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

It’s that time of the week!

Our host, Denise, has provided us with a prompt word and, (an) invitation, to write a story that involves that word. The story can be any style or genre, even poetry; it does, however, have to be six sentences in total length. (Not five, and certainly, not eight!…. a Six Sentence Story).

This week the prompt is:

Trip

Either he was so inside his head that he forgot to tell his foot to pay attention, or his foot was asleep and unable to distinguish between a stair and open space; the result was the same.

If the sole of his right shoe and the third-from-the-top step were a couple on a blind date, it was a disaster; one waited with nervous anticipation at a small table in a little restaurant across from the park and the other sat on a nearly comfortable bench, in that very same park; as the saying reminds us, sometimes a miss is as good as a mile.

The fact that he was neither standing on his feet nor lying on solid ground should have inspired a more complex emotional state, however, like a Dixie cup floating on the surface of a relatively calm sea, he would later insist it was more like, ‘the serenity of the here and now’.

In the brief, yet timeless 3.075 seconds, his normal consciousness, aka ‘the damned constant internal dialogue’ was conspicuously silent.

This stillness, rather than being the darkness of un-consciousness, was the result of the absence of the story-telling quality of contiguous awareness; his experience did not, it would seem, include the steps leading up to the fall nor any implication of the (rapidly approaching) floor at the bottom of the flight of stairs.

“How was your trip?” his friend, a pier after the passing of a rogue wave, looked down and laughed; “Better last fall,” the man lay on his back and waited for the world to re-register a past and file the option on a future so that he might resume what passed as a conscious relationship to the world.

Sure the music has something to do with the story. But that is so, way subjective. (For best effect, hit play just before reading Six.)