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

Prompt word:

TURN

“Hey, where the hell is everyone?”

“I learned a new word…or fact… or whatever the term for the crumbs of insatiable curiosity… gotta be a cool Greco-Romanian fricken word for it,” the tall, thin man paused, very much a person interrupted by the voice of a compelling, if not overly visible, agency; the path he took upon leaving the Manager’s office, while tempting to describe as random and pointless, going from bandstand to bar, back to dance floor, then sitting for a moment at a random table only to rise and move through the mostly dark, entirely empty Six Sentence Café & Bistro, betrayed a certain competence as he ended up at the waitress station at the end of the bar closest to the perpetually dark hallway where his journey this evening began.

“It’s ‘compline’ which is something to do with the Liturgy of the Hours and, while not as cool as some of the others, like Terce,” the man’s tailored shirt sleeves were turned-up un-evenly, his bespoke jacket left hanging on a mic stand on the low stage that ran along the back wall of the Café, a chromium valet reflecting the blood red of the nearest Exit light, “I wanted to tell someone; anyway, compline… those Latins with their declensions and cases, always misleading the average Joe, compline is the last prayer of the day so you’d think it’d have, you know, special powers.”

“It don’t,” the tall, thin man stood still in the empty club, as if waiting on a memory, but then continued with the non-voluntary effort of a drowning man rising out of the water,  “You’d think with that kind of effort, scheduling the whole day, down to every syllable of every word you’d speak out-loud, it would fuckin work.”

“But it don’t…”

The Proprietor stood at the new jukebox and stared at the neon-lit list of songs and felt nothing and, if for no other reason than to drown out the silence, continued,

“You know the worst thing about ghosts? The worst thing about ghosts is that they’re almost real and we’re never, ever, no matter how hard we try, allowed to forget the almost.”

Compline… no, wait, lemme look it up for ya.Here, int Wikipedia , it says,

Compline tends to be a contemplative office that emphasizes spiritual peace. In most monasteries it is the custom to begin the “Great Silence” after compline, during which the whole community, including guests, observes silence throughout the night until after the Terce the next day.^[1] Compline comprises the final office in the Liturgy of the Hours.

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

(We usually write the week’s Six Sentence Story on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. This Six I wrote Tuesday morning of this week which also was Halloween.)

Prompt word:

TURN

{No, don’t stop reading; these, our efforts to communicate, call them interludes, are being noted by the Sentence Counter and our supply of semicolons has been sharply curtailed; your predisposition to our kind having been established, we trust you will need a minimum of help with the instructions to follow in turn.}

“My last question is, as a writer, which is worse: seeking to manipulate the Readers of your stories into accepting fiction as fact or (that) you wish only to engage them and, with a little luck, move them emotionally,” recognizing the trap buried in her first statement, the speaker, trying to create a safe haven with the second, continued, “I’m serious, despite my physical appearance and confident manner,” with a subtlety of gesture so powerful it could only have been an issue of chromosomal imperative, the young woman pushed rebellious blond locks back from her face, into questionable restraint behind an ear, “It’s possible we might all be characters in a story of unknown origin; you can accept that, can’t you?”

{Ok, they’re on to us; in keeping with the code of the non-unreliable Narrator, I say, ‘It looks like you’re in the crosshairs of this story, the game is afoot and do not, under any circumstance, evince any objective, external reaction to me, or especially, to your being in touch with agencies of a higher plane.“}

I’d fought my parents and my friends and my high school counselors over the matter of curriculum in this, my first year here at Miskatonic University; from the moment I found the school’s site while scrubbing away a day of normal by wandering the Dark Web, a passion grew as the medications waned and memories of my earlier years scrawled subtitles to silent dreams of self-destructive behavior; sure, I’d chased a nightmare but I’m awake now and I can handle this cute little intern’s efforts to trip me up.

{Very good; your reputation as an apt pupil clearly is justified, nothing like the modern-teenage-angst melodrama that some of your generation wear like temporary tattoos, all first-glance-shock/soap-and-water washable; we leave you with words as a shield against the intrusions of the everyday world, this young lady, for example, who is so well-endowed to capture your trust and block your chosen path, heed: Reality exists only in the Mind. }

“You’ve done very well this last year and everyone is so proud of you, its just that the time you spend alone writing your little stories, especially here in this place, might not be the best way to assure a complete recovery.”

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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, 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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