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 and defined by a single number: 6 (the exact number of sentences in qualified stories)

Hey, who said, “We love the serial story, but it’s been a while since you’ve gone to the weird side. Hit us up!” Aiight!  Just a hint? cueing up one of those word reverser apps isn’t really cheating.

Prompt Word:

RANK

“Are you sure?”

seY, 001% niatrec!

“Man, this is messed-up,” Trying not to look at the mirror, the previous night played back until right after the fortune-teller booth; the other guys were ranking on how hokey it all was, but my date, Amber, didn’t think it was so funny, but the last thing I remembered was saying to her, ‘Hey, it’s a guy thing, just some good-natured fun,” but, of course, not only didn’t understand, she started crying.

lleT em gnihtemos I nod’t wonk!

“Try to stay calm, that ole sorcière, I gave her fifty dollars and she said, if we… I whatever, just  hold the amulet against a mirror and touch our foreheads, the spell will be reversed and we go back to the way we should be, but better, can’t say I liked the way she was smiling,” feeling my way closer to the mirror, the brush of hair against my hand made me want to throw-up, and for some reason, my eyes began to sting, I held the fifty-cent charm on the glass and, still refusing to look, leaned into my reflection.

noD’t yrc, tiaw, on, og daeha uoy’er doog, I’ll ekat erac fo uoy, ebab.

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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 and defined by a single number: 6 (the exact number of sentences in qualified stories)

Previously on ‘a Café Six‘

Prompt Word:

RANK

“Lou?”

“Tall.”

The two men stood on equal, opposite sides of the round, lacquered-wood table; claiming a hemisphere being the most equitable of ranking, social or otherwise.

One, dressed in an exquisitely-tailored bespoke suit, raised an eyebrow, an ambassador of a smile that stood in the wings, the better to be fashionably late; the other, whose fashion choice was emblematic of a life in which lethality and personal comfort were of equal status, blew a grey-blue cloud of cigar smoke only to disrupt it’s fractal symmetry as he leaned out over the table’s equator.

A fraction of a second before the growing tension would have compelled an ordering of rank, the ice-maker, alone behind the bar reflecting neon votive candles of rows of liquor bottles, released it’s freshest, coldest cubes; it was a sound not unlike that of an antique steam locomotive’s first piston thrust tearing the machine from Newton’s grasp.

Both men acknowledged their amusement and sat down at the table.

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?”

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