Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Six Sentence Story time!

zoe, she say, the word this week is ‘RIPPED’.

(Yes, we’re trying something that might be fun this week. The ‘we’ being me and ‘Girlie on the Edge‘. I will, in fact, be coy and leave it at that!)

RIPPED

Post offices, easily the most ubiquitous symbols of modern culture, manage to project an air of civic order in even the smallest of villages by the simple expedient of having a lobby; often merely a wide corridor between ‘outdoors and in’, it provides a place to stand and look into tiny windows on the doors of the mailboxes inset in the wall, a key to which is as much, (if not more), credential of citizenship as any wax embossed document.

A man, his worn suit a tapestry of the echoes a life’s potential and it’s inevitable disappointments, stepped back and held the door as Starr Diamond approached the inner lobby, the angle of his body sketching an archaic (and very unconscious) bow as he waited for her to pass. The young woman, wearing clothing that clearly would require access to the internet if desired by any the inhabitants of the small town, moved with the grace of youth past the man and, in a gesture that resonated within only the deepest most primitive parts of the brain, turned to face the man as she passed through the entrance.

Sliding the green Certified Mail form (Part A), ‘Margaret Ryan’ showing through the fingers of her right hand, along with the Certified Mail (Part 2), across the counter, Starr announced to the woman opposite her, “I’d like to send this letter, Certified Return Receipt, please.”

Edwina Fulton accepted the envelope without looking beyond the Piaget resting on the young woman’s wrist and, with movements as graceful and automatic as a pianist playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16 in C, removed the thin white strip from Part 2, placed in on the green form, ripped the lower half of the white form (Part 2), fed it to a machine that tasted then spit it back, red ink saliva a circle on the receipt.

Accepting Starr’s five dollar bill, she quickly made change and pushed it, along with the receipt to the young woman; inspired by the simple and sincere ‘Thank you’, Edwina Fulton wrestled her winter-roughed lips into a smile that, like a child’s first ‘A’, found in a box in an attic, wrinkled and smudged, nevertheless conveyed that feeling, from a long ago time in life when hearing a ‘Thank you’ made a woman feel good.