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

Six Sentence Story

Hosted by Denise

Six and only six sentences in a story created around, in reference to and otherwise about the week’s prompt word.

(Its 5:13 am and I have 1113 words. The result of getting up at three thirty when the night’s tossing and turning finally yielded an idea for this week’s Six. Not my preferred approach to writing. But now, all I have to do is, like some insomniac sculptor, chip away at the mass of words to reveal the simple story contained within. Think I’ll go back to bed for an hour and see who I am when I awake. Let him do the hard part.)(lol)

This week’s prompt word:

CARDINAL

“Do your parents know you’re out wandering around all alone, you need to get home, don’t you have some friends to play with, it’s not safe for a child to be alone,” Mr. Veira, standing in the doorway of the RiteAid on Circuit Ave, spoke a dialect of adult meant for expressing concern for a kid not his.

Seven-year-old Ethan Dowd arranged a smile on his face and began to turn, tentative pride growing at the thought of his assuring the adult he was quite fine, speaking clearly and not mumbling, perhaps other adults would observe how well he handled himself; looking up, he saw the balding pharmacist had already gone back into his shop, the glass door closing with hydraulic deliberateness, leaving only the reflected image of a thin, blond boy standing in the street, shoulders already pulling his eyes back down towards the sidewalk.

Between downtown and home, there was a place where the street spilt apart to form an island of trees and grass, like a park but, well, it was in a neighborhood, so it couldn’t really be a park, not like down where the flying horses were, but it had a bench facing each of the streets and, this particular afternoon, a man was sitting on one of them.

Thin and old with white hair, he was staring down at a map spread out next to him, a compass and three pieces of colored chalk kept the light October breeze from bending the lines; Ethan stopped, “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers and today they said there was an orange alert for kids to not be by themselves and to tell an adult if they saw anyone they didn’t know.”

“Do you know what cardinal points are,” the man looked up from the map, saw Ethan nodding, and continued, “most people think there are only four, a smaller group maintain there are really six but a few, a very few, know there are seven;” standing, the man began to walk up Hiawatha Ave towards where it turned back into Circuit Ave, “I spent the morning marking the other six, probably the reason the good citizens of Oak Bluffs are so alarmed, unfortunately I can’t remember where the winter church is and that is the seventh cardinal point.”

“Its just up the road, I’ll show you,” as they walked, Ethan heard the sounds of high school kids playing football in Veira Field, sounding like seagulls fighting over a clam cake; suddenly the man’s face changed, looking at the weathered-grey church facing the park, “Thank you, Mister Dowd, you’ve helped an old traveler more than you can know,” and took a piece of yellow chalk from his pocket, “of the cardinal points, the only truly useful one is number seven, for it points to the path of Time, usually discounted as being a one-way path, however, if all the other seven are marked and a man visualizes them properly, well, we shall see.”

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