Blue Manifesto Letter from the Editor
Playlist
Not Full Enough
Henri Bergson on Possibility and Creation
Roman Candle
Oliver Beatty
Some students feel that they have to pull off elaborate stunts in order to ask someone to the dance, and every year the Valley View school administration wonders if they need to ask the students to maybe scale back, tone it down. Most students ask each other via elaborate karaoke performances in the hallway or baked goods arranged into letters. But last year, a student built a ramp on the school football field during the night and tried to flip a four wheeler off of it while carrying a roman candle–a small, handheld firework. The plan was that, as the four-wheeler tumbled through the air, the student (astride his vehicle) would aim the roman candle at the field where he had used gasoline to spell out the letters “Jane HC?” He had originally planned to write a longer message with a more thorough explanation of what he was asking Jane but found it actually pretty difficult to write with gasoline.
The boy had spent three years sitting behind Jane in band class, staring at the back of her head day after day as they played through arpeggios, she the first clarinet, he the second. He had asked her to Homecoming every year, rebuffed each time, but he hoped that now, as seniors, pure spectacle would carry the day.
So the morning comes, and the students all begin to gather around the field because they’ve seen the ramp, and they’ve seen this guy wearing a ridiculous outfit, and finally Jane gets there, and the guy points at her and pumps his fist in the air and starts revving the engine, and the crowd cheers, and Jane blushes but feels excited. She feels chosen and special. She feels something in her stomach jiggle a bit. Later she’ll say she felt concerned, that she yelled for him to stop, but of course that’s a lie. Every rev of the engine makes her more excited. She wants the boy to jump for her.
The student does a donut on his four-wheeler in the end zone and then lights the roman candle he holds in his hand. The wick begins to spark and burn and he takes off at full speed for the ramp he built, roman candle outstretched like a lance. The crowd goes nuts and starts chanting his name. He hits the base of the ramp and he feels like this is the moment where his life is going to really begin. He is going to launch off the ramp and into glory and from there life will be gravy. He’ll take Jane to Homecoming, they’ll graduate and go to the same college, they’ll be in love but maybe will breakup for a year or two in order to gain more life experience and make sure that they are really meant for each other but of course it’s true love so they’ll be pulled back, inexorably, together and right after graduation he will propose in the middle of the quad at their college and Jane will say yes and they’ll have a huge wedding paid for by her father who owns a large agricultural chemical business and they’ll have three kids and a dog and live in a penthouse in Chicago and have a private jet. Sure he’ll have affairs, he’s rich, but he’ll never not love Jane. And they’ll hold lavish parties where they’ll tell the story of how they got together, how he flipped on an ATV for her and set a whole field on fire for her and how after he landed he rode right up to her and she hopped on the back of his four-wheeler and they drove off into the brilliant Nebraska heat, the two of them against the world.
He thinks all of that as the four-wheeler hits the ramp and begins to ascend. But a millisecond later, as it reaches the top, a breath away from launching into the air and into glory, the whole thing buckles. Some small synapse in his brain fires with the realization that he had meant to attach a support beam, a crucial component of the ramp according to the “RalphsRamps” YouTube instructional video he watched, but had forgotten to do so after the gasoline writing proved to be such an arduous task. So as the entire crowd of students from Valley View High watches, the ramp collapses and the four wheeler does indeed go tumbling but not in the air, just on the ground, crushing the boy riding it again and again as it completes a full seven hundred and twenty degrees of flipping. There are screams and gasps from the crowd and then silence. The boy is lying there in the middle of the field near the shattered ramp and then there is a small pop as the roman candle goes off and the turf around him erupts into flame.
Jane stands frozen as the boy who loved her writhes and people rush to try to drag him out of the fire although no one wants to actually go in the fire to rescue him so they just sort of stand around on the edges. She tries to make out letters in the flames but unfortunately for Jane and the boy the gasoline has spread to all the turf in the area, merging into a puddle instead of any discernible shape. The whole field smells like burning rubber and gas and charred plastic.
That put a real damper on the festivities that year. There is now a memorial out by the football field and the school administration is hoping that the memory and the statue of the boy will serve as warning enough to the students not to try anything crazy and to keep things in the realm of the reasonable vis-à-vis asking each other to a school dance. They hope they won’t have to be the party poopers in that regard.
And now Jane is in her first year of college but since she was elected Homecoming queen last year (the student population agreed it was only fair after the tragedy) she has to come back to crown the new winner at a halftime ceremony during the football game. Hours before the game starts, she walks through the middle of the field, a big patch with fresh turf a slightly different color than the rest of the field. She lays down in the middle of it and thinks of her future, wide open, arcing ahead of her, bright and unending.
Oliver Beatty is a writer originally from Kansas City who foolishly left the heartland for the East Coast. While his nonfiction work focuses on punk and local music, he has been trying to return to his roots through fiction.