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

This is the Six Sentence Story bloghop. Hosted by Denise, participated in/by/of a number of talented and clever writers it is ‘the bloghop that flash-fiction engendered.

Rules are simple and few:

1. employing the week’s prompt-word, write a story
2. keep the sentence count to six (fortunately, the word count is non-limited)
3. link your Six to the host’s blog (ask her, if you have any questions on how-to)
4. go around and read the other Sixes and comment
5. tell your friends and such about the hop and make them promise to participle*

Thats it. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

* a spellcheck joke… I left it there ’cause it’s kinda funny in a rogerian sorta way.

This week’s prompt word:

Television

Elizabeth Drive, the connector street between Weeden Drive and Potowomut Road was all of two houses long; unfortunately one of those two mid-sixties tract homes, the very last house before he was in sight of home, was abandoned.

Timothy had two newspapers left in his canvas delivery bag; one for the Sprague’s house, their television turning the front lawn into a greyish-blue pool at the bottom of a cathode-ray waterfall; the remaining newspaper was for the last house on his route.

It was cold and getting colder as the earth, dragged away from the life-giving sun like the last Sabine woman, grew dark; although he hated the freezing temperatures almost as much as he hated standing in front of his sixth grade class to give an oral report, Timothy no longer felt the cold.

Empty and vacant (the combination of qualities far more threatening than simply empty or vacant) houses, on a late November afternoon have a disturbing propensity for transforming into what can best be described as ‘frozen ghosts’; this was the last delivery before reaching the safety of the street light that lit the way home.

They do not approach, they do not chase, they hardly ever make noise; what they do, what made Timothy’s numb fingers and toes thoroughly unimportant, is offer a window (far worse, a variety of windows) into a world where parents were the ghosts, powerless from preventing things from stepping out of the darkness of the closet, beneath the bed.

As he walked down the front sidewalk, away from the house, the un-read newspaper on the front porch like a fresh bandage on a week-old corpse, he knew better than to run and nothing could compel him to look back; despite the proven strategy of ‘fight or flight’ shared by all successful orders of life, flight is far more effective if one is not aware of what it is fleeing.

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