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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