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, the product of this endeavor is a (weekly) gathering of short, short, shortest stories devised around a single prompt word.

Prompt word:

COMBINATION

“…and, finally, counter clockwise past the last number of the combination; pretty simple, isn’t it?”

My best friend, make that my only friend, spoke with the confidence that came from being one grade ahead of me as he gave me a tour of William Golding Junior High.

It was decided that my return to regular school, after the doctors signed off on my social-survival abilities, should be in the middle of the day; clearly, someone in the decision process learned to swim by being tossed into the middle of the deep-end of the swimming pool.

The transition had no chance of being smooth, but adults, at least those in charge of the well-being of traumatized youth, drew their personal authority from willful amnesia; helpful advice was, more often than not, presented in… presentation form, logically, and therefore, surely more effectively than leaving it in the hands of the patient who was expected to be grateful for these letters of transit to normal life.

Extended absence from social engagement, not accounted for by vacation or mononucleosis, conveyed an aura of the foreign to young people; expressions of condolence and sympathy, as awkward and foreign to boys and girls marching into the psycho-sexual battlefield of adolescence, made ‘Welcome back…’ and ‘Sorry about your parents…’ sound like a foreign language spoken by a hearing-impaired person.

“Just remember the combi-,” the felt-muted cymbal crash of his shoulder against the adjacent locker, a soft tissue carom from the graze of a passing athletic jacket, gave lie to his characterization of my new life during daytime, “-nation and you’ll never have a problem.”

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Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to Denise‘s Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Prompt word:

PUMP

“I trust the name given to my husband’s condition is an inadvertent use of cruel irony by some faceless clinician,” the woman tilted forward in her chair with the explosive grace of an Olympic javelin thrower; the physician, safely on the far edge of a very large desk, registered surprise in a professionally-sanctioned manner as his eyebrows rose, witnessing the flight of the aforementioned spear.

He realized, not suddenly or in surprise, (these qualities of experience were barely words, much less a choice in framing his perception), that the soft, fluid grayness surrounding him began to glow with a grey-on-grey luminescence; unremarkable, (to the man), it simply was now the nature of the world, like a pump supplying certainty rather than water, the latter necessary to life, the former essential to the appreciation and acceptance of ‘Life’; he accepted that these areas of transparency were supposed to offer a view, and, so, thought, “Well, I must be on a train.”

The scenes, passing as if outside a stationary window, appeared with the seamless logic of a dream: a classroom of children without names; a woman floating above him; a dog resting her chin on the man’s knee with the level of trust rarely found in humans in infancy and old people at the time when moving becomes a conscious activity.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand your allusion,” the physician looked for something to pick up and hold, wishing for the day when smoking cigarettes could be considered therapeutic for both doctor and patient; failing that he stole a glance at the wall behind him, covered in declarations of Expertise, (hinting at Wisdom with it’s use of Latin), an elite claque ready to heckle any patient with the temerity to oppose his position.

“You hear the word onset referring to an early winter because it’s inevitable, but what kind of god makes dementia a character of aging to be endured like dimming eyesight or halting step?”

The man saw a woman in the not-really-a-train-window and knew he should know her name; trying to call out to keep her in view, his mind starved his lungs of words and he watched her fade, replaced by a Christmas so far in the past he did not yet know his name.

 

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Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

the part of the boat where the name ‘Roann’ is? that’s the fo’c’s’le (sleep and eat there…work everywhere else)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise.

Prompt word:

MILK

“Keep us on this heading; I’ll relieve you at four,” not waiting for agreement, argument or even acknowledgement, the owner of  F/V Christine Denise opened the port-side wheelhouse door, stepped down to the mercury-vapor lit deck of the trawler and made his way forward to the fo’c’sle and his bunk; leaning back against the pedestal chair, the newest deckhand looked down at the compass, it’s ordinal-point disc floating in fluid and indirect red light; outside the windows, the sea was biding it’s time as the young man who paid for his intelligence with the coin of easy boredom had already fled the scene, retreating to the recent past.

 

Milt’s Tavern was everything a bar in a working port might hope to be: no windows, one clock on the wall, (a brass ship’s clock that reminded the patrons of their responsibilities eight bells at a time), and a tolerance for desperation; having stowed his seabag onboard the Christine Denise, the young man walked down the dark and aromatic docks to kill an hour with the bar’s new owner; the place was fairly empty, as most of the fleet had departed for Georges Bank earlier in the day.

The bartender smiled at the young man and the empty stool in front of his station, “Bound on the evening tide, are we, Mr. Selkirk,” the new deckhand laughed as he sat, ” You know, with that accent of yours I’m surprised you didn’t rename this place, ‘Paradise’s Cost’; folding the white bar rag, the owner smiled, ‘Better to serve in a bar than to rule in a retirement home?”

“Yeah, only got an hour, better make that my usual,” the barkeep busied himself behind and below the expanse of burnished teak, an expression of hard-earned serenity creasing the corners of his eyes: with the flourish of a stage magician, he placed on the shining wood, a glass of milk and, adjacent to it, a china saucer holding three Oreos; glancing over the white crescent of frothy-cold milk, the young man, in a mumble serving to highlight his desperate attempt to sound casual asked, “So, Keith, is Reena working tonight?”

 

The newest deckhand, standing second watch, learned one of the oldest lessons of working on the sea: no matter how dire the circumstances might seem to the waking, alert and alarmed mind, a sufficiently exhausted body is capable of taking hostage all senses except balance and so, standing at the wheel, the man jerked forward suddenly awake and alert.

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