Like I Was Gandhi page 2

The Boston Fiction Festival

Like I Was Gandhi

Perry Glasser

Harry stepped beneath the awning fronting the drugstore just as the chunk of ice fell from the sky and hit the pavement. It missed him by two feet. Maybe less. He never saw the thing, but when it hit the ground it exploded. Boom. A noise like that. But really loud. Boom! He was going for eye drops when Boom!

This happened on the upper eastside, the day after the last snow we had. What fell in that storm, three inches? Gone in a day as if it had never been there. But the fact is that Harry was on Third Avenue at a very, very bad moment. In a way he was lucky. The ice might have fallen from twenty, maybe thirty stories up. There’s no telling just how lucky Harry was.

The delivery guy wheeling a dolly loaded with palettes of Slim Fast said the chunk of ice was about the size of Harry’s head. Later, when Harry told his wife about what happened, Elaine said she did not understand how the guy could have seen the ice. “It would be moving too fast,” she said.

Elaine had a way of missing the point. “So he runs up to me and starts ranting, ‘God was wichyou. God was wichyou.’ That’s how he said it. ‘Wichyou.'".