Lost Balloon

When I shuffle into his bedroom, Felix is sitting cross-legged on the ceiling, upside down, already in his PJ’s, his shaggy blonde hair dangling from his head. I stop in my tracks, lean against the doorframe. I thought we’d have more time.

“Oh buddy…” is all I can muster at first, my stomach sinking. I try again, not wanting to seem panicked or scared, not wanting to make my fear his fear. “How’s the view from up there?”

Felix doesn’t miss a beat. “Weird.”

“So much for cleaning your room before bed, I guess.”

Felix smiles at this, all teeth, and my chest warms. “Well technically it’s super clean up here!” he says, spreading his arms out. I laugh, seeing what he means. The floor is littered with all the usual controlled chaos of toys, books, art supplies. But the ceiling — his floor now — is almost totally bare, save for the bed I’d mounted up there just last week, anticipating this very thing. There’d been the signs. The growing moonbounce of his walk, his arms slightly levitating off the dinner table when we ate together. But I was hoping for a longer in-between stage before he inverted completely. I think of the videos Mark and Peggy sent of their twin girls giggling, floating around their living room, bouncing against one another like balloons.

“I can mount more stuff up there for you next weekend,” I tell Felix, my neck craned, trying to seem like it’s the most normal thing in the world talking to him like this. “Glad we got your bed done though. Oh wait! I have special sheets. And a pillow.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Felix says, already groggily yawning. They say the first few days of the switch wear them out like nothing else.

“No, no, they have velcro so they stick to the bed. I’ll go get them.”

I watch Felix crawl across the ceiling, over the metal brackets keeping his bed suspended and secure, and onto the mattress. It’s heavily reinforced, but I still worry I didn’t do it right. I worry about everything.

Before I leave to get the sheets, I turn back to Felix, sprawled out on his bed and quickly drifting, eyelids heavy. “They’re going to figure this out, bud. They’re close. I was reading an article today,” I’m rambling.

“I know, Dad,” he says, his voice thick and drowsy.

Downstairs I sort through the stack of boxes, all the supplies they have for this now. An assortment of braces, tethers, harnesses. I ordered a little of everything, not really knowing what I was doing. Ashamed to be this clueless.

Felix is eight years old, and I have no idea how to keep him safe in this world. When a child’s gravity inverts the family has two choices, basically: Try to fight it and keep them earthbound with straps and leashes and even sometimes, like the McKinleys did with their twins, cartoonishly large suction cups. Option two is to try to make the house more accommodating for them. My coworker Rosa actually bought identicals of every piece of furniture in her house and had them mounted onto the ceiling, mirror-like, so her daughter would have the exact same experience after she flipped. I guess this is the route I’m taking, too, gradually. But it’s hard not to second-guess myself. I cock my head, trying to see everything from Felix’s new perspective.

I finally find the boxes with the sheets and pillow in them. Through the kitchen window, across the alley, I notice another house has put poles and netting up, enclosing their backyard. Lucky. I’m still on the waiting list for netting while they prioritize schools, daycare centers, playgrounds. At some point, if this goes on long enough, they’ll just cover the whole city with nets, or a giant cage, or something. I wish I could find more comfort in that, more hope. We’ve all seen the photos, the videos. We all know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody. There will always be a kid who slips away. There will always be a chance that kid will get scared, grab hold of another kid, take them into the sky with them, beyond the clouds.

I trudge back upstairs and find Felix already sound asleep and snoring gently in his ceiling bed, the northern lights projector I got him for his birthday spinning an array of violets, oranges, greens, pinks, and blues across his fragile body, his perfect face. I stand underneath him, reach up on my tiptoes and graze the tips of his golden locks with my fingers.

“You’ll be okay,” I whisper. “First they need to figure out why it’s happening to just kids, and then they can…” I trail off. I have no idea what I’m talking about, not really.

I suddenly remember I loaned our step ladder to Rosa. I have no way to get up to Felix and tuck him in. I scan his dark room, looking for a solution. Then I realize the solution is everywhere. Quietly I begin making a pile of Felix’s stuff. Ottoman, chair, boxes, cushions, up and up. Not totally secure, not perfectly stable, but good enough. I scale it slowly, sheets and pillow folded under my arm, until I’m up at his bed, right next to him. My son. I unfold the sheets and cover his body, velcroing the edges along the sides. I gently lift his head, tuck his pillow under it, carefully fastening it to the mattress cover.

Then, heart breaking with more love and fear than I know what to do with, I kick my leg up, above his bed, hoist my body up, leaving the floor behind, and swing myself over so I’m clinging onto the side of the bed next to him, gripping with all my strength, imagining for a moment that nothing has changed. Lying next to Felix, watching him dream, gravity be damned. Pretending I can hold on forever without falling.

 

---

 

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Okay Donkey, HAD, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.

My neighbor shouldn’t live on his own. Not once in the four weeks since I moved in, have I seen a soul enter his apartment—no friend, no family, no girl—and yet, the boy cannot be older than seventeen.

Grey skin, overcast eyes, an odd edge to his shadow. We never talk.

When I leave for work, straight in my stiff collar and high heels, I feel him stare at me from his dirty window. I come home after dark to his breathing under the door and the smell of old carpeting. With the languor of winter’s dreamless slumber, I press the key into my lock, lingering in the unheated corridor for a bite of his voice. I get nothing.

***

One Friday night, after a tall, lonely glass of coke on the rocks, I lose it.

“Hey you, in there,” I call out, mouth to the wall. “I’m new here. Care to say hi?”

No answers but a blank breath, and by my thigh, a spot of tepid plaster where on the other side he lays his cheek.

I startle at my own imaginings and let out a curse.

What is there here but me, a weekend of too many empty hours and sugar to rot my teeth?

Nothing, indeed. Under my palm the wall is so cool, wetness coats the length of my fingers. I step back.

Fresh out of college, I long to be a girl a while further, a somewhat child, close to what the boy is. Truth is, I should have gone home after all, stuck with mom and dad and the soul-numbing local job. Except I’m still holding out for something out here—the gold, the fleece, the prince, the big opportunity, who knows?—something beyond the black pair of overpriced pumps and sullen pencil skirt that bind me into this pretense that I am worth minding. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for yourself—go get the world, hold out, be worth minding—before you skitter back home with your tail between your legs?

I bet the boy’s in college, getting the world, or the next best thing.

***

Sunday morning, I knock.

“Hey kid, wanna have lunch with me?”

You can come out, I don’t bite.

For my troubles, I get shushed footsteps padding away from me.

At noon, I leave steaming beet soup in front of his door with a quick, quiet rap. Seven days it remains there, as I watch for him to pick it up, clean it out, the bright stew, garnet as wine, curdled cold and lumpy.

By next Sunday, the forgotten food has grown a hairy coat of green and white, a delicate doormat at his shut door.

***

Days pass; I find myself pondering his unnatural aloneness as I fall asleep in my single bed, nails bothering white blisters off the wall. Why doesn’t he answer? Why is he watching me? How does he spend his days? I’ve had a belly full of ice cubes since I moved in.

One night, I am on the balcony, having a smoke, stalking the moon’s slow rise, fingers croaky in the December air, when I hear it: a milky whisper, unnerving as the damp look that licks my neck every morning.

“Cold,” he says.

For a stretch, I think I’m dreaming, the texture of his voice grainy in my ears next to my own thoughts. Is someone missing me at home? Where are all the friends you’re supposed to make in college? Did sweet Danny Frost from middle school get married? What about the dude who promised he’d French kiss me if by thirty no one else had?

The tip of my tongue meets the bitter end of the cigarette and curls away.

“It’s going to snow,” I say.

I don’t see him across the black chasm between our balconies but there’s no one else.

“I wish I could see it,” he says. Or maybe that’s not what he says, only what I hear. It doesn’t matter: he doesn’t care to be reached.

Still, my mind probes the darkness for him.

“You will, soon.”

The snow will be down before dawn.

“So much cold,” I hear once more.

***

Next morning, the snow starts as I walk out. Watching his empty window, waiting, I stick my tongue out and catch a shaving of falling ice. He doesn’t show.

I wonder who he is. A lost kid. A ghost in a stony city. A kin.

***

On my way home, I grab ice cream for two. Cold on cold. I’m about to knock when his door sways open an inch or two.

“Hey there, kiddo? Everything OK?”

I push in, no warmth puffing out of his place, no light either.

Inside, his apartment mirrors mine in all things but furniture. The sharp, straight lines of white walls cocoon a small expanse of nothing much but dusty air. No heater, no lightbulbs dangling from lonely ceiling wires, no boy. A tiny box of absence.

And too much ice for one person.

***

Outside, the snow blankets everything. Ice on ice, the extra chill gloved in bittersweet quietness. Sugar rots my teeth; I fall asleep, lips to the wall, holding out for his soft breath—my too-young, grey shadow, my kin. The boy no one misses.

Let me hold out.

---

 

Divya Kernan (she/her) is a biracial and neurodivergent speculative fiction writer, a French native and an alumna of the Short Story Incubator at GrubStreet, Boston. Her work has appeared in Baffling Magazine. You can find her on Bluesky: @divyakernan.bsky.social.

I had this new dress. It was completely over the top, but I wore it anyway.  I guess I wanted to make a lasting impression. The slinky fabric, the hot pink and lime print, the bell sleeves, a dress no one’s mother had owned, surely.  In the consignment shop on 19^th Avenue, the saleslady slipped it off the mannequin and commented on my excellent taste.

“I’ll take that pale blue suitcase, too,” I said.

The blackberry bushes in the backyard engulf the swing set, now. They will ripen soon. More pies and jam I will fail to make. Last summer, the day I came home from the hospital the third time, I found Lynette at the stove, stirring sugar into berries and hot water.  Miles bought frozen pie shells. The three of us ate pie.

Advice from my dead mother’s playbook: Tears are for clearing dust and tiny insects from your eyes.

Miraculously, I locate a clean pair of underwear and a bra in the bureau.  For weeks, Miles has been coming home to the private moat of dirty laundry on my side of the bed.  He pretends not to notice.

The dress falls cool past my shoulders, over my waist, belly, and thighs.  The chainsaw noise in the living room signals the start of the Indy 500.  Any minute, Miles will come into the bedroom to see if I’ll join him and our daughter, make it a family affair. When she was a colicky baby, the roar of Formula One cars soothed her.

Fifteen years ago, he made his way clear across campus, his gait uneven, and asked if he could borrow the notes for a lecture he’d missed.

“I don’t take notes,” I said.

“But  I see you writing furiously, every class.”

“I’m doodling.”

He gestured over at the student union building, a shipwreck rising out of a concrete sea.  “Good.  I’ll buy the beer, and you can show me your doodles.”

Over beer, I asked, “Why do you limp?”

“Hit by a taxi.” He pointed to the bad hip. “A steel pin’s been holding me together since I was fourteen.”

“Good.”

“How is that good?” His eyes, a field of wild iris back home.

“You’re too handsome, otherwise,” I said.

He moved himself and his Siamese cat into my studio apartment. We cooked, made love. Managed to graduate. Got married. Managed to laugh at things that make most people cry.

“Don’t catch the house on fire,” Miles yells into the kitchen.

Lynette fires back, “A monkey can make Jiffy Pop!”

I hear the scrape of tin on the stove. She’s counting each pop.

Mom goes to the loony bin three times; daughter counts her world. Raisins in a handful. Tiles in the bath. Filaments of a web.

“Are you coming to watch the race?” Miles says through the bedroom door.

I close the suitcase. Toothbrush.  Hairbrush.  A pair of jeans, two pullovers, and three tees, a denim skirt I bought to drive out from Kentucky to California, ten minutes after I turned eighteen.

He joins me at the window and picks up one of the sand dollars lined up on the sill. Curving a calloused finger around the shell’s edge, he says, “That’s quite a dress. You going someplace special?”

His money has always been on the shrinks. Another fiction we maneuver, like the moat of laundry.

“You two are better off,” I say.

He sets down the sand dollar. “I’m going to call Dr. Ames.”

“I’m not going back there, Miles.”

“You don’t get to decide that.” He’s looking at the suitcase on the bed. “You know she’s rooting for Danny Sullivan?” He takes my chin and makes me look at him.

Sullivan is a Kentucky boy.

“Please don’t forget the lemons,” I say.

Miles grips my chin tighter. During a heatwave, when he was building the work shed, I picked lemons. Made the lemonade in an empty coffee can. No walls on the shed yet, just a frame and open air.  Optimal conditions for making a baby, he said.

I pull away. My chin burns, and I hope it doesn’t stop. I need to feel.

“You’ll be back,” he says.

“Close the door behind you, please.”

I put on shoes, makeup. Our daughter watches from the mirror’s edge: Timid smile. Lips pressed shut over lost baby teeth. Pigtails, long tangled hair, short hair, long again, then smooth and shiny as a shampoo commercial actress. In these wallet-size girls, her father’s grey eyes and a conviction to live fully. Her 12^th birthday party at the indoor rink is two weeks away. I will not stand next to Miles, who’s not a drunk and makes the best omelets in San Francisco, while she and her friends slice paths in the ice.

I slip the sand dollar Miles was holding into my purse and pick up my suitcase.

The broken ones get tossed back into the ocean. Lynette’s theory is that they find each other, mate, and form more perfect sand dollars.

“Like people?” I asked.

“No, Mom, they’re shells.”

---

Lee Doyle’s work has appeared in Calyx, Consequence, Nostos, The Healing Muse, Unbroken, and other publications. Her first novel, The Love We All Wait For, won Best Novel at the East of Eden Writers Conference. An audiobook of the novel, newly titled Hearts Crazier Than Mine, will be released this fall. Lee holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University and shares a lair in San Rafael, California, with a black Lab named Jasper. She’s working on her second novel.

 

 

I have something to tell you, my husband says, but I’m not listening. I’m trying to shift the stone lodged in my mountain boot. Rain has slicked the narrow path covered in last year’s crushed leaves and we’re on a steep descent.

More words tumble out of his mouth: didn’t mean anything, didn’t want to hurt you, didn’t think, didn’t blah blah blah.

I watch him speak and wonder how long ago he stopped being the man I love. What I feel is as hard and as true as the stone I cannot dislodge. I raise my arm to shush him, to stem this flow of didn’ts and didn’ts and didn’ts. I have my own list. All the times I didn’t protest when he worked late, the art classes I didn’t take because he didn’t help with the kids, the tedious socializing that helped build his career. Up goes my arm and whoosh go my boots. Treacherous path. Treacherous husband. I slide and slide and collide into boulders, sharp edged branches, stinging nettles. I thump into the bark of a fallen tree. All goes black.

Rewind.

I have something to tell you, my husband says. This time we are settling in for a romantic dinner. I’ve laid the dining table, the one we rarely use, and cooked his favourite meal. It’s my apology for all the nights I’ve been away, all the children’s appointments I’ve forgotten, all the travel I’ve done for my art exhibitions. I’m serving the lamb chops, fragrant with crushed cumin and fennel seed, smiling as I pop open a bottle of champagne, when words tumble out of his mouth: you’re never around, you never want sex anymore, you never appreciate, you never blah blah blah. And when I raise my arm to shush him, to stem this flow of never and never and never, I lose my footing on a slick of wine that I never saw coming. All goes black.

Rewind.

I have something to tell you, my husband-to-be whispers. I’ve snuck out of my sister’s house to make out with him under the majestic elm tree. Tradition says it’s bad luck to see the bride the night before, but we don’t believe in any of that. We’re young and gorgeous and in love, him with cropped hair waxed this way and that, me with my gypsy skirt and flouncy blouse. Great, I say, but I’ve got something to ask you first. And this time, we talk and talk and talk about careers and kids and taking turns. We argue and laugh and cry about all the what ifs that could come our way. We kiss and kiss and kiss into the small hours, until the grass is bent with dew, until the dawn is pinking the sky and we can’t rewind any further.

---

Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for awards and shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport, Oxford and WestWord prizes for flash fiction. She’s also a contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review. Cole lives with her girlfriend and has two children. You can find her on bluesky @nomad-sw18.bsky.social.

We’d been off the main route by ourselves in the Conservation and Marine Science Zone, and you’d been saying how we didn’t want to miss it as back at the main tank there’d be the mermaid show soon, but we’d been lucky arriving there as it was quieter and not as appealing to children, and as it happened the aquarium had set aside a pregnant seahorse for monitoring and I’d been lucky again to get to watch it agog, rocking back in the water, pulsing up its young, but you were looking at your watch, saying there’s loads left to see and we’d be busy with the move the next two weeks so let’s just keep going, we should drink this all in, and I was, and about to point out to you the newborns too, like commas scribbled in the water in white, but you rapped on the glass before I could speak and though it got my attention, it got one of their staff’s too, whose should-know-better glower embarrassed me enough we couldn’t stay, so you lifted my wrist and steered us onto the concourse to sit with the six-year-olds and my point is it wasn’t that I saw how you couldn’t conceal your annoyance the mermaid troupe proved all mermen instead, athletic in their tails and tasteful kelp, and it wasn’t that you saw me watching them, hardly agog but as I was there at least into it, and it wasn’t that I saw you staring at the only female performer, the girl on the beach looking lonely along ‘the sea,’ but perhaps instead because you’d said “Corinne, for God’s sake, you’re in a trance again” but maybe I was thinking about the seahorse again then, moved into its tank because the decision was made it was ready, or maybe I was listening to the announcer calling out the story, that the girl and her merman were from two different worlds and it wasn’t meant to be, or maybe I’d just zoned out from that plot.

---

Stephen J. Bush was born in Bath, England, and lives in Xi’an, China, where he works as a biologist. His fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, BULL, Oyster River Pages, and Panorama.