First scene to a short story for my Fiction class, any critique is welcomed. I changed the point of view, and gave the story a kind of narrator, I think it brings you a bit more into the story.

A growing crowd of long and short faces are shaking the days rust away. Elliot, an old, thin faced man is lifting a drink to his mouth as a still cloud of white smoke hangs above the patrons sitting at the bar. He eyes the contents of the glass curiously, smiles briefly, and drops a tightly bound wad of cash on the bar. After a careful sip, a joke about his wife and brother becoming something more then friends, departs slowly from his narrow mouth. I attempt to laugh, but it’s been the same joke you see, for a week now, and I quickly gaze over toward the band that is still setting up while hopping that Elliot will stumble upon a new issue of playboy in the coming week.

I follow the trumpet player, this huge, towering figure, in a fine black suit, as he walks under the white stage lights. For a moment I take him for an ethereal apparition in the incandescent lighting, and as he lifts his instrument, the drums ignite behind him as if a bundle of flares had been shot off into the night. Anthony, in the crude beginning of life, is sitting near the band’s stage with a cigarette dangling between his fingers like a switchblade. A friend of his is arriving.

“Been waiting long,” asks Richard as he takes a seat at the table.

“No, not long,” Anthony replies as he buries the cigarette into a full ashtray and looks off, dejectedly, towards a young woman dressed in white. She is dancing in front of the band.

“I got held up, it happens you know, so where’s this lady friend of yours that you wanted me to meet.”

Without turning back, Anthony motions a lazy hand toward the woman, who smiles back at the two men. Anthony feigns a smile in return.

“Is that her, dancing with Alex?”

The drummer, dressed in a black sports coat and wearing a brown hat, that is tipped casually to the side atop his pointed head, slows the delicate rhythm like an officer curbing traffic at an intersection. Taking heed, the trumpet player, with his face stressed and compressed, steadily lengthens a melodic note. It fills the tavern, mixing in with the smoke hovering above the patrons like a shot of penicillin .