Where has Dr. Gingermouse been? Well, in addition to the usual demands of working as a hospitalist during a pandemic, schooling the kids at home, and doctoring a dog with a toenail injury, I’m also taking a writing class. The class is asynchronous. Though I communicate with my classmates daily, I have never met them, even over Zoom.

Last week we worked on brevity. I love a rambling sentence peppered with misplaced commas, but our first assignment was to create a six word story. At first I panicked. But once I got going, I couldn’t stop. All day I was thinking in six word sentences so I grouped some of them together. (Possessed by 6, avoiding longer sentences. Meant individually, just kept coming, though. Defeating the purpose of spare prose?)

You might call it a poem but I haven’t written poetry since high school and I don’t claim to know anything about it. So we’ll call it a story. I wrote it on the day the United States reached 500,000 Covid deaths.

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