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

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

It is hosted by Denise.

The rule is six, (and only six), sentences per submitted story.

This week’s prompt word:

SPARK

‘If you had just a minute to breathe,
And they granted you one final wish.’

The Sophomore stood in the brick-and-cigarette-machine foyer of the Six Sentence Café & Bistro, the exhalation of cool, conditioned-air offered a bouquet of varied spirits, short-order food, and secret dreams coaxed into blooming under a neon sun.

Having no memory of leaving, the young man, wearing a long wool overcoat that was twenty-years-old in 1973 and blond hair that was long enough to touch his shoulders, but too curly to do anything other than rest there, like half-a-ruff from the height of Elizabethan fashion, stepped towards the bar that ran along the right-hand wall, dividing the stacked-rows of liquor bottles from the open area of the Café like a breakwater protecting a harbour of refuge.

Surveying the room, he wondered if he should tell these people, inhabitants as they were, of a world fifty years in his future, his given name; the answer, as non-verbal as a belch, made his smile both brittle and heavy as his friends, creating an emotional gestalt among the crowd of Saturday Night strangers, suddenly became visible.

A flash from the farthest alcove, a soothing purple with a subtle glint, the bandstand, halfway down the right-hand wall, came alive with a buzz of greetings and acknowledgement, at once smooth, friendly and provocative and, finally, in his right-hand peripheral vision, a quiet smile of confident kindness.

The Sophomore’s attention was instantly commandeered as the tall, thin man stepped out of the darkened hall at the far end of the bar, singing the final line of the verse, as Tom, holding one of the double swinging kitchen doors for Chris joined in, “…spark of the low-heeled boys.“

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