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 it is governed by a single rule: all stories must be exactly six sentence in length.
Prompt word:
MACHINE
Leaving his third floor apartment, the Sophomore resolved anew to accept that he had been transported fifty-five years into the future from his eponymous second year of college and, upon further reflection, added to his New Year resolutions the goal of nurturing gratitude for finding himself in the company of the people, who, for reasons no one thought to explain, called themselves Proprietors of the Six Sentence Café and Bistro. While lacking the laid-back vibe and remarkable music scene of the end of the ’60s, he knew if he was ever going to find how or even why he’d been temporally dislocated, he needed to embrace the present.
The sidewalk, as he approached the Café, ceased being a brick ‘n soot maze, the work of the first modern industrial engineers serving the monied-patriarchs sitting in homes in the city’s finest neighborhoods, known, without the slightest sense of irony, as College Hill; the young man smiled at the memory the girl he met at a college mixer in the Ivy League school on the Hill, his mood souring with the realization that she would now be seventy-three years old.
The five-story building that housed the Café and served as the involuntary time-traveler’s sanctuary, came into view as he turned the final corner but his attention was hijacked by a billboard sign in the middle of a freshly cleaned lot.
Brand new and totally incongruous, it offered the image of a family walking, in the background were open fields and distant mountains; the adults were smiling grimly and the two children gazed upwards; the artwork was in a pointillist style with an earthy palette, the result was thoroughly wholesome and homespun.
Dominating the top half of the 10.5 by 36 foot sign were two lines of text;
in comic sans:
‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’
below which, in Times New Roman:
‘Serve the Machine and your needs will be met’.
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About clarkscottroger
OMG that was beautifully written! I think I failed to breath the whole way through!
Scary times call for desperate measures. I only hope we are up to the challenge!
‘How long? Not long, cause what you reap is what you sow!’ Brilliant song too!
thanks (loved those guys)
Whatever brought him, I’m glad he’s here, and hope he gets back someday.
yeah I’m hoping that too
Ooh, fascinating… what is that Sophomore finding – good, we hope.
Great song, by the way!
thanks, Chris
Embracing the present while remembering the past. Intriguing.
the character (the Sophomore) is kind of an incidental time-traveler (through no thought or intention of his own)
Nice description of that ominous billboard sign.
fun thing about that… half the whole Six started because of the famous typewriter exercise, ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’
A bit of full circle, with the Sophomore. When we first met him at the Café, there was a sense of his being a little “out of his time”; subsequent scenes with the tall, thin man always a bit of a tease. And why not?! It’s the Six Sentence Café & Bistro after all. Good Six.
a ‘little’ out of his time?!? No. He is totally a chrono-kidnap victim (perhaps we should be looking at the notrious Doctor Egmont (from the Victorian Era) afterall, like my favorite joke holds (What do we want? Time Travel! When do we want it? Thats irrelevant!)