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

This is our weekly submission to the Six Sentence Story.

Denise is the hostinae of the bloghop.

Hey Sixarians. If you’re starting to think, ‘I could swear I’ve seen this urban nightspot in another Six’, you are not mistaken. There’s been developing, among some of the contributors to these pages, a certain virtual locus, a gathering place, if you will, where ideas are exchanged and whimsy is always on the menu. It’s becoming a place where a body can go to watch what happens when characters, avatars and ego projections are allowed to relax and hang out with each other. If you think it might be fun to visit this ‘place’, drop us a line and we’ll see if we can’t get you on the guest list. ya know?

ed note. A Tale of Two Sixes, a study on the influence of music on the emotional tenor of a story. The following story is but a single side of a narrative coin. Chance and time, conspiring to express themselves, in defiance of the instability of reality’s narrow edge. A moment of temporary resolution. (btw the alternate mood music? Hot Chelle Rae’s ‘Tonight Tonight’)

…damn!

The prompt word is:

MUNDANE

“Dude, what are my chances of, you know, getting a job here?”

Four hours, alternating between being entranced by the night’s musical act and practicing his thousand-yard stare, left the college sophomore exhausted; his original confidence replaced by a dogged determination not to stop the emotional CPR he’d been self-administering since the band left the stage and the too-bright ceiling lights chased the customers out of the club, onto the 3 am-dark streets of the city.

By a process he uncharacteristically did not give a second thought, he identified the seven people who yielded power at the Six Sentence Café & Bistro: a tall, thin man who moved with an absent-minded grace; a woman with an intensity that ebbed and flowed in response to who she interacted with; a woman who sat at the bar throughout the night like a sentry, exuding a kindliness all the more in contrast to the mundane avarice of nearly all the customers; the bartender appeared to be possessed of a multiple personality, flaring with good will to some and scorching the air when a customer mistook himself for the image he saw in the bar mirror; a glimpse of a man at once the center or a group of models and actors, transitioning to deep conversation with the intense woman, fanning her aura like a amphetamine’d Boy Scout on his first jamboree and, the penultimate person of authority, more a presence than a person, sat seemingly alone yet clearly interacting with the world around her.

The last person, among the people the young man found himself thinking of as, ‘the Proprietors’, and the only one he directly addressed, defied all attempts to categorize: the bearded man seemed to shed definition as rapidly as they could be applied, one moment he was an hourly waiter-cum-mop, moving among the inebriati like a good-natured shark, the next moment he’d shoulder-walk the drunken Lothario to the door, the incongruity of the Patek Philippe on his wrist lost on all, except the woman behind the bar smiling in gratitude, and without any perceivable transition, sat down with the band during their break, their faces reflecting a respect and appreciation.

“Listen, you got the attitude, but there’s no way I’m gonna let you through that door.”

The ‘door’ in question was at the end of a short corridor to the left of the bar, and the determined student, carrying an overloaded tray of empty glasses, his impromptu resume, came to a halt, as the man in his way was now in full-on bouncer mode, “Bad ju ju, my man; maybe someday, but,” the Proprietor glanced, for a brief second past the would-be employee, to the far side of the club, nodded and smiled, “But not tonight”.