Six Sentence Story | the Wakefield Doctrine - Part 25 Six Sentence Story | the Wakefield Doctrine - Part 25

Six Sentence Story -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, there is but one rule: make the sentence count come out exactly at six.

Prompt word:

TEXT

At the focal point of the lecture hall, stood a chalkboard; to it’s left, a podium and behind that, a man wearing wire-rim glasses, hair of anachronistic length and a tweed jacket that had patches on its signature patches; on the dark slate, to his right, in all-cap yellow letters: CONTEXT, TEXT and SUBTEXT (and scrawled beneath: can’t tell a story without ’em).

From somewhere in the half-dark of the top row of desks, a young woman’s voice climbed up to her raised hand and threw itself, all Danza de los Voladores, towards the podium, “Professor Pangloss, can you give us examples of these three essential elements of fiction?”

“This,” the professor, stepping around the podium to the edge of the stage, extended his arms straight out to his sides while twisting his torso to face one side of the classroom and then the other; returning to center, he grinned and said, “This is Context.”

Seeing the girl’s hand begin to flutter, he added, “Your request and my response: Text.”

The trajectory of the broken piece of chalk he then threw, a dusty comet tracing an arc from stage to a student who sat hunched over dueling thumbs engaged in millennial foreplay with the glowing screen of his phone, resulted in the device flying from his fingers to lie mute on the floor.

“Hey man, what the hell,” the outrage of the phone-deprived student brought all attention to the man on the stage who then, with arms in a bowing flourish, pronounced, “Voilà …Subtext!”

 

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Six Sentence S… -the Wakefield Doctrine-

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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Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

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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Six Sentence Story -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 the Lord High Sextuplet (aka ‘the God of as many arms as fingers…sorta’)

Prompt word:

MILK

The phrase ‘...the milk of human kindness‘, deployed by one of the earliest bloggers was, in the context of the play, a powerfully ambiguous burn.

As humans, cursed with all the ambitions of the devil yet little of the blindly powerful faith of the angels, our playwright (Will@stratford), reminds us that we are created to doubt: ourselves, our motives, others, (especially their motives), all under the guise of entertainment and diversion.

It has been said that the degree of difficulty distinguishing between the living and the dying is inversely proportional to the relationship binding one to the other; the future of the stranger lying in a hospital bed can be evaluated with a five minute chat with a nurse or physician or with a glance at the cybernetic clergy watching over the patient; because, well, facts are facts.

Taking a measure of the state of vitality of a loved one is an order of magnitude greater in difficulty; such relationships are always, (to one degree or another), interactive because in the creation of the pair, each becomes a part of the other.

How can one be expected to maintain the mature rationality exhibited in our first scenario; that said, a gift from the realm of science, in general, and quantum physics, in particular, is the most-misunderstood concept of quantum entanglement, that, in terms of change and effect, two can become one.

Arguably, the true reason for mankind being cast from a certain Garden lay not in disobedience, but rather defiance; the willingness to sacrifice all to change the fate of a loved one, to bargain without thought of recourse, to invoke and facedown both the Good and the Profane demonstrates not weakness, rather the very human (and oft-flawed) quality of love.

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Six Sentence Story -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 the Lord High Sextuplet (aka ‘the God of as many arms as fingers…sorta’)

Prompt word:

PITCH

“You got a story to pitch?”

Looking around the room, the man thought, not for the first time, that maybe there were alternative ways to fill the empty hours since the passing of his wife other than trying to get his flash-fiction stories published.

After a week of emailed directions, texted passwords and participation in an online seminar titled: ‘The Six Sentence Story and You!’, he stood facing a bearded man glaring up at him, eyes echoing ancient myths about one god deciding to give a gift to Mankind, even as another decided it wasn’t, after all, a good idea; his question, parted the cloud of cigar smoke sufficiently to reveal his uniform, all scarlet lettering, soggy wool and the embroidered words: ‘Yeoman Warden Ravenmaster’.

One wall of the small room was decorated with 1990s movie posters, the other, a cork-board with a solitary yellow pushpin securing a sheet of paper labeled: ‘Prompt Words’; there was a desk in search of status: blue-bound copy of Roget’s arm-wrestling with a dog-eared CMS, bracketed by bookends of Rodin’s ‘The Muse’; between the door and a single 1950’s chome-and-red-vinyl kitchen chair, stood a free-standing ashtray, the kind with an amber-glass receptacle perpetually overflowing with scarlet-smudged cigarette butts, grey-ash worms and at least two intricately folded silver gum wrappers.

“Well, it’s about a guy’s first night at the helm of a fishing trawler with a storm chasing the boat back to port and besides being two o’clock in the morning, the wooden Eastern rig is pitching and yawing when suddenly…”

“Fine, thanks for coming by, she‘ll let you know…” the man looked up from his iPad and seemed to reconsider his brusque dismissal, added, “If it helps, and, mind you, you didn’t hear it from me, the saying around here about flash fiction is: ‘If you can’t write better, you can always go meta“; opening the door, the bearded man leaned into the half-dark hallway and shouted, “Hubney! You’re up!”

 

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