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, ruled by a single… rule? To use the prompt word and keep it to six sentences in length.

This week’s prompt word:

Thread

Washing up against the glass that pretended to be a wall separating the individual rooms from the corridor, the ICU was filled with a kind of light that, if high and low tides were day and night, would be immediately recognized as an ebb tide.

But ebb tides are boundaries, not conditions of the ocean, and so, as the light from each room flowed out towards the nurses station, it’s character changed from the meeting of the bright and vital illumination filling the nurses station to the dusky suffusion returning to each patient’s room; the requirements for the occupants of each area momentarily worlds apart.

The array of monitors, whispering in their un-human language, watched over the man in the bed, his direct contribution to the blanket-relief map between the bed’s stainless steel railings was the rise and fall of linen peaks and bleach-white valleys; it was a rhythm indistinguishable from sleep to all but the digital sentinels that monitored and watched over him.

The shift nurse, watching through the glass, that pretended to be a wall, held the routines of her duties like a child might memorize a series of prayers; as a medical professional, she fought the urge to stay in a place not of the cutting edge technology but a time, (and perhaps a place, but surely a time), when there was, in fact, more that could be done. In the half-light of the corridors of the ICU, the light and the dark were not adversaries, they were colleagues in timeless partnership.

Life can be imagined as a thread with no beginning yet with a definitely imaginable end; one is for each to take on faith, the other to act in faith.

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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, ruled by a single… rule? To use the prompt word and keep it to six sentences in length.

This week’s prompt word:

Thread

Any of the shoppers, at least those parked nearest the supermarket entrance, walking from their cars, were in a position to observe, not so much a miracle as a vision into the past, at least as it manifested for one man and one woman.

The man identified himself as an ad hoc food-shopper by pausing before crossing the travel lane that ran along the front of the store, had the air of an amateur cultural anthropologist as he paused at the main entrance.

Being a late Wednesday morning, the automatic doors were relatively quiescent; however the motion of each half sliding apart as approached made the man think, ‘Star Trek doors’ his smile immediately retreated, a scientist embarrassed at feeling amused by a novel artifact he properly note for later study.

Her white hair was loosely tied, bent only by the shoulders of her thread-bare coat, the effect was less truce flag than patched uniform of a defiant POW; she was pulling a two-wheeled wire-cart full of folded grocery bags and a bundle of coupons towards the door.

Realizing that all the greats, from Boaz to Malinowsky to Mead, forever altered the study of primitive cultures by having the imagination to improvise, the man extended his left leg and stepped on what he theorized was a pressure sensor, causing the door to open; without thought he turned, looked at the woman and presented what is surely the most fundamental of non-verbal communication: the slightest of bows.

The woman hesitated as she stepped towards the threshold; rather the full-stop of an effort to remember something lost to the past, her pause was more a reminiscence, which inspired a smile to elbow aside the wrinkles of age as she nodded in fleeting gratitude.

 

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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, ruled by a single… rule? To use the prompt word and keep it to six sentences in length.

This week’s prompt word:

SCREEN

“Ya got the instinct, I’ll give you that.”

Lou Ceasare spoke quietly, which is to say the regulars presently in attendance at the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge, in a demonstration of the social phenomenon 0f  Interpersonal Entrainment, simultaneously increased the volume of their voices, effectively drowning the conversation going on in the last booth on the Lounge side where he and I sat.

Staree Nyte, currently playing tag with a multi-colored baby-spot light around the stage in the Strip Club, with the seamless transition exhibited by the patrons of the Lounge side, switched her musical accompaniment from ‘California Girls’ by the Beach Boys, it’s laid-back rhythm eminently danceable, to the more ‘Hey, the show’s over here’ of Bob Seger’s ‘Her Strut’; what two men in a booth?

Lou and I could’ve been at a corner table in the Tavern on the Green for the sense of having a relaxed, private conversation over lunch, except for the part about being in Providence, sitting in a red-leather booth opposite one of the most respected (and feared) men in the New England underworld; oh yeah, the topic was how I might be helpful.

“You wouldn’t know it look at me now, Devereaux, but there was a time back when I got into the life that all I had were my instincts and, what do they call it now, a knack for psycho-social evaluation and screening,” He laughed his alpha-wolf laugh resulting in a pause in the susurrus of conversations surrounding us, every bit the primordial freeze of creatures large and small whenever a top-tier predator reminds the surrounding jungle of their presence, “Well, back then Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers already carved out the kiddie TV territory, what’s a young Italian-American boy gonna do?”

The privacy-curtain provided by everyone in the place came back as Lou leaned over the table towards me, something like those slow-motion videos of pieces of the Antarctic the size of a state breaking off into the ocean, “I need you to look into the background of a potential… ‘business partner’ for me, all on the up and up, of course; ‘cept my name never gets more involved than whatever my latest escapades might be in the Providence Journal, capiche?”

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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, ruled by a single… rule? To use the prompt word and keep it to six sentences in length.

This week’s prompt word:

SCREEN

“Plato was almost right.”

The tall, thin man sat alone at a table in the middle of the Café ,looking like the archetypical shipwreck survivor in a single-panel cartoon in the New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post; the difference between the two and the man was the exertion of Free Will and illusion of socio-economic sophistication. The time was afternoon, lighting was sufficient and nearly all the Proprietors (and Tom) were present.

“It wasn’t simply a matter of shadows thrown on a wall by an unseen fire, as that would account merely for the common world we,” Locking eyes with Tom, who was leaning over his elbows on the working side of the bar that ran along the far end of the open room, continued, “Well, most of the human race experience on a day-to-day basis; the better construct would be a screen, one that allows to be seen what the individual, by inclination or upbringing, wants to see.”

Tom laughed and threw a bar towel in a hopeless trajectory towards the Manager, while Nick, sitting on the bandstand halfway down the old brick interior wall, in a sotto voce that more forte than sotto, laughed, “He was talking to the dog,” which Ford, naturally, punctuated with a rimshot on his drum kit. Mimi, on the Café side of the bar talking to Chris on her laptop, looked down to her right, “Tut tut, Hunga, your people have been aware of the true character of reality since, well, forever.”

“Hear, Hear” Denise emerging from the dark hallway at the end of the bar, “You been told!”

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