“A flight to the summit” was the breathy way April had described to him what he would do first after he stole the small plane, and as he tossed the words around again and again (both before and after he stole the Cessna), the phrase came to acquire a Cole Porter beat and lyric such as anyone might get by substituting April’s words for “a trip to the moon” and in front of “on gossamer wings.” Landing had been his second task, and that had been almost effortless due to April’s patient step-by-step instructions and the huge runway they found at the crest of this very large hill. Two bearded men dressed in green fatigues—two Fidel Castro’s—came running out of a metal building to meet him and April as he brought the plane to a stop, and they immediately told him that unloading the bales of marijuana (which he hadn’t even known were on board) was all his responsibility, and evidently, he wasn’t supposed to consider having the men or even April help him, because both Castro’s were already poking out of their pants and assisting April to get undressed, as they started to fondle her right there on the tarmac. But it was the radiance of her smile toward the pair that decided for him what immediately came next, and that was his sudden and nimble bunny-hop back into the plane’s cabin, his rapid taxiing down the strip, his takeoff, and then his circling flight above the now-balling threesome and away from the very large hill.
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William C. Blome is a writer of short fiction and poetry. He beds down nightly in-between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is an MA graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as Amarillo Bay, Prism International, Taj Mahal Review, Pure Francis, This, Salted Feathers and The California Quarterly.
