the Wakefield Doctrine

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 a sole rule: exactly six sentences in length must stories be.

Previously in our story…

Prompt word:

MARKET

The expression on my face, as I surveyed the Hobbomock High School campus, was probably a bit more ‘fuck you-y’ than I realized, but in my defense, given how all William-Wallace the inside of my head was, not such a surprise.

“My god, Ian, talk about hormone-skewed, mark-to-market self-assessment of the adolescent male;” her smile ‘EQ’d her words into something that encouraged me to reply,

“If only someone had simply pointed that out to me then, the needless self-doubt I could’ve avoided.”

My elbows, denting the mid-June grass of the sloping lawn, held me in place, physically if not emotionally; the campus was vacant, Diane was patient and I waited hoping to hear the echos of a past that might now be edited into something more than self-isolation in an anechoic stage of social development.

Diane sat cross-legged next to me and, for rather for the umpteenth time, I marveled at the natural grace of her gender; she was wearing a skirt of a simple design, shoes with heels that were somewhere between ‘Race-you-to-the-car’ and Race-you-to-the-bedroom’, a Navy blue blazer over a blouse that strongly suggested attention best be focused somewhere northward, how she managed to get into her current position without looking awkward or brazen, totally beyond me.

I was equally sure that no matter how much I remained attentive, when the time came to leave, she would be wherever she wanted to be, and I would be ….well, where she wanted me to be.

“So this,” Diane scanned the empty high school campus, a smile neutral, a slightly-raised eyebrow as asterix, “would be the drawing board of, in Freud’s five stages of psychosexual development, the genital phase; I’d love to believe he was trying to be ironic, but you know, different times, different mindsets,”

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 a sole rule: exactly six sentences in length must stories be.

When last we saw our two protagonists…

Prompt word:

MARKET

“You awake?”

“No.”

The queen-sized waterbed, surveyed and flagged with pheromone-fused pillows and passion-twisted quilts, made clear how mis-named was the once-standard, double bed; surrendering to both the call of Nature and caffeine, the Sophomore wrapped himself in a top sheet that lay on the floor, padded out of the bedroom to the kitchen, started the coffee maker and, after a stop in the bathroom, returned to bed and tried to guess which pastel wrinkled hillock concealed Rosetta’s head.

“If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain,” hearing the nicotine-laced laughter escape from the northern end of the quilts, he set the coffee mugs on the nightstand closest to the window and slid under the main quilt, after blanket-tenting the top half of the bed with his now redundant sheet thereby muting the unforgiving early-day sunshine into beige-tinted morning dusk.

“Hey, glad you could sleep-over,” laying on his side, the Sophomore stared at the rise and fall of the profile of Rosetta’s body; she smiled and finger traced his shoulder down his arm, “Well, if I’d known you lived in this part of the city… lemme just say don’t expect me to come visit after ten o’clock on a Sunday morning; dude, my uncle Lou is a major crime boss and even I had second thoughts about getting out of the car last night.”

“Well, given your rep down at the Café for being scary, I guess I shouldn’t risk asking you to walk down to the corner market and get us some pastry,” PT Barnum would have smiled at the alacrity in construction of the Big Top in a third floor walk-up, in a crime infested neighborhood.

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 a sole rule: exactly six sentences in length must stories be.

Previously…

Prompt word:

IMPRESSION

“Gimme a light, will ya?”

There are many forms of intimacy, some so common as to become cliché, predominantely manifesting in forms emotional and/or physical; however, like great music these intimacies can be surprisingly resistant to the degradation of repetition, the favorite line of a song or a chorus sung, retains the magic.

While it is said that nature abhors a vacuum, more instructive in the context of our story, is that nature also loathes predictability as is demonstrated in a nighttime encounter between the Sophomore and Rosetta Storme; their moment of shared intimacy began with the illumination of the young woman’s face by the flame of a zippo lighter: hair held back casually with one hand, she offered the end of her cigarette to the flame; her head was tilted down, he remained more erect (in stance) and the steadiness of his hand, a timeless emblem of confidence and strength nevertheless serving to accentuate her strategy of using one hand for her hair leaving the other free to lightly touch his hand holding the lighter.

There was a giving and receiving, offering and acceptance inherent in the rhythm of this midnight minuet; the shadows of her face, darkly alive impressions and depressions, a landscape anchored by the essential features, her eyes and her lips, their lack of words speaking volumes.

The flame of the lighter danced about in the dark, once a certain proximity is attained fire it leaps towards the end of the cigarette; for her the moment of ignition is accompanied by an intake of breath as he watches and waits for her to look up, a signal of both satisfaction and approval. He closes his light with a firm snap, the flame extinguished for the moment but at the ready.

“Hey, thanks,” Rosetta tosses her head back and to the side, her hair a tsunami of intent and a wave of soundless celebration,

*

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, there is one rule: Six (no more, no less) Sentenceses to the story

Previously...

Prompt word:

RATTLE

“Just take a second of ya time, I promise?”

The voice from the vacant lot was assigned corporeal form, that of a young woman, well-dressed, (in the way of the young a celebration of flaunting the rules of good taste), standing as still as the moment before the grill slides in the church confessional; failing in her ambition to further rattle the young man’s confidence, she left it to the Sophomore to advance the narrative.

On this particular evening, the Gatekeeper, perhaps in the throes of a regressively-whimsical mood, had set up his station outside the entrance to the Six Sentence Café and Bistro with a rusted 50 gallon drum containing a scavenged firewood blaze that provided far more light than heat; the illumination crashed like storm waves along the granite walls of the building, resulting in a quite respectable ‘Bread and Roses Strike’ vibe.

“You’re that new girl, Ronetta…Rosetta, Rosetta Storme the one that those who aren’t afraid of, kinda hate…”

“And you’re that old guy pretending to be a young guy who’s supposedly a time-traveler from the Seventies, sophmoric… no, wait, missing the slightly pompous way over-done, leading article, I got it: The Sophomore!”

Leaning against the granite wall that divided the old mill building that housed the Café’ from the rubble-strewn vacant lot, Rosetta shifted her weight to her trailing left foot and turned to face the unsteady waves of light fleeing the drum set up in front of the entrance; a smile hid in the corner of her mouth, allowing plausible deniability as backup to her go-to strategy that focused on hormones and wishful thinking.