the Wakefield Doctrine

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, constrained by a sentence limit (high and low) of six, there are worse ways to spend the remaining time you have on earth.

Previously…

Prompt word:

BREED

“Hazel, I need you to clear my calendar for the next…”

I was looking at my phone as I stepped into the reception area, my head full of memories of a trip to Europe necessitated by accepting Leanne as a client the first time. Her husband was killed over there in a car wreck; I was aided in my investigation by a German detective who looked like Sargeant Shultz, an intriguing secret organization and an impressively-scary woman in Chicago. Still not sure which of those last two still gave me nightmares.

My part-time admin had the all-too-rare ability to anticipate rather than require explicit instruction, so the silence that met my half-formed sentence was pretty loud; being the born-diplomat, I added a simple, neutral, interrogative, “What?”

I began to realize this was one of those times I was expected to know what she was thinking and extrapolate from there; she was staring at the steno pad on her desk, tapping the blotter with her pen, and while they say familiarity breeds contempt, the look on her face was the angular-opposite fractal of that attitude and much more akin to something the apocryphal child-raised-by-a-tiger-in-the-jungle would recognize.

After the temperature of my self-imposed cauldron reached the desired temperature, she looked me in the eye and, with a barely-there playful undertone, asked, “Do you need me to spell it out?”

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, constrained by a sentence limit (high and low) of six, there are worse ways to spend the remaining time you have on earth.

Previously…

Prompt word:

BREED

“Duh dah de duh, dah di dah di dah,” the Sophomore began to sing. In fairness to the ubiquitous experience of singing, it was more a muttering of musical notes that a person, though certain they were unable, felt compelled to try; the sequence of notes ended with, ‘The FBI, Now in Color.”

All conversation, primarily limited to the front seat area, was sucked out of the car like a cloud of cigarette smoke through a 1950s adult driver’s vent window, leaving a noetic vacuum to make a NASA engineer green with envy.

As the individual thoughts of the other three passengers scrambled to re-organize themselves, the young man with the unfashionably-long hair continued in a voice a dead-solid imitation of a television series narrator,

“It’s a new breed of outlaw roaming the streets of the city, the cars are European, weapons are electronic and the crimes solid-state. Now, from the case files of the FBI, tonight’s story: “Where the fuck are we going?”

In the interlocutory pause, Rocco nodded at the up-dated GPS display in the dashboard, and looking in the rearview mirror, “Got it. This Six Sentence Café place is where we take Placido and the girl to meet Lou.”

*

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, constrained by a sentence limit (high and low) of six, there are worse ways to spend the remaining time you have on earth.

Previously...

Prompt word:

TRIM

“Ian, you’ve a call on line… err Line blinkin’ light.”

“Who is it?”

“What, am I your fricken… wait, I am,” Hazel’s laugh pressed up against the glass of my office door, “in that case, hold on.”

“Oh yeah, this I like, the caller said her name would be on our system’s caller ID, if, that is, this wasn’t an investigative services agency from the mid 20th century; too funny… wait, I wrote it down somewhere.”

“Got it, Leanne Thunberg… Doctor Leanne Thunberg from Radcliffe’s Department of Advanced Anthropology and Cultural Semiotics,” Hazel’s voice transitioned into a perfect Boston Brahmin, not an /r/ left un-trimmed from the word De Pah Ment onwards; “Hey, I know, I’ll let her know I need a copy of curricula vitae to update our records and that you’ll call her back from your cah.”

I held my finger over the Line One call button like Vasili Arkhipov long enough to remember my last meeting with Leanne,

“Leanne, how long has it been?”