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Practicing Stalls
- Wesleyan University Press
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30 Practicing Stalls Long ago you lay in your back yard listening to planes circle for the dirt strip near your house. They droned loudly at first, but when they throttled back, almost to silence, your heart stopped for a moment. Though you couldn't see the planes and after a while there was only the sound of your breath near sleep, in that instant when your heart stopped, something uncontrolled and heavy began falling in you: a sense that a life had passed nearby, or the falling you already knew from dreams, or the completely imaginable kind that kept you from jumping off the roof. Whichever, a space opened, and you quieted so as not to miss the crash that never came. Now when the propeller's blade unwinds like a broken film and floods the cockpit with the sudden bright light of a projection lamp, your heart stops. Wind blows through the engine cowling, beats the Plexiglas like a desperate hand and a voice says, Let me in before I fall, and falling, you hear another voice rise to its last plea, Let me in. You trim the elevators, and the nose rises to a saving attitude. You practice stalls again and again until everyone is safe. *** Years from now you may lie in your back yard and through half-closed eyes watch the flat jets too high to be heard leave their white trails behind, and though friends of yours have died, and you haven't yet stopped dreaming of falling, you know that when a propeller unwinds and a voice cries, Let me in, it is your own death that spins as slowly as a blade before you. It's not like the beginning near the dirt strip, or when practicing stalls: you could lose all that altitude and never fall. 31 ...