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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