U6: Utilitarian

Her body had become something less and more than a body, something utilitarian. She was an elaborate set of wrenches or hammers to be applied to a delicate money-making process. She thought of herself as a drain.

U is not for Flu

Have had the flu for two days. Will resume tomorrow/after the holiday.

T6: Tortoise

The tortoise sat lumped at the side of the road, monolithic, leathery, unblinking.

S6: Sleep

He just wanted to sleep. It was the cinnamon rolls after dinner that did him in. Cinammon roles after pizza. It wasn't like him to eat this way. At least it hadn't been.

R6: Repeat

It was a repeat motif - on the rooftop of Guadi's La Pedrera, a blonde bride leaned against her husband and a sand-colored smokestack sentinel, while the rooftop salon at our riad in Fez became the setting for the bridal photo shoot of a young Chinese couple from Singapore.

Q6: Quote

He didn't want to come off like a fag, quoting Funny Girl or The Way We Were, but that was the language of his new community, he supposed. No more "Brown Eyed Girl" or Phish. Now it was Madonna, Barbara Streisand, and Cher.

P6: Pontiff

Was there some pontiff I was supposed to appeal to? Some old man with wrinkled earlobes who could tell me what to do?

O6: Only

Only a trip to the the Walmart outside Culpepper could make Jamie feel skinny. Only returning to his own neighborhood could make him feel unforgivably fat.

N6: None

Sometimes the words are a jackpot, other times, a dud.

Today's word offers almost no inspiration. In fact, it inspires "none."

M6: Marriage

It wasn't marriage that tired Dennis, it was the fact that Marjorie expected him to think about "their marriage" every single day.

L6: Lift-off

Both of them knew it. Lift-off, which usually freed them, with a chiming silver spring of release, from the pressures of everyday life, wasn't going to be enough this time.

Winter Clothes

Thought I'd refresh the look for winter.
And I think my next challenge, albeit still more than 12 letters away, will be consecutive sentences. I've still got 18 rounds of the alphabet to go. That's 144 sentences. It might just give me a solid start.
New look!

K6: Kill

"I would kill for a moon pie right now," Reston said, the tension in his jaw making Heck wonder if perhaps he really would.

J6: Jag

Not the TV show, not a "crying," but a great, searing gash in the landscape. Something out of Tolkien or a post-apocolyptic movie filmed with white-out heat.

After three days' climb, they crested the hill, only to face the jag, a red-dirt gash in the landscape that separated the brown lands - which they'd been trudging across for days - and the green places they had glimpsed before only in happier dreams.