After the first inhalation of you, after our date at the top of the Hyatt, the Compass Room it was called, like a sign like a magnet like some kind of direction, where we drank milk in martini glasses and the servers thought it cute because we were only sixteen, after we spun around the city, breathed in the 360 degree view, the Phoenix sunset like the cover of a magazine, after the lights flicked on the houses below with their white picket fences, the promise of them, after the white dress white veil white vows white honeymoon where we took the train as Paris flashed by and I wanted to be the kind of newlyweds who stayed in bed for days, limbs tangled under rumpled French sheets, laughing “pas de service de ménage” when French maids came to clean, but it wasn’t like that at all, not at all and I wondered if something was wrong with me, after we came home and bought the house with a brown slump-block fence, after the nights when you rocked our daughters in the delivery room when I lost so much blood, sang “Sweet Baby James” at two a.m, changed diapers, taught them how to ride a Schwinn, to play soccer, to cook salmon with the perfect amount of garlic and lemon, after they said Dad is a better cook than Mom and they were right, after the trips to Disneyland when they asked to ride Space Mountain with you, only you, after you called them Daddy’s girls and they called you Superman, after you played “Kryptonite” by Three Doors Down on repeat in your black Silverado and fancied yourself Clark Kent, after I didn’t listen closely to the lyrics, after you went on midnight drives alone—you said the desert made you claustrophobic, after you came home smelling like something more than fresh air, after you blasted “It Wasn’t Me,” by Shaggy on repeat later, after I didn’t listen closely to the lyrics, after the midnight phone call, after I listened to the lyrics, after what was white became black became some shade of grey, after you didn’t beg me to stay, after I wouldn’t have stayed if you had, after you got the truck I got the dogs we shared the kids, after I tried to block the lyrics for them, after I failed, after the final threads of your cape unraveled, after we cried, after the years the years the years the years, after that week in hospice when the lyrics fell away, when we sat at your bedside when we held your hands, when we cried, after your ashes were scattered in the Pacific because you said being on the water was the only place you felt free.
After, we’re on the train again, two kids clutching Eurail passes, still-shiny rings on still-smooth hands, me just twenty-four and you a year younger. I remember how you teased that I’d always be older— and the truth of it takes my breath away—you, forever fifty-three, me adding years to the distance between us. I alone, now, remember the train, speeding cross-country that July when we gazed through sun-speckled windows, sunflower fields and Paris rushing by. We toasted our future with a bottle of Viognier in our own private cabin and later that night I was woken by a whoosh as the door opened. I saw the dark-haired man with my wallet and you just behind him, reaching grabbing retrieving shoving, throwing him off the train at the very next stop. Saying don’t ever come back, don’t come near my wife or I’ll kill you, and I swear I can still see your cape, the ghost of it.
Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, where her family has lived for six generations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke, Fictive Dream, Cleaver, Your Impossible Voice, and Moon City Review, among many other journals. Kelli’s stories have won contests and been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. Recently, her work was chosen for Best Microfiction 2024. She is currently working on her first novel.
Lost Balloon 