Black Flies, Post #1

People don’t like to believe that bad things happen, that the horrors of the evening news don’t apply to their existence. Instead, people try to only look at the brighter side of life, because if they didn’t they would have to come to understand that life has a dark side. In Shannon Burke’s novel, Black Flies, the worst of life comes to the surface through the eyes of Ollie Cross, a rookie paramedic in Harlem. The book begins in an old, run-down apartment building where a kid claims to have hurt his arm. Cross and his partner, Rutkovsky, are suspicious of the boy, and are concerned about the group of youths that he is with. They believe that the boy is faking his injury, looking for free drugs. Burke writes, “He pretended to get ready to start the IV. Then there was a sound at the door and eight cops burst in, shouting to get down, throwing kids to the floor” (5). The author quickly reveals a darker landscape than most people would ever imagine, and shows all of the shady corners of the city. Cross narrates the frantic pace of his job and the details of his work. A few more pages into the book, Ollie Crosse relates one of his first saved patients. He elaborates, “We’d definitely saved his life. No doubt about it. He’d practically coded in front of us” (12). He felt the thrill of saving a life, and this motivated him a lot in his work. If he didn’t feel dedicated to help people he wouldn’t be able to tolerate his job.

As the novel progresses, Cross discovers more about how the paramedics worked together in a kind of close-knit community. He describes how he was hazed a bit at first as a result of a botched job. This occurred in a park when he wasn’t able to get a breathing tube down an asthmatic’s throat. When his partner had to do it for him he was made fun of. He describes, “I went down to my locker and found a taped sketch of the grim reaper on my locker. I guess a joke had started up about how I’d tried to miss my tube on the asthmatic on purpose, how I wanted my patient to die, how I got off on dead patients” (13). There is a dark sense of humor attached to the paramedics’ conversation and jokes. Cross talks more about hazing later with another paramedic. As a hint, one of the medics put a transfer form in the mailbox of someone they didn’t like. When the man found it, he went out to his car and found another large hint from another paramedic, LaFontaine, that he should leave the precinct. Burke writes, “I saw that there was something propped up in the driver’s seat. I stepped closer. It was a dead dog. LaFontaine had used some sort of wire to attach the paws to the steering wheel so it was like the dog was driving the car” (21). This book is terribly dark, and the author doesn’t leave out any of the details. I believe that this novel is shocking in its bluntness, but that it does succeed in carrying the idea across to the reader.