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.

Hosted by Denise, governed by the Lord High Sextuplet (aka ‘the God of as many arms as fingers…sorta’)

Prompt word:

PITCH

“You got a story to pitch?”

Looking around the room, the man thought, not for the first time, that maybe there were alternative ways to fill the empty hours since the passing of his wife other than trying to get his flash-fiction stories published.

After a week of emailed directions, texted passwords and participation in an online seminar titled: ‘The Six Sentence Story and You!’, he stood facing a bearded man glaring up at him, eyes echoing ancient myths about one god deciding to give a gift to Mankind, even as another decided it wasn’t, after all, a good idea; his question, parted the cloud of cigar smoke sufficiently to reveal his uniform, all scarlet lettering, soggy wool and the embroidered words: ‘Yeoman Warden Ravenmaster’.

One wall of the small room was decorated with 1990s movie posters, the other, a cork-board with a solitary yellow pushpin securing a sheet of paper labeled: ‘Prompt Words’; there was a desk in search of status: blue-bound copy of Roget’s arm-wrestling with a dog-eared CMS, bracketed by bookends of Rodin’s ‘The Muse’; between the door and a single 1950’s chome-and-red-vinyl kitchen chair, stood a free-standing ashtray, the kind with an amber-glass receptacle perpetually overflowing with scarlet-smudged cigarette butts, grey-ash worms and at least two intricately folded silver gum wrappers.

“Well, it’s about a guy’s first night at the helm of a fishing trawler with a storm chasing the boat back to port and besides being two o’clock in the morning, the wooden Eastern rig is pitching and yawing when suddenly…”

“Fine, thanks for coming by, she‘ll let you know…” the man looked up from his iPad and seemed to reconsider his brusque dismissal, added, “If it helps, and, mind you, you didn’t hear it from me, the saying around here about flash fiction is: ‘If you can’t write better, you can always go meta“; opening the door, the bearded man leaned into the half-dark hallway and shouted, “Hubney! You’re up!”