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, the product of this endeavor is a (weekly) gathering of short, short, shortest stories devised around a single prompt word.

Prompt word:

COMBINATION

“…and, finally, counter clockwise past the last number of the combination; pretty simple, isn’t it?”

My best friend, make that my only friend, spoke with the confidence that came from being one grade ahead of me as he gave me a tour of William Golding Junior High.

It was decided that my return to regular school, after the doctors signed off on my social-survival abilities, should be in the middle of the day; clearly, someone in the decision process learned to swim by being tossed into the middle of the deep-end of the swimming pool.

The transition had no chance of being smooth, but adults, at least those in charge of the well-being of traumatized youth, drew their personal authority from willful amnesia; helpful advice was, more often than not, presented in… presentation form, logically, and therefore, surely more effectively than leaving it in the hands of the patient who was expected to be grateful for these letters of transit to normal life.

Extended absence from social engagement, not accounted for by vacation or mononucleosis, conveyed an aura of the foreign to young people; expressions of condolence and sympathy, as awkward and foreign to boys and girls marching into the psycho-sexual battlefield of adolescence, made ‘Welcome back…’ and ‘Sorry about your parents…’ sound like a foreign language spoken by a hearing-impaired person.

“Just remember the combi-,” the felt-muted cymbal crash of his shoulder against the adjacent locker, a soft tissue carom from the graze of a passing athletic jacket, gave lie to his characterization of my new life during daytime, “-nation and you’ll never have a problem.”

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