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

‘Charge’ = prompt word

‘Six’ = the number of sentences in the story

‘Story’ = there, indeed, is the rub.

“with the pale cast of thought”

Granted these pre-writing musings often show a certain tendency to wander through a forest of half-formed thoughts and ideas, nevertheless, the effort is worthwhile in terms of reducing the stress of facing a blank and otherwise empty page, come Thursday morning. This week… ayiiee.  Oh well, what does make sense is that each week zoe provides a prompt word and we are invited to get all creative on the thing and conjure up a Six Sentence Story.

CHARGE

The Sixth District Court, built during the late 1980’s, was a sincere if ineffective effort to provide an environment more suited to nurturing the human spirit, as opposed to trampling it, as evidenced in the civic architecture of the previous decade; it’s interior décor and design was resplendent with the use of natural materials: maple veneers for the walls and jury box and witness stand, light brown earth-tones in flooring and upholstery.

Courtroom #3 (this designation, in bronze, outside the sole entrance door, was the glint of steel in the leather scarab, showing its soul, if not it’s body), had four walls of equal length; unfortunately, walls and floors alone do not account for the totality of a room, at least not the subjective experience of occupying it; there is, (if the claim to being indoors is legitimate), always a ceiling.

Unfortunately, the ceiling in the courtroom was thirty feet up; compounding the effect of towering height, and the un-doing of it’s noble ambition toward a friendly, non-threatening place, the only natural light in the courtroom came through narrow rectangular windows, set in four rows where the center of the ceiling had been raised above the roofline, the effect was to make the light and airy courtroom nothing less than a dimly-lit dungeon.

“Your Honor, my client has been charged, not only with a civil misdemeanor, related to his allegedly over-charging the plaintiff for his meal; he also stands accused of allowing a minor, in his charge, to cause to be discharged, a firearm that had been loaded, unbeknownst to my client, with an excessively large powder charge.

Furthermore, upon accompanying the plaintiff to the local hospital’s emergency room, walking, due to the lack of charge remaining in his car that was used to carry both the defendant and the plaintiff to the Civil War re-enactment, my client was told that the Charge nurse had been detained, but not yet charged, by the local police for attempting to charge her phone without permission of the owner of the re-charging equipment. ”

The Judge, sitting high above the people in the room, his grey hair made dark by the spear of bright sunlight descending from the windows above them all, smiled somewhat grimly and said, “Bail is set at $100.00 as, according to the Bailiff, your client’s credit card has charges in excess of its current limits.”