Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.
Hosted by Denise, governed by a single rule (that stories be of six sentences in length, no more and no less)
Prompt Word:
CLOSE
“No Fricken Way”
The smell of coffee and the skittering of metal on china was my welcome to my new ‘here and now’; I took a moment, closing my eyes against the reality I found myself in and recalled a line from one of Carlos Castaneda’s books in which don Juan Mateus confides in his half-comic-relief foil, Carlos, that, ‘the world is a feeling’. I treated myself to a smile of pride at not going into catatonic regression in light of the events of the previous ten minutes (or days), as I honestly had no idea how long ago my encounter in the tunnel under College Hill had been.
“Tell me, how expensive is this little operation, the drugs alone must be a huge part of your budget, Mr….” having resigned myself to being a captive audience to the man sitting opposite me, I opened my eyes, looked around and started to laugh.
In the booth behind us, a young family, the boy couldn’t have been more than six, his eyes like saucers at the prospect of breakfast in the middle of the day and, pancakes at that; over the shoulder of the man without a name a young college-age couple: his hair was a blond waterfall breaking on the shoulders of a Salvation Army trench coat and he talked in a mumble that relied on the gesticulation of his hands to clarify his torrent of words, the girl’s hair was long, freshly ironed and behind gold wire-rimmed glasses, her eyes were calculating as the equation of happiness was arranging itself on an invisible blackboard; had he not been as young as he acted, he might have heard the chalk scrape of the positive and negative integers of reproduction.
“Let’s set aside the mechanics of your little show, I’m willing to stipulate your production values are quite impressive,” looking out the window to the parking lot I could see the car I woke up in seemingly a minute ago, the street sign clearly readable as Thayer Street; looking down at our table, the sight of a chrome-wire rack of six different flavors of maple syrup triggered a chill up my spine, “In fact, let’s not argue minor points, the East Side International House of Pancakes was demolished in the mid-seventies, so fine, you’ve managed to transport me back in time fifty-plus years,” the man nodded silently;
“So what the fuck do you want?”
*
Ah, we finally get around to the question.
The mention of “pancakes” in the third paragraph reminded me of a breakfast at a mom and pop diner where the half-stack cost $9.00, but the full stack was only $9.50. By the time I reached the “six different flavors of maple syrup” my mouth was already ordering the full stack.
Nice question at the end.
yeah, IHOP was an foundation of our college nutrition pyramid
Ah ha, I am much clearer about what’s going on now. Thanks Clark.
So, pancakes are lovely for everyone (of course) – but now it’s clear that poor Ian is even earlier in the time travelled place. Still, it seems that this question is in sight. Good.
yeah
don’t tell anyone, but when it comes to time travel, I prefer the periods from my own timeline that carry the highest energy i.e. college/grad school days
gotcha!