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

This is surely Tuesday (or Wednesday, this week has been rife with ‘day-swapping’; Wednesday trying to be carefree Friday, mild Tuesday taking on stern Thursday-like airs…. you know, like that). In any event, it is time for this week’s Six Sentence Story.

(Each week), our host, Denise offers a prompt word and invites each and all of us to fashion a story around that word. The only requirement is the story must be Six Sentences long (as opposed to twenty-seven or eighteen sentences in length). We then quickly, before our inner critic starts whispering poisonous suggestions such as, ‘hey! I know this well, I could come here with my eyes closed!’ or “Given the viscera in stainless steel trays and the fact it hasn’t drawn a breath in two days, perhaps the equine has expired” (lol, yeah, this is all a last-ditch attempt to throw that part of myself off its rhythms), link up, read every single other post and comment the hell out of them. Like that, ya know? The result is fun with words!

This week we go to the ‘real’ world for inspiration. March 26, 1911 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The young (and ravenous) god of industrialization, was growing hydra-like at the dawn of the 20th Century, wherever it could find sufficient raw materials and a devote clergy. Unfortunately, as our tale reminds us, for this god, people are raw material for it, every bit as much as the bolts of cloth and spools of thread. The clergy, as clergy all too often does, hid behind walls of wealth, power and ritual, convincing the population that gods were necessary and life demanded the occasional death.

This week the prompt word:

Transform

Eliana Lehrer felt ashamed, and, for some reason embarrassed, as she rose from her place along the bench farthest from the soot-tinted windows overlooking Washington Place and the stone and steel canyons of Lower Manhattan and stepped out into corridor that lead to the elevators and stairwell of the Asch Building just ahead of the wave of terrified women.

Until some part of her decided to bypass her brain and took control of her feet, the day in the vast ninth floor sewing room had been as typical as the third slice of bread in a new loaf, nothing but the susurrus of a Saturday’s optimistic fatigue when, without warning, black smoke rose through the vents and rough-wood floorboards.

She allowed the wave of humanity to carry her, at times literally, as the mass of workers broke against the closed doors of the two elevators and, barely slowing, to the end of the corridor and the stairwell where gravity and animal nature solved the equation of fear with a single conclusion: downwards.

Eliana was not like most seventeen-year-old girls in a new country, a part of her insisted on looking on the world as if it were a place to be visited, rather than merely as another inhabitant; as the crowd moved towards the stairs downward, she saw a man on the staircase leading up to the tenth and topmost floor and managed to allow him to pull her from the panicked tide of young women.

The smoke prevented her from seeing where she was being pulled until two flights of stairs had been surmounted and she found herself on the roof of the building, the tar and gravel, an urban sea-shore for the handful of castaways who gasped for oxygen and looked for escape from the flames; across a ten foot chasm, a smaller group stood on adjacent rooftops, arms out-stretched to help make the leap to safety.

Standing at the edge of the building, clutching the man who pulled her from the tide, Eliana heard the sound of death on the wind as women, on the narrow ledge of the ninth floor, flames licking at their legs like a starving wolf, chose to take the impossible chance; a merciful numbness embraced that part of her that knew only life and Eliana Lehrer looked down at the granite-edged sidewalks, the bodies of her friends and co-workers lay, transformed into broken balloons of a wanton god, discarded in anger at their unwillingness to float.