and athlete Bill Gramley of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, recounts his discoveries of Southern cooking and describes the delectables offered up from the table set by his mother-in-law on a 1950s North Carolina farm.

– “Sweetheart, wake up! Santa’s here!”   “But what I really want, Santa, is a flashlight.”

“Do you like the gift ya got, girlfriend?” Wanting to get rid of the proof, I tried to give the chocolates to my family for dessert.

I should have developed emotional armor, but I’d gone the other way. Stunned, I leaned hard on the doorjamb, knuckles white on suitcase handle, nerves frozen as they did when gut feelings proved true.

We all know our mothers have magical powers In Mom’s day, if you were not bleeding and could walk, you were perfectly fine.

The wind is the sculptor that shapes the shoreline. Vince poked holes, and I scuttered along crab-like, planting sprigs one by one.

Wires dangled from under the dash leaving only silence and an emptiness of spirit It was a time of meaningful conversations. George rode with me every day offering words of encouragement.

I had "sent a message out into the universe" asking for help. This unexpected path began bearing fruit and I was happy.

I did not want to be alone … so I looked for connections beyond the local. Call it meant-to-be, fate, kismet, benign coincidence, or just plain good luck, I do not care. I did not want to be alone … so I looked for connections beyond the local. Call it meant-to-be, fate, kismet, benign coincidence, or just plain good luck, I do not care.

“What’s that at the end of the other bed?” Sometimes we say to our adult selves, “Did this really happen? What did we see?

A shadowy man with a blurry face motioned for me to come down. In the dim light, I saw a large room containing mountains of frayed furniture, dishes, rusty hardware, and tattered cardboard boxes overflowing with yellowed papers.

“Who told you that?” Mom asked, horrified. “Nobody goes to the attic!” I asserted. I crossed my four-year-old arms defiantly.

“I’m coming, Mom. Hang on. I love you IloveyouIloveyou.” It would match the electric energy inside as we bumbled and fumbled with new information gathering as furiously and ominously as the roiling storm.

The music and togetherness created a happy space. A preaching wrapped into a folk song, circling lessons with rhythm and life.

My mother disliked going into debt. Self-sufficiency remained her ideal. He rendered our family homeless and forced my mother to find shelter in abhorrent shacks.

Anything that can go wrong, it will go wrong. The police reported it an accident; with anguish I added the word stupid.

Something had happened and the farm knew it. Rooster Cogburn was a burly, jewel-toned arrogance of teals, reds, deeper reds, and blues shot through with lances of yellow and purple.

I still feel the chills run down my spine. After all, D-O-G is truly the perfect reflection of G-O-D.

– “The inmates here are an army of forgotten men.” He accepted the rejections and focused on making a successful transition from his rogue, racketeering life.

– “This isn’t a timeshare. Our program’s based on points.” A presentation by a Dolly Parton doppelganger, so charming she could sell a bald man a comb!

– “Okay, Mr. Spark Plug. Out you come.” I gave it another dose of penetrating oil, waited, and pulled a little harder.

– I just wanted to say, “thank you.” Such a hole in cyberspace has no bottom, of course, so I grabbed onto one protruding root—to overtax the Alice metaphor—and pulled myself over to the side.

– “Let’s go backpacking.” Undaunted, we scoffed at the potential to dive into oblivion down a Tennessee mountainside.

–There’s almost no food that I don’t like. It usually takes a long, long hour to get the proper freeze, so we took turns slowly turning the handle over and over.

– After that, my confidence in strangers diminished. The bicycle delivered me to-and-fro until the weather changed, and the snowy, windy, 6-month Lake Erie winter arrived.

– “We can’t let her know what we’re up to.” We clambered up on the breakwater and made our way, in the dark, out to its very end.

– because it was there—our Mt. Everest. We never formally identified the squealer who called the police, but the local constabulary turned up in the form of Skippy Brown, a favorite local enforcer of the law.

— Buona fortuna. The possibility of seeing Renaissance art and architecture in person intrigued me.

– What have you got in a red? We were two competent but naive travelers missing a Spanish-English dictionary.

– I just kept working every day, knowing I would adjust. The wisdom of my decision to transfer schools certainly was now in question.

– “Do you have any questions?” If we lost this car, at least a new one would arrive in two days.

— “I cleaned it up, Mommy.” One small ocean of apple juice had been swabbed over the entire kitchen floor.

– “Can we keep one?” Mitzi barked, poked her nose through the fence, and sniffed her wooers.

– Nothing would deter us from enjoying our well-earned evening out. Ash-gray script swirled across the textured buff pages like hazy clouds crossing the sky at dusk.

– “I drove your car off a mountain.” No mercy was given to two mostly broke kids trying to start two new careers and a new marriage.

– I felt the comfort of a giant hug, surrounded by these beautiful mountains. My heart is heavy for what others are going through.

– “Let’s do it ourselves.” I punched button after button, painstakingly input the titles of programs using that archaic alphabetical system and ended up in some endless inescapable loop.

– “I can do that.” The words “stress,” “pressure,” “anxiety” appear on page after page.

– “You’ve got to do something about this,” they jibed him. Of course, later they told their kids that they loved us all. Usually they added, “despite the headaches you caused us.”

— I respected the officer and assumed he would also respect me. This was not just the assassination of the President; it was the death of hopes and dreams.

— whatever enlisted men played, or claimed to play, an instrument An order came down to me to have the band looking sharp, sounding good, and ready to lead the parade.

– “Sweetheart, wake up! Santa’s here!” “But what I really want, Santa, is a flashlight.”

– That was the plan, anyway. In that moment, we stopped feeling sorry for ourselves and remembered why we came.

– My warped resentment started after Dad died. We endured eye rolls and dagger-filled glares as we saw no other option.

– “I’ll take care of this, Honey.” Eleanor and I dragged our stocky, dark, wooden desk chairs up to our door to peer over the open transom at the long hall.

– “If the test was positive, what would I do about it?” Tipping the scales at four pounds and four ounces, our first granddaughter arrived still shimmering with heaven’s leavings.

– With a friendly smile, he joked, “Akira, you caught a big fish!” Some nights, my younger brothers and I would huddle around him, pleading for his stories.

– Drew and I became “a thing.” He turned all the girls into giddy puddles of goo.

— I liked him, he liked me. We needed to find common ground. Emotions drained, I was, nevertheless, taken with his coolheadedness in the face of danger.

— Leaving the door ajar, she darted out in her slippers and bathrobe. Hugging the bag of Oreos, Christie grinned at her mother’s face in the window as she skipped past the door.

– “Oh, little sister, that’s enough out of you.” When a bully grabbed me in grade school, I kneed him and ran all the way home, overkill in this instance, but not unwarranted.

– The change is unnerving. Lying on a chaise, brain numb and unrefreshed, I am confused by the unexpected difficulties of the day—of what to do next with an empty schedule in this now-unfamiliar place.

– what would my family think about us living two years in central Africa? It seemed futile to buck these chaotic, insoluble forces buffeting Zaire.

– “How can you give him up? He seems devoted to you.” As far as I could see, a carpet of brown and black leaves provided perfect Airedale camouflage.

– The stare-off begins. Puss-faces, Mom called us. A game of chicken, I think. Seven years older, decibels louder, she always won.

– “Isn’t your dad like a cult leader?” I was approached by a caramel coyote, slipping out of a convertible Camaro.

– I had a secret power—a newfound ally. I was a preadolescent boy lost in a, heretofore, unknown love spell magnified by the magical thinking of childhood.

– “Jane can’t ever know the truth.” The tide and wind pushed it ashore as surely as vengeance.

– Who does this? … and as soon as my husband crept in the door, probably hoping for a scintilla of Norman Rockwell’s water colored scene-of-cooing-baby-at-the-hearth-slurping-dimpled-fist while the smell of home cooked fill-in-the-blank danced like fat motes and fairy dust, …

– DIG! DIG! FLY! FLY! I ordered them to come back with a spoon. They didn’t know why, but I was the oldest.

– In the cold twilight above the town, he sang it to himself. The aftermath story that emerged from the rumors and boasting was that there was a girl at the center of it.

Great expectations gone awry—by surprise, short-sightedness, and trickery That’s why we have stories to tell.

– I was now going somewhere; out of there, for sure. I must have forgotten that gravity is a thing.

– Forty miles to spare We followed our well-worn route, enjoying the new car smell, feeling like The Jetsons.

– Not what we expected Hell-bound for a summer of adventure in France, we didn’t care.

– Should I tell my mother what I decided to do? A 5-year-old, less than one meter tall, I slipped through the turnstile without being noticed.

– I had a layover in Elmira, New York—six hours long. Warblers, whistlers, and trillers sang. Joe and Maybe Dave knew when not to talk, too, when beauty itself was the conversation.

— You durn fool Waves of hot lava washed down my throat, past my lungs, and hit my stomach like an acid avalanche.

– “Quick! Let's get the oars!”. Traveling fast, the tanker’s bow tossed large white-capped waves.

– “Do not let it get to the pond. It will eat our fish!” My Ninja Turtle dance began in the pouring rain, my umbrella in one hand and the shovel in the other.