Susannah Charleson’s Reading Disaster Story

Infectious Prose
A reading. On a Friday afternoon. In spring. Not even the most optimistic of us could say the house was packed when seven of the faculty were invited to read from their recently-published work to an audience of fellow-faculty and students, most of the latter bribed or threatened to attend. There was nothing inspired in this setup. The auditorium could seat 400, and there were probably 100 students there – most of them slumped in the back rows – which from the rostrum made the back-heavy room appear to be sinking, like the Titanic.
I was scheduled to be the seventh reader, and by then many students (and some of the faculty) sat in a brown stupor. A poet read before me. A fine poet, a celebrated guy, but this audience couldn’t even manage the little unnhs of appreciation that generally follow the last line of a poem.
Since I have a book on working search and rescue coming out, I thought I’d read from that, and I had bookmarked several passages. Right here, right now, the group seemed to need a little bang. So I decided to read a particularly harrowing account of a house fire. Just as I was heading to the rostrum, a late student came in, pushing her way to an empty seat in the middle of one of the back rows. I saw the ripple of students moving to let her in and briefly wondered if her teacher would really give her credit for attending the last ten minutes of an hour-long event.
And then I started reading about a late-night flight home, piloting a Cessna 172 and overflying what I first thought was a lakeside campfire, then realized was a house - a house that exploded with such violence that the hot, rising air thumped the underbelly of my airplane at 4500 feet.
The reading seemed to be going well. I read on, about contacting air traffic control and emergency services, about circling the fire and looking for survivors, about coyotes creeping forward to the brightness, about watching the double-twitch of light flashing from a single fire truck winding through the dark toward the blaze. The audience appeared attentive—especially in the back rows, where I could see a double handful of students leaning forward in uncomfortable postures, some with their arms gripped on the seats in front of them, as though they clung to every word.
Wow, I thought. Score!
When I finished reading, there was applause (which I’d hoped for) and mass exodus (which I’d expected), but a few came forward to talk to the readers, among them the late student who’d plopped herself in the middle of one of those back rows. I was speaking to someone else when she touched my shoulder, and as I turned she beamed at me and honked a little – a young woman with a face like a swollen, streaming gourd – the mother of all head colds, or worse. This was the spring of Swine Flu, and suddenly I could understand those back row students and their attentiveness, their strained postures and fixed expressions. They weren’t leaning toward my story; they were leaning away from her. And who could blame them? She was sick-on-a-stick. A right mess. “Wudderful,” she shouted, a literature lover clearly deafened with mucus, “zo eggziting.” She tilted close so I could hear her, smiled wide and clasped my hands.

Broadcast writer Susannah Charleson’s Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search and Rescue Dog will be released in April 2010, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.