Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
1856 painting, ‘The Death of Chatterton’ by Henry Wallis. (A young man lying on a bed thats set beneath a small window overlooking London. His right arm hangs off the bed, lifeless hand on the floor. He’s wearing, like purple pedal pushers. (Don’t ask me why)
Running a bit behind. Early Wednesday evening, for the ‘warm-up’. The occasion is, of course, zoe’s weekly Six Sentence Story bloghop. Every Thursday we go to uncharted, see the word, feel our stomach drop and, dutifully retire to our garrets. Unlike the unfortunate Mr. Chatterton in our lead photo, my window does not overlook mid-1800s London, but we do what we can.
So, don’t end up like young Mr Chatterton! Write a story of Six Sentence length and try to arrange for the appearance of this week’s prompt word, ‘Well’
Well
You feel your eyes open; that you need the soft, up-wrinkling sensation of retracting eyelids to know they are open, makes the bottom of your stomach drop. Darkness takes on a quality of non-touching pressure on your face and you extend your arms away from your body; suddenly, like a spider skittering over the blankets as you read in bed, the thought forms, ‘provided you have a body’. The animal-instinct pushes blood to the extremities, but is immediately entangled by the feeling of liquefaction of leg muscles, and, from the very most bottommost lobe, your brain screams, ‘Become small, get low, freeze’. Your head moves from side to side, your body remains still, there is nothing that makes one side the opposite of ‘the other side’, when a hint of something that makes the blackness merely very dark, comes from ‘above’. A pale moon, at once off in the distance at an angle that confuses your feet, at the same time above you; it’s a lightness that is changing, but you can’t tell if it’s getting closer or, and you wish without words that you had quit while you were ahead, you’re moving away from it. A voice in your mind, both demon and savior parts the dark that smothers you, “Now be careful, the old farm wells are marked and boarded up, your father did the best he could, but you never know.”
About clarkscottroger
Most excellent!
ty
LOL The purple pedal pushers are…odd, at best.
Love the mood created here – found myself actually leaning in to find out what happened and fighting not to jump to the last sentence.
OK, now I keep coming back to look at the photo because those purple pants are bothering me. :D
hey! it wasn’t me! it’s that Wallis guy! lol
I think I need a pair.
lol*
*that is the only reply that I can think of that would not entail a six page Reply to Comment! lol not that I wouldn’t enjoy writing the comment but I am finally learning that sometimes it’s best to hold on the explication of the implication of the ramifications of… of the notion suggested in your comment.
see? the Doctrine can work miracles in changing behavior! lol
Awesome. Felt like I was there. Spider 🕷 Skittering over the blankets…. every time man, every time!
yeah, but that’s not the worst part… it’s when you lose sight of ’em
Whoa, what a scene you’ve created here, Clark! The intensity level is 10.5 and a feeling of pure panic sets in. Very, very well done!
thanks Josie!
Very frightening! Remind me not to read this right before bed.
lol yeah, really
Oh wow! This put me both into a nightmare…and in the too frequent experience I have, transitioning from sleep to the “real world”. I actually avoid going to bed because waking up is like an assault–takes me hours to settle into the day, and accept that it’s probably not a monster about to eat me whole. We write because we MUST grasp at sparkling floss of sanity, do-able normalcy. Great story, Clark–Bravo!
interesting. for me, it (can) be the opposite, the change over to the night is the more dramatic of transitions. in fact, one of my favorite this to do when, on the edge of sleep, although I have lost much of my ability, is to try and pull back out of a dream quickly (and quietly) enough to return with an artifact, of that so-non-rational world. It’s so fleeting as to leave nothing enduring enough to create a memory, but it is real enough to have a sense of the the feeling that accompanies that moment when, back in the rational world of awake, you consider the dream thing.
I find the deeper into the day and it’s reasonableness the less I am able to hear the stories that my characters try to tell me. Early morning is the best time, sometimes later in the evening, if I can get my ‘second wind’ (aka not fall asleep at 9 pm on the couch lol)
You may not have a view of 19th-century London, but you aren’t wearing purple pedal pushers either (I assume). I call that a win.
Auuggh! The chill with that last sentence! (Does Lassie know?)
that is the correct fashion/clothing term, yes? I half thought about using ‘deck pants’ but that sounded even weirder… which considering the source is certainly saying something. lol the concept of wells was definitely a childhood meme. (they didn’t have meme, in those days, however)
I think prostrated death scenes were popular a century or two ago because artists needed to over dramatise the scene this way which we can do so easily in the present time with audio and and motion in our depictions. As for wells they are rare beasts now aren’t they?
fortunately (being rare…what a potent structure, surely right up there with castles and boats)
My stomach is doing flip-flops. That must have been some bump on the head. Well, well, well, guess who fell in the well.
I’m thinking that all children (and some adults) have that specific nightmare at one time or another.
Wow. That is all.
thank you
What mood you have created! Superb writing.
hey, thanks
Yikes! This is a nightmare, in writing. SO GOOD.
So much panic in just six sentences.