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 each Thursday. The link-in opens Wednesday at 6 pm ET, if you have a jones for writing or a hankerin’ for reading short, little stories, this is surely the place to be!

Some background on this Six. At some point in recent weeks, we had Ian Devereaux pick up a hitchhiker on the Southeast Expressway. The college-age appearing young woman was looking for someone by the name: the Sophomore. Ian told her that he knew where he might be found, the Six Sentence Café & Bistro. Only one problem. We not only did not know anything about this girl, (though we suspect she has some involvement in time-travel, given her stated familiarity with the Sophomore), we didn’t even know her name!

This being the cool writing community that it is, i.e. talented writers, eccentric artists, irascible raconteurs and sublime students of the human condition, we put out a call for help. Our Miz Avry came to the rescue by informing us that: “.…her name was Sybil. Sybil Trainor, a young woman who grew up silently despising everything about growing up in a small to medium sized midwest town where grain silos stood in for sky scrapers.”

So, let’s pick up where last we saw our antagonista. (Click Here)

This week’s prompt word:

KNOT

Sybil Trainor, moving over the concrete and litter sidewalk with the unhurried confidence of a jungle predator leaving a snarl-of-hyenas dividing the remnants of her last kill, approached the bearded man standing at the entrance of the Six Sentence Café & Bistro with the simplest of intentions, to get him to tell her where she could find ‘the Sophomore’; the old brick and masonry mill buildings, in a slow-motion shuttering as she passed from one pool of yellow-white street light to the next, caught a fragment of memory from childhood, for a chaotic second, she was thrown into her past.

“Not only is your daughter not on the spectrum, her reading comprehension and general aptitude tests are, well to put it crudely, ‘off the charts’,” the school psychologist’s smile of vicarious pride stuttered as she watched disappointment flare in the eyes of the girl’s father and fear glowed in the banked embers buried in her mother’s eyes; afterwards, silence filled the cab of the F250 pickup truck like a reversed-fishbowl, it’s occupants seeing only distorted reflections of each other, rather than outwards at the passing fields of Kansas farmland.

“Look, your mother and I work hard to keep a roof over your head, it might not seem that much to you, but we grew up in this town and, well even with your cellphones and texting and Tiktokking, this is where you’re from,” her father unconsciously reached into his pants pocket, jingling change a mid-western version of a far-eastern cue to meditation; “You just need to try and fit in, you might be surprised at how much your friends really appreciate you, if you let them get to know you,” the woman in the passenger seat stared out at the scenery with a longing that a lifetime of practice kept out of her voice.

Sybil’s graduation party, debutante ball and near-miss encounter with a socio-biological tentacle was held in the former Hudson Grain and Feed Supply warehouse, music provided by AC/DC and Spotify, her oft-maligned intelligence made sure she’d availed herself of the essential protection; without an emotional harness she found the secret passages that are available to all who are sufficiently motivated (or desperate) to leave the bonds of small town life and left before anyone missed her.

“Sorry, the Café is closed early, a private Christmas party,” holding the knotted end of the velvet rope that marked his domain, the Gatekeeper looked toward the oak and iron door as he said, ‘Christmas party’ but preparing to wave his cigar as an impromptu Cuban pointer, was surprised not only at how the approaching woman had closed the distance between them, but that his favorite smoke was no longer between his fingers.

Blowing an aromatic cloud of tobacco smoke ahead, as both silent emissary and petition of truce, without breaking her stride, Sybil Trainor whispered to the surprised man, “Ο Ιανός θα ήταν περήφανος”

 

*

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

This is our weekly contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise every Wednesday.

This, our third Six of the week, and (a) continuation of the previous Ian Devereaux Six is the product of the courtesy of D. Avery‘s suggestion of a name for our story’s hitchhiker/possible-time-traveler/and all-around-mysterious-antagonist, who Ian, in a display of characteristically-questionable judgement picked-up on the Southeast Expressway. Our story continues as he is about to drop her off in front of the Six Sentence Café & Bistro. (This support and camaraderie from our Miz Avry is not an isolated instance. Denise‘s little bloghop community is quite accommodating to writers new and un-new alike.)

This week’s prompt word:

VAULT

“Don’t stop the car,” leaning over the center console, staring out through my driver’s-side window at the entrance to the Six Sentence Café & Bistro put my passenger’s voice close enough to detect two anomalies: the enthusiastic awe of a young person on a roller coaster for the first time, and, the second, courtesy of my friend Leanne Thunberg’s gift with dialects and accents, a sour, edge-of-the-prairie twang the slid under the verb ‘stop‘ but jumped off before the object ‘car‘.

Acquiescence, despite it’s bad rap in much of the literature celebrating private detection and it’s practitioners, got the upper hand and I eased off the brake as we rolled past the surprisingly-well lit entrance; the doorman, a guy with a beard, an attitude and the character to go toe-to-toe with Lou Ceasare, (to his credit he and Lou became friendly), in no small part the result of my not telling the younger man how the owner of the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge only recently swore-off manslaughter as the preferred modality for conflict resolution; “I guess either I’m gettin’ soft or belong in a boardroom like a fuckin’ CEO; sometimes, Devereaux, delegating work takes the spirit out of a guy, know what I mean?”

‘Pull over up there, by the diner,” I smiled, as given the relatively early hour, there was a parking space in front of the New York Systems; putting the car in Park and knowing better that to grab at any part of my erstwhile passenger, I persisted from the relative safety of a running engine and a rolled-down window,

“Wait, before you leave, being a private detective by profession and inquisitive by nature, I need to know, what’s your name?”

“Sybil Trainor and don’t say you heard it from me.”

A quick U-turn let me keep my former passenger in sight, if only as a dark silhouette distorting the sidewalk with intimations of raw carnal power twisted with skewed emotion; I looked as I passed the Café entrance as the light over the door illuminated the young woman, now with hair the fiery red seen in old-timey depictions of Lucifer as he would stride confidently in the vault of a heaven rejected.

*

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

This is our weekly contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise every Wednesday.

Reader Advisory! What follows as a Six, while a part of an established story/narrative, is more for the fun of typing words with a common, if not rather scrambled DNA, like, back in the day, when Johnny Carson would have someone on the show who lined up a bunch of dominoes (or playing cards or Carol Wayne lookalikes)… and, just before going to the midnight commercial break, would set off the sequence…. like that, except for the thing about using words and, a vague, mis-remembered article on James Joyce.

This week’s prompt word:

VAULT

“What it is Hunga?”

The tall, thin man looked up from the desk in the office located on the left-wall down the never-quite-light/never-totally-dark hallway that started at the end of the long bar that ran along the right-hand wall on the entrance-end of the Six Sentence Café & Bistro; the bar faced the broad, black-painted-ceiling space of the Bistro, with it’s low stage jutting off the interior brick wall that faced the lagoon of round tables separating it from the opposing exterior wall, which, unlike the interior wall, was a load-carrying wall, the immediate and arguable second most beneficial outcome of it’s design being the presence of intermittent alcoves in the spaces between the supporting columns, which provided certain patrons the promise and opportunity for privacy, discretion and intimacy, this linear series of curtained tables ended at the point the main entrance to the Café appeared, with it’s three granite steps down from the sidewalk that, like a premature chalk outline of an inexplicable death, continued along the the side of the building that contained the Café and it’s brethren in slow, civic resurrection; premature tomb stones of hewn timber beams, hand-laid bricks and cast iron-encased glass that continued to hold up the roof, five floors closer to the sky.

The dog sat on a handcrafted comforter that, draped from the back of the leather sofa and, after a tuck-in between vertical and horizontal surfaces, spread over the seat cushions and cascaded, in the still-life way that blankets and throws and such, have, when compelled by gravity, to hang, softly frozen above the floor; the leather was entirely brown, the dog, only partially so.

Possessed of the quality that allowed it’s kind to complete the other half of a perfect private conversation, the dog looked up from whatever invisible vistas that held his attention and stared at the man sitting at the desk that faced the door that lead out into a hallway where dusk reigned permanently, offering only two choices: to turn right and move towards the light and the relatively uncomplicated life out in the Bistro, the bar being the first sign that a safer land has been entered, the wall behind the long bar was entirely mirrors and rows of liquor bottles leaking color in chaotic prisms on multiple shelves, except, in the one section where glass became wood, and bottle caps, the porthole-like window allowing the kitchen to be observed like some shiny-steel polar landscape or, were one still undecided as to the original binary choice, lingering outside the Manager’s office, a turn to the left offered more hallway but less light and much, much less benign certainty.

The tall, thin man titled his head towards the dog, adding the element of genuine curiosity to his interrogative, a gesture appreciated by all members of the canine family, despite lacking the muscular capacity of pointing and manipulating the direction of his outer ears, the man retained the free use of his tongue which, combined with a grinning, panting expression, conveyed both agreement (as to the importance of directly regarding the other lifeform), and gratitude for his unalloyed attention; satisfied he had secured as much backup as could reasonably be brought to bear, the man stood up and faced the office door that remained in it’s minimally functional state of being closed; his canine companion, being blessed with a more direct, action-oriented relationship with the world-at-large, coiled his hind legs as the last stage prior to a vault over the back of the sofa to a position at his human companion’s side.

With the soft click of a felt-and-cork clockwork, the door-handle began to rotate.

*

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

This is our weekly contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise every Wednesday.

This Six is a continuation of last week’s, so allow us: Previously in this story...

This week’s prompt word:

VAULT

“Goes by the name, ‘the Sophomore’; long hair, quiet-type, dresses la maison de Salvation Armee, kinda mumbles when he talks, but funny; you did say you knew where I can find him, right?”

While not quite like when you wake up from a particularly intense daydream, the source of the jolt in my stomach was a toss-up between: when my passenger got in my car just outside of Boston city limits, the sun made her longish hair seem more white than blonde, in contrast to the brunette hair that was cut short enough to serve to frame eyes darker than the night-sky and the fact I was currently at the bottom of the off-ramp, five minutes from my office.

“Can’t say I know the guy personally,” I sensed an angry withdrawal from my passenger, like those demonstrations of inertia, where a balloon is tied to the center console of a car speeding along a road and, when the brakes are applied, the balloon moves, counter-intuitively, towards the backseat rather than the windshield, “But I have heard that name from a guy I know who is one of the owners of a place called the Six Sentence Café & Bistro, it’s not that far from my office, I can drop you off there”.

Praying for green lights, I drove past my office building; not that there would be anyone in the waiting room of Devereaux Investigations and Conflict Resolutions LLC, as the city was wrapped in night and the only pedestrians, at least in the part of the city we were driving through, were people who were lost, or those hoping to become so.

“You know, it’s late, why don’t I give a call ahead, maybe this guy you’re looking for has, I don’t know, left for the day?”

As we drove through a sodium-light waterfall at the intersection between the Superior Court building and the DMV, my hitchhiker finger-combed her short dark hair and adjusted the lapels of the pin-stripe business suit that made the blue ambient lighting pretty much surrender, she smiled while reaching into the back seat,

“Don’t fuck with me, you so much as think about warning your friend at this Bistro place, I will stop you like a bank vault door.”

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