Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
Midweek and, like one of those old-timey handheld games where you have to get the three ball bearings to settle in tiny indentations underneath the clear-plastic cover, ideas and plot-fragments are beginning their non-predictable movement. Sometimes they align into coherency and sometimes they do not.
Each week (on Sunday), Denise, hostinae of the Six Sentence Story, sends out a prompt word. Each Thursday, she opens her blog to all who have taken her invitation and fashioned a story based on the word of the week. The trick, or if one prefers, the challenge, is to fashion a story that is six and only six sentences.
This week, the word is:
Agreed
Billy Tulene pushed the brim of his prized-possession, an old road-wore Stetson and, with just a sideways glance of his eyes as a how-do-you-do, said, “The guards be sayin’ you here ’cause you tried to steal some plantation owners wife’s jewelry, now I just doan understand that, I mean, if she lets you get close enough to snatch the necklace off her lily-white neck, how’d you manage to stay alive to end up here?”
The new prisoner stared back with eyes the color of an ancient gold coin, watchful but relaxed looking, like the Warden waiting for his favorite trustee to bring a fresh pitcher of lemonade; his hair was strange too, like someone off the boat from the East Indies, braided together on either side of a broad face and his hands didn’t look like a new convict’s, piss-callused from days of cotton bracts; they looked more like hands suited to swinging a scythe 12 hours a day.
The Cage Boss at Camp 11 sat in a pool of greasy-yellow lantern light, pudgy fingers poised over the checkerboard, “He’s an odd one, not that theys any shortage of bedeviled men here at Parchman”, holding his red disk he touched it down on alternate squares on the board, a short diagonal path to the last row on the far side of the board, with a squint like a weasel picking out the lamest duck waddling on the edge of the swamp said, “King me, boy; you ain’t never gettin’ the upper hand on ole Roscoe Williams.”
“I was not stealing the necklace, I was returning it.”
“I hope you ain’t thinkin’ of going rabbit on me now, are you boy; we’d have us a problem if you was thinking about leaving early,” Boss Williams pushed the brim of his hat up, smears of sweat brief prison stripes on his pale forehead.
A smile broke the dark lower half of Heimdallr’s face and he looked across the room and said, “Agreed, if my Lady Freya summons me, it will indeed be a problem for you.”
Again, I get the call of tried and true stories, in this case the story of Freyja’s lost necklace and, even stranger* the call of the Parchman Farm.
* yeah, like coals to Newcastle, no?
