Six Sentences is an online literary project that presents writers with an interesting challenge: write a piece of fiction in six sentences, no more, no less. It's ably edited by Robert McEvily and, if you have any interest in flash fiction, I think you'll enjoy it. My contribution, which is set during the Battle of the Bulge, is called "Farmhouse."

   I started out as a journalist 34 years ago in the newspaper business. I’m now a television producer, but my heart is still in print. Today, as newspapers and magazines face the specter of obsolescence, print journalism is poised at a crossroads from which it cannot turn back. Great work is still being published, but the contemporary reader must look harder than ever to find it. That’s why I was so happy a year ago to find Dispatches, then a new quarterly of foreign correspondence. Edited by Mort Rosenblum and Gary Knight, Dispatches publishes a single-topic issue every three months, packed with excellent reporting and arresting photography. First-year topics have included Russia, Iraq, poverty, climate change, and the USA as seen from abroad.
   As a writer/editor who’s worked in the mainstream media for three decades, my journalistic values are old school, but I understand they won’t survive if they can’t keep pace with the sensibilities of the 21^st Century marketplace. With my first glance at Dispatches, I knew I’d found the real thing: deep-sourced, difficult reporting, conveyed through vivid writing and bold packaging. This is the stuff of Orwell, Fisk and Kapuściński. If you’re looking for frank analysis about what’s really happening in the world beyond America, and if you value great journalism, you must read Dispatches. You won’t regret a minute of it. 

    I was about halfway up the cliff when the fear stopped me cold. I had been doing just fine until I reached this overhang. My right foot was on the edge of a wide crack in the rock; my left foot was lower, resting on a tiny nodule of stone; my hands were flat against the granite wall. Up to this point handholds and footholds had been plentiful and I’d been climbing fairly quickly, thinking fast, letting momentum take me from one move into the next. But now, about 50 feet up from the base of the cliff, I was stuck. I stood there looking for my next move and saw nothing within reach.
     Craig, the Outward Bound instructor down there on the ground, couldn’t know precisely what I was seeing; he couldn’t know on which small bumps in the rock my eyes fell, but he was familiar with the shelf that was blocking my path and the routes across it. He also knew something I didn’t: he knew the nature of the decision I was going to have to make to finish this climb.
     The shelf was several feet above my head; it stuck out of the rock like a skewed mantelpiece, wider on the left, protruding further from the cliff-face on that side. I’d have to cover less distance to get over the top if I chose the right side, but I saw nothing above the shelf except smooth rock, nothing to grab hold of, nothing to keep me up there. I might be able to push myself over the right side from where I stood, but then I’d be scratching frantically for handholds before falling backward into space. (I could see myself falling when I looked up there.) If I went to the left, the initial effort would have to be greater, but I could see potential handholds above the shelf on that side; if I could get onto the top of it, I might be able to stand there for a moment and grab something.

    So there really are ghosts, spirits of the dead I mean, that haunt the living, forcing us to live with an unbearable memory, or reminding us that our lives once intersected with those of others, some of whom won’t be left entirely behind. I never understood the nature of ghosts, nor was I even convinced of their existence, until I heard the story, long after my father’s death, of the ghost that haunted him as he lay dying in a hospital bed in suburban New York.
     One morning his younger brother came to visit and was surprised to find Dad agitated and confused. “What’s wrong?” asked my uncle.
     “He was just standing there,” said Dad, “at the foot of the bed, in his uniform. The German. He was just standing there looking at me. He was right there, in his uniform. He was there until you walked in, Willy, staring at me.”
    It took my uncle a little while to calm Dad down and get him to tell the whole story. The young German my father saw that morning was a soldier he had killed in 1944. Dad was a first sergeant with the Ninth U.S. Infantry Division and fought in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. In addition to a Bronze Star with two oak leaf clusters and a Purple Heart, he earned eight battle stars. His unit, the 47th Regiment, landed at Utah Beach on June 10, four days after D-Day. He apparently ran into this particular German shortly thereafter.

    Perhaps the best essay I read in the run-up to the election of President Barack Obama was "The Triumph of Culture over Politics" by Lee Siegel in The Wall Street Journal. It was a masterful job of synthesizing a lot of complicated campaign undercurrents. "Liberals always think that there is something broken in politics," wrote Siegel. "Conservatives always think that there is something wrong with the culture."
    There are aspects of this essay that are moot now that the Democrats have racked up a convincing national victory and, in hindsight, it's easy to say Siegel gave the Republicans too much credit, but his theme is still ripe for debate. Here's a sample: "Liberals segregate culture from ordinary existence. They will 'do' culture and then 'do' the rest of life -- gaze at a Vermeer, say, and then work on finding the perfect daycare center. But for conservatives, raising children, using the discipline of faith to endure illness or setback, cherishing life at its conception are cultural tasks and values inseparable from the challenges of everyday living."
    Check it out if you've got 20 minutes to spare.