It spits and heaves from the bus downtown. You’ll notice men looking at your mother strangely and feel scared, so you’ll focus on the Velcro on your scuffed-up dinosaur shoes. When you go by Rural Cemetery, there will be a three-decker that your great grandmother lives in. You’ll announce the importance of this location to everyone on the bus. In another couple years you’ll find out that she walked the same route the bus takes before school every morning to deliver her family’s daily piece work when she wasn’t much older than you.
It fills the street behind you from an ancient panel truck, somehow still in one piece. The seats and frame will creak and bounce while you’re delivering nuts to the city’s dive bars with your father. He’ll get dirty wads of cash and you’ll get a few bags of pistachios, maybe even some red ones. In one bar, there will be an old-timer, a friend of your grandfather’s—the one who killed one of his kids and brutalized the others. You’ll sit at the bar and stare at pickled eggs floating through vinegar that hasn’t been clear during your lifetime while your dad jokes about how he could take his dad now that they’re both older and the old man at the bar will just laugh and shake his head. You’ll wonder why anyone would care about this but one day you’ll understand.
It fills your lungs because somebody thought it was a good idea to put an enclosed train platform next to the opening of an expressway tunnel. You’ll wait here bloodied to get the last train home from punk shows when you’re 15. Or you’ll be 19, fiddling with a discman, sad about a girl, reading a book that you don’t like all that much but has the right affectation, and you’ll already be nostalgic more often than you should be. You’ll be waiting to go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas or maybe even Easter if it’s before your grandmother is too frail to pick up a ham or cut through a turnip.
It sputters from tuk-tuks outside an after-hours club. It’ll be five or six in the morning, and you’ll have been at this for days now. You’ll think that you’re probably ready to go home, but you might just end up in a flophouse downtown again. You’ll be looking around too much because a man that was wearing an all-white suit kept grabbing your friend and she kept telling him to fuck off, and you were high so you threw a drink at him and fucked up his white clothes which caused a scene and so you swiped through the converging bodies to get a few hits in. So now you’ll be outside coming down and nervously fidgeting with a cigarette you won’t be sure about lighting and drivers will descend on you with promises to take you to places where you can keep whatever this is, because it’s clearly not a party anymore, going.
It hovers low like fog, casting a gray-brown filter over everything, even the waves lapping at the posts barely holding the dock above the water. You’ll walk past the boats to the end and wonder what it would feel like if the pylons broke and the dock just floated out into the ocean with you on it, untethered and sinking. You’ll have woken up in a broken-down old bathroom stall, your clothes wet with something that hopefully came from you and coarse with sand. You’ll have stumbled out, bought a beer, and sipped at it while taking in the first light of day under a banana tree. Then you’ll have stripped off your clothes until you stood naked and alone on the beach, walking into cerulean surf set ablaze.
Brenden Layte (he/him) is an editor of educational materials, a linguist, and a writer. His work has previously appeared in places like Entropy, Ellipsis Zine, Pithead Chapel, and the Forge Literary Magazine. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his girlfriend and a cat that was described as “terrifying” the last time he went to the vet. He tweets at @b_layted.
Lost Balloon 