Excerpt from the story Danger by Perry Glasser
Literature
An excerpt from the story “Danger” in Dangerous Places: Stories by Perry Glasser. (BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, November 2009) Re-published with permission from BkMk Press.
I was neither happy nor unhappy, waiting for things to start again. A job had ended. Another job would begin at the summer’s end. Such are the rhythms of a teacher’s life. At a rock concert scheduled for a field near a dragstrip, a half dozen bands will gather to play for a day and a night. A mini-Woodstock. I thought it would occupy me, bring back lost times. I’d sit in the sun, surround myself with thousands of younger people, they’d ingest drugs and drink beer, we’d listen to music that was new when I was, and I’d brood on the decline of the West.
The day dawned glorious. At ten in the morning, I park two miles from the concert site. Lined with cars on the shoulders, the single lane blacktop road is choked with people trekking to the dragstrip’s grounds. They carry coolers and backpacks. At noon, the concert begins. The sun is strong. High, white clouds dot the blue sky, the music is passable, and a group of people, kids really, invite me to join them, share their food and wine, and sit on their blankets. I wish I’d thought to bring a hat. The air is cool, but the strong sun heats my flannel shirt. When I take off my shirt, a young girl sits so close beside me our hips touch. She tells me she thinks gray chest hair is cool.
The concert is less a demonstration of music than a celebration of community. In this field, we are one. Late in the afternoon, between bands, a small aircraft buzzes overhead. Small planes have passed above us all day; journalists, I assumed. But this airplane is lower and more insistent, circling tightly, very low, and people all over the field begin to take notice. When at the height of a loop the plane emits a plume of white smoke, we know it must be part of the show. Can it herald the next band? Sure of our attention, the plane climbs, slows, and then the sharpest-eyed among us see the parachutist leap from a door behind the wing. The girl beside me points. The parachutist plummets like a stone for a few seconds, and then his parachute blossoms. Everyone on the field applauds, but we rise to our feet to cheer when he ignites red, white and blue smoke bombs. The three colors spiral about him as he twists in the wind. Great plumes of colored smoke stain the sky. People whistle, stomp their feet, and shout. It is a magnificent moment.
Only the next day do we learn from newspaper accounts that the rogue parachutist had nothing to do with the show. In fact, his nylon jumpsuit caught fire from the three smoke bombs strapped to his waist. He’d been aflame, burning right before our eyes, dead before he touched the ground. Unable to know his pain, as he twisted and spun above us we cheered every foot of his agonized descent. We hollered and shouted, oohed and aahed through the nightmare of his slow, excruciating final fall to the earth, in our ignorance thrilled by his exquisite beauty.
Authors Perry Glasser and Evan McNamara will read at An Evening of Dangerous Fiction on Friday, October 30, 8 PM, at The Writers Place (3607 Pennsylvania.) This event is a special Riverfront Reading cosponsored by BkMk Press with support from I Love a Mystery Bookstore. The event is $5 ($3 for Writers Place members).
Evan McNamara
Kansas City mystery author (and recent UMKC graduate) Evan McNamara novels wrote Fair Game and Superior Position, and his fiction has appeared most recently in Danse Macabre. A graduate of West Point and of UMKC’s MA program in English/creative writing, he has served as a preliminary judge for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. He lives in Kansas City with his wife and daughter.
Perry Glasser
Perry Glasser’s stories have won the PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize three times and the Boston Fiction Festival twice. He is the author of two prior fiction collections: Suspicious Origins, which won the Minnesota Voices Award (New Rivers Press) and Singing on the Titanic (University of Illinois Press). A former public high school English teacher in New York City, after years of being a magazine editor, he currently coordinates the Professional Writing program at Salem State College in Massachusetts. Glasser received the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize in Short Fiction from BkMk Press of UMKC for his new book Dangerous Places. We also just learned that the book won the USABookNews.com’s Best Books 2009 Award in Short Stories.
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