Douglas Brynes Survives Sky Diving Without Parachute

Douglas Brynes was a man spoken of in the town not because he wished it so, nor because he had ever lifted his voice above the pitch required to greet another man at the post office, but because once—once only, which was enough—he fell from the sky and did not die, and afterward the town could not decide whether he had been spared or merely delayed.

They said it began as a dare, though Douglas himself never used the word. He would say only that the morning was clear and that the earth, seen from the open mouth of the plane, looked no more solid than memory does when you are young and believe memory to be permanent. He had gone up with men younger than himself, loud men, men who laughed too much because they had not yet learned the weight of laughter, and when the door opened and the wind rushed in like something alive and offended, Douglas felt—not fear—but recognition, as though the air itself had called his name years ago and he was only now answering.

There was no parachute. This much was certain. The men would later swear to it, hands raised as if under oath, as if the telling required a court. No straps. No silk. Just Douglas, his body already leaning forward before his mind could object, stepping into nothing as calmly as another man might step off a porch into dusk.

He fell. Of course he fell. Falling is what men do best, though they dress it in other words. He fell through air that thickened and thinned, through a roar that stripped thought down to its barest bone, through a sky that did not care whether he lived or died. And in that falling, time itself seemed to loosen, to stretch like an old rope, so that Douglas had room enough to think of his father’s hands, always smelling of oil and dirt, and of his mother standing at the sink watching the yard as if the yard might leave her. He thought of a woman he had loved once and failed, and how failure, like gravity, never needs encouragement.

They said later that he struck the earth in a field just beyond the river, a field gone soft from recent rain, where the grass lay down as if bracing itself. Some swore a gust of wind caught him, others that he clipped the branches of an oak, each leaf tearing a little of the fall away. One man said the earth itself rose to meet him, unwilling to be the thing that finished the story. No one agreed, and Douglas did not help them. He only lay there for a time, listening to his own breath, surprised by it, as a man might be surprised to find an old clock still ticking in a room long abandoned.

When he stood—eventually, awkwardly, like a man learning his body again—the world had not changed. The sky was still the sky. The field was still the field. Yet something had shifted, not outside him but within, as though a line had been crossed that could not be uncrossed, only remembered. He walked back into town days later with bruises like dark sermons written across his skin, and the people looked at him with a mixture of awe and resentment, for nothing unsettles a community quite like proof that the rules may bend.

After that, Douglas Brynes lived quietly. He worked. He ate. He slept. But when he stood sometimes at the edge of things—a bridge, a thought, a decision—there was in him the echo of that long descent, the knowledge that the fall is always waiting, patient and impartial. And the town, watching him grow older, could never decide whether he had been granted a miracle or merely borrowed time from a debt that all men, sooner or later, must pay.