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.

It is hosted by Denise.

The rule is six, (and only six), sentences per submitted story.

This week’s prompt word:

SPARK

‘If you had just a minute to breathe,
And they granted you one final wish.’

The Sophomore stood in the brick-and-cigarette-machine foyer of the Six Sentence Café & Bistro, the exhalation of cool, conditioned-air offered a bouquet of varied spirits, short-order food, and secret dreams coaxed into blooming under a neon sun.

Having no memory of leaving, the young man, wearing a long wool overcoat that was twenty-years-old in 1973 and blond hair that was long enough to touch his shoulders, but too curly to do anything other than rest there, like half-a-ruff from the height of Elizabethan fashion, stepped towards the bar that ran along the right-hand wall, dividing the stacked-rows of liquor bottles from the open area of the Café like a breakwater protecting a harbour of refuge.

Surveying the room, he wondered if he should tell these people, inhabitants as they were, of a world fifty years in his future, his given name; the answer, as non-verbal as a belch, made his smile both brittle and heavy as his friends, creating an emotional gestalt among the crowd of Saturday Night strangers, suddenly became visible.

A flash from the farthest alcove, a soothing purple with a subtle glint, the bandstand, halfway down the right-hand wall, came alive with a buzz of greetings and acknowledgement, at once smooth, friendly and provocative and, finally, in his right-hand peripheral vision, a quiet smile of confident kindness.

The Sophomore’s attention was instantly commandeered as the tall, thin man stepped out of the darkened hall at the far end of the bar, singing the final line of the verse, as Tom, holding one of the double swinging kitchen doors for Chris joined in, “…spark of the low-heeled boys.“

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

This is our contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, the only requirement is to present a story in six (and only) six sentences.

[ed note: In deference to one of our ESL Sixarians, I will impose his ‘One punctuation mark = one Sentence’ interpretations of the Rule of SIx. All in the interest of nurturing the most egalitarian of communities, of course. This one time. lol]

This week’s prompt word:

KNOT

“Wait! Don’t move!”

Female laughter, confidently brash, yet very much in the key of ‘come hither’, overflowed from the undiscovered country outside the circle of light currently painting the twisted and tangled bedsheets a lavender-pink color.

“One word about Gordian knots and you’ll be on Harvard Street trying to figure out where to put your phone.”

The current chair of Radcliffe University’s Department of Advanced Anthropology and Cultural Semiotics, Leann’s voice commanded my attention; her body, however, totally controlled my more corporeal elements as two a.m. snuck towards us like a teenager trying to get his girlfriend home without alerting her father, time-worn copy of the ‘Am Bròn Binn’ on his lap, asleep in a chair on the front porch.

Although I wasn’t overly surprised at her deploying the Alexandrian reference, the imagery of a painting by Berthélemy, courtesy of the École des Beaux-Arts during my recent trip to Europe, assured our commingled laughter; it provided the perfect end to a day that began with my surprise visit to her lecture, ‘Scylla and Charybdis: Conjoined twins of anti-patriarchal Militarism or Adolescent fantasy‘, and ended in the master-bedroom of her house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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

This is our contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, the only requirement is to present a story in six (and only) six sentences.

This week’s prompt word:

GUARD

“Would it be too much to hope for our son learning to be more on guard; a kid like him, head in the clouds all the time, is asking the other sixth graders to lash out, it’s what we did at that age,” the man seemed to address the otherwise empty kitchen, even as his wife placed the tea cup and saucer at the upper right corner of the evening newspaper opened on the kitchen table; his smile of thanks faltered as he rotated the handle on the steaming cup to precisely three o’clock and adjusted the teaspoon on the saucer.

The tall woman compressed her lips, a tacit expression of agreement, however, her husband had already turned his attention to the black-and-white newsprint, sparing him the blaze of protective fury in his wife’s eyes; folding the front page carefully to the left, the man continued,  “You’re his mother, and for reasons beyond me, there are times when he’ll listen to you, go have a talk and tell him to apologize to whoever and, while he’s at it, grow a thicker skin.”

 

The boy, sitting with his back against the plain headboard of the single bed, the tensor lamp, chrome-articulated neck leaning over his shoulder like a concert pianist’s page-turner, looked up from the circle of light illuminating the pages of the book, his eyes held both questions and answers as his mother stepped into the room, tension diminishing ever-so-slightly as she shut the door;

“You’re here to tell me to not let them get to me, that I just need to grow up,” no longer focused on whatever he was reading, the boy’s attention flared like a kitchen match in an empty basement.

“Well, yes, but this is one of those life lessons that need to be memorized like passages from a favorite book; what you felt in class today, when that boy, William, said your book report was pretentious is part of a strength rather than the weakness you’re thinking it is right now; like it or not, it will take time to practice being you.”

“Thanks a lot, Mom, so all I have to do is hurry-up and run into doors, sit on tacks, have ‘Kick Me’ signs taped to my back in school and I’ll get to become the best person I can be?”

“Well, yes, …but at least you won’t have to become your father,” the walls of the bedroom seemed to bulge inwards for a split second, until both mother and son broke into gales of silent laughter.

 

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

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

Hosted by Denise, governed by the Rule of Six

This week’s prompt word:

BAND

“Big wheel’s rollin, gotta keep ’em goin’ 
 Big wheel’s a rollin’, movin’ on…”

Bobby Harrington’s voice held more twang as he sang his favorite Merle song than any of us believed possible, gathered in a second floor tenement apartment in Providence, Rhode Island in the mid-1970s; as I played the closing riff, we shared smiles of relief, like cans of Budweiser in a high school parking lot, knowing we’d found a singer for our band.

All of a week before, I got a call from a guy who said he was a friend of Cyanide Jack, a mutual acquaintance who ran the plating department in a jewelry plant where I’d spent a year in the middle of grad school, re-assessing my goals and ambitions in a setting guaranteed to minimize familial pressure while enhancing the delusion that time was a condiment, rather than the main course.

Bill Haywood was putting together a country band and heard I was between bands, of course, the latter was accurate only if you considered a group of musicians who wanted to play in front of people badly enough to wear matching polyester floral-print shirts, a band; I was asked to leave, ‘Brass Tacks’, (‘When you’re ready to get serious about music, it’s time to get down to Brass Tacks‘), because I had a habit, while the rest of the band was playing ‘On Blue Dolphin Street’ as the wedding party ate dinner, of turning the volume off on my guitar and practicing the music I enjoyed playing.

So we listened to Bobby sing his Merle (and Waylon and Willie) and the evening’s good mood got even better when the drummer announced that a friend in a house band at a small club just outside the capital city told him we could have the stage right after their second set on Saturday night.

Saturday arrived, the place was half-crowded and, after a brief introduction, we got up on the small stage, plugged in and I immediately went into the guitar intro to ‘Movin’ on’ followed by dead air; now everyone misses a cue now and then, so we played through the instrumental lead-in again and as we approached the part where the vocals come in, I turned to my left and there was Bobby Harrington …frozen solid; apparently in the five days of rehearsals in the living room, no one thought to ask Bobby if he’d ever sung in front of an audience.

 

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

This is a Six Sentence Story post.

As Denise prescribes, it is six sentences in length and uses the prompt word as unifying idea.

As this post’s subtitle reminds us, this being the continuation of a serial story, we will say, “…previously on the Whitechapel Interlude.”

The prompt word:

FORM

“But Brother Anselm, why is it you so often quote Bible passages; I, for one, joined the Order to learn how the Sons of Adam have distorted the path of humankind.”

The voice belonged to Nestor Beckwith and Nestor belonged to a class of student that made my vocation so challenging since Brother Abbott left the school for reasons un-articulated by the Mother Superior; his use of citing Bible chapter and verse remained a clear influence on my new role as an instructor. I can recall on the first day of my first form, before stumbling into the chapter’s Thrawl Street kitchen, hearing the Bible stories quoted like scientific theories, which any good scientist will label as such.

Most theories, like the Bible being referenced by my privilege-bound student, sought credibility in drama, eschewing logic as a distraction to the hungry minds of the masses; the Order of Lilith exists to both teach the history of humankind without the propaganda of patriarchy, and to try to avert the dominant culture’s efforts to extinguish the potential of the species.

I saw the fire flicker in the eyes of the boy sitting in the back row of the class, a very familiar light, “Yes, Seth, you have something to contribute to the discussion?”

“John 8:41-44 and…”

Brother Abbott’s skill at remaining above conflict whispered to me and I refrained from laughing in anticipation, instead raised an eyebrow,

“Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Chapter 3:18″