Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

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

Early start on this here Six Sentence Story here.

Our host is Denise and, each week, she provides a new prompt word.

We’re expected to write a story utilizing this word and make the sentence count come out to six. And only six.

Readers of these pages will recall several Six Sentences Stories that take place in the institutionalized horror of Mississippi’s Parchman Farms prison. This, only because I read a few sites that described the early days of the place. This week is similar, but worse. The photo at the top is courtesy of Wikipedia. Let them tell you the backstory of this week’s Six. On a more positive note, we get to visit a character and location from my WIP, ‘Home and Heart’.

This week, the word is:

REFUSE

Turning from the blackboard, the white cursive letters shaping a single word, ‘Heteronym’, Sister Cletus addressed the class, “Who among you young ladies and gentlemen,” she smiled at the repressed giggles, aware that children always find formality amusing, “would care to give us an example?”

Her eyes, blue opals at bottom of a spring-flooded stream, finely carved contours of her face worn into rounded folds like a snow drift in March, scanned the classroom.

In the kind of surprise common to a fatal heart attack victims or the onset of puppy love, her mind hijacked the suburban-clean faces and combed hair of the twenty-three pupils of St. Dominique’s fifth grade and replaced them with the hunger-grimaced faces that surrounded her as a child in Sisak, Croatia, at the onset of World War II.

A film of long-banished tears blurred the orderly desks in her classroom like the beginning of a motion picture, the return of focus produced a different scene, one of barbed wire, fear and adults with the souls of jackals.

Mercifully, her memory remained true to history, relief at being pulled from the line of children herded towards a filthy railroad car, echoed over a lifetime, was still powerful enough to break the spell, even as she heard the tall, vaguely feral man whisper, “Ne bojte se mlada Svetlana, poštedjet ću vas strahote današnjeg dana.“ (‘Do not fear young Svetlana, I will spare you the horrors of this day‘).

Sister Cletus’s return to the present was anchored by the sound of Zacharia Renaude standing up next to his desk, in the back row, “If we refuse to learn, will our minds will be nothing but refuse?”; for just a moment, the old nun and the young boy laughed in a language indecipherable to the rest of the class.

Comments

UP says:

September 19, 2019 at 9:00 am

“blue opals at bottom of a spring-flooded stream” you do this every week! I am often jealous of your wordsmithery. Frankly, I think you’re a witch. Good six.
- clarkscottroger says:
  
  September 20, 2019 at 5:40 pm
  
  Thanks, man.
Pat Brockett says:

September 19, 2019 at 7:55 pm

This is such a powerful piece of writing with a message we should never, ever forget.
- clarkscottroger says:
  
  September 20, 2019 at 5:48 pm
  
  yeah, it (the background) kinda jumped up and grabbed me… but the characters are enjoyable. (The story with Sister Cletus is that it was none other than Cyrus St.Loreto from ‘Home and Heart’ who saved the young nun-to-be from the concentration camp, here, here’s the scene where she tells Sister Margaret Ryan about it:
  
  “Mine was a wealthy and influential family, at least as influential as necessary given we lived in a small town in Croatia. My parents were good people and were well-regarded but none of that mattered when the Nazis arrived. They found the location of Sisak, where the Kupa and the Sava rivers combined to be a moderately useful place for a munitions and troop depot. Geography and strong young men were valuable to Hitler’s ambitions. Children were not.
  
  One day I found myself standing in a long line of quietly crying children outside the train station in Sisak. I was ten years old and the line that I helped form ended in a rust-red train car. I remember noticing that there was chicken wire on the few windows that still opened. I had everything that mattered to me in a blue felt bag and I was three children from the train, when a tall, well-dressed man pointed at me, turned and pointed at the German soldier who seemed to be in charge. Two soldiers grabbed my arms and pulled me from the platform. Belching sooty black smoke that barely escaped the stack before it fell to the ground, the train pulled out from the station and I remained alone with a total stranger. I survived and lived through the War, those on the train did not. The man’s name was Cyrus Dimineață. I lived in comfort, was educated in America and, for a time returned to Europe.”
  
  Sister Cletus stopped talking and seemed to go away, in that way the elderly have of ceasing occupation of an unreliable vessel, choosing to take flight in the mind or the memory or maybe the emotions. I decided the conversation was over and concentrated on the road ahead.
  
  “I’m sorry, Sister Ryan. The past has such power to call us, forgive my wandering mind.” She started to turn to face the passenger side window.
  
  I reached over and touched her arm lightly and said, “And then you were accepted into the Order and began your life in service to our Lord. Right?” My voice was choking on the hope that her story was as simple and positive as I knew it could never be. I thought that if she would confirm my version of how it played out, it would make such an inspirational story. I even thought that maybe a wild-eyed student reporter, the one who wrote a story about how I was getting a graduate degree online might be interested. I smiled to myself.
  
  I didn’t hear a response from Sister Cletus, so I glanced to my right and saw her smiling at me. I admit that I jumped in my seat, just a little. Rather than the wise-and-serene-old-woman look, thin lips pressed into a quiet smile, she was grinning at me. To further throw my off-balance, I heard her say, “Yeah, sure.”
  
  When a person says or does something totally at odds with what you expect, the eyes are the give-away. Sister Cletus was one of the oldest-looking women I’d ever met. Her face was every badly folded roadmap, taken from a glove compartment when the signal fades for the GPS. To further accentuate the ravages of time and experience the traditional dress of our order, wimple and habit and veil, isolated the face. You cannot but focus on the active parts of the woman, her eyes and mouth. By design or by chance her habit provided the perfect framing of a portrait of the marks of a long life, writ in flesh, skin and muscle.
GirlieOnTheEdge says:

September 19, 2019 at 9:44 pm

I find it almost impossible to believe humans are capable of atrocities such as the one you reference, yet they populate our history in abundance.

For those of us who have read “Home and Heart”, this is a terrible tease! Tell me Sr. Cletus will be the one responsible for the downfall of Cyrus St. Loreto :)

Very visual Six.
- clarkscottroger says:
  
  September 20, 2019 at 5:49 pm
  
  Found the scene (in Home and Heart) reprinted in my Reply to Pat Brockett’s Comment below.
Lisa Tomey says:

September 20, 2019 at 2:50 am

Goodness! Just a draw in from the get go! Interesting six!
- clarkscottroger says:
  
  September 20, 2019 at 5:49 pm
  
  Thank you, Lisa
D. Avery @shiftnshake says:

September 24, 2019 at 8:21 pm

Sister Cletus! She’s (understandably) got ptsd. She’ll never forget and may we never forget.
Good one.
- clarkscottroger says:
  
  September 26, 2019 at 7:47 am
  
  yeah… sometimes the world makes us see things that we shouldn’t have to, luckily Sister Cletus is a remarkable character (I included the full scene, from my WIP that forms of the basis of my Six) in my reply to Pat Brockett.