Lost Balloon

“SPIKES is an acronym for presenting distressing information in an organized manner to patients and families.” – Clinical Journal of Oncology 

S- Setting

There is no guarantee of privacy since you share your house with four housemates, but you’ve done your best; the others are at work, it’s just you and your husband. You are his only significant other, which is maybe part of the problem, so there is no one else to invite to this meeting. Push your textbooks to the side of the table. Ask him to sit down. You’ve already sat where you can see the kitchen clock over his shoulder. Turn off your phone. If you haven’t established rapport by now, there’s no chance you ever will.

P-Perception of condition

Ask your husband what he knows about the state of your marriage. Listen to what he has to say and quietly assess his level of comprehension. Accept denial but do not confront at this stage. He will tell you that everyone has rough patches, but you will see the deadness behind his eyes.

I-Invitation to inform

Ask your husband if he would like to know more about how your marriage is going. Accept his right to not know; if he goes that route, offer to answer questions later if he wishes. When he becomes angry that you are offering to tell him about your marriage, unilaterally, as if you were the only person involved, do not get distracted. Stay on script. When he finally says, sure, Alice, why don’t you tell me, go ahead, I would love to know more about OUR marriage, take a moment to consider if there is any guidance about how to proceed in the face of sarcasm. Unfortunately, the data on how to break bad news is limited. Plunge forward.

K-Knowledge

Use language intelligible to your husband, with consideration to his education, sociocultural background, and current emotional state. He has not spent hours watching YouTube lectures on heteropatriarchy. Instead say you’re just going in different directions. Give information in small chunks. Check to see if he has understood what you said. Give the positives first: you’ve had a good run, and it’s not like you have the same friends so your support systems won’t have to pick sides. Give facts accurately about treatment options (none), prognosis (terminal), costs (actually not that bad, thankfully).

E-Explore emotions/sympathize

Identify the emotions expressed by your husband, i.e., sadness, anger. Then identify the source of the emotion. Give your husband time, then respond in a way that demonstrates that you have recognized a connection between the emotion and the source, i.e., I see that you are angry because I am leaving you.

S-Strategy/summary

You’ve glanced discreetly at the clock and you are on schedule. Close the interview. Ask whether he would like you to clarify anything else. The question why are you like this seems more like an expression of emotion than an actual request for information so you can ignore that. Offer an agenda for the next meeting, i.e., I will speak to you again when we have the paperwork from the lawyer. Remember: unhappiness is a normal response. Get up. Walk away.

 

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Margaret Adams’s stories and essays have appeared in over two dozen publications, including The Threepenny Review, Best Small Fictions 2019, Joyland, and Pinch. She is a healthcare worker and a writer, and she currently lives in Vermont.

Three decades on, and we had graduated to a bed. My childhood twin bed in my time capsule bedroom. No twigs snagging our shoulder blades under the barely-there lean-to as we waited out the storm that caught us by surprise by the abandoned coal mine. No gangly limbs and errant kneecaps, but now bodies puffy and scarred, eyes circled and hair betraying gray strands.

When Billy and I first made love, I took comfort in it being the last time. A Greyhound bus ticket ready for the following day, I was onto bigger and better things, skyscrapers breaking up the hazy pink sunsets and an agent who promised I’d knock Broadway’s socks off. I could get on the bus and never again think about each kiss Billy trailed up my neck, seal away with the coach door closing his checking and rechecking that I was okay. Billy had folded my clothes and laid them atop my hiking boots to avoid the mud. He handled me like fine crystal. So gentle I could’ve cried, and that, I remember, put it firmly in my mind that I was leaving. In the city, I would find adventure, ravishing love, fame, fortune. Everything Billy did felt good, amazing even, but I saw the life I would’ve had, had I risked staying in town, flashing before my eyes with each lightning strike, vanilla day after vanilla day lining up one after the other until I died.

Someone once told me that perimenopause is like a train crashing over an already seeping oil spill. Insomnia and hot flashes and mine and Craig’s divorce and zero call-backs and the cherry on top was Mom’s diagnosis. I had to drop everything, move home, sell my condo for Mom’s care. After the nurses rolled the hospice bed into the living room, over the spot where I once sat watching Evita and Cry-Baby until each VHS gave out, the professionals took over. I could escape my childhood house for a few hours, so I walked over to Philadelphia Avenue. In Shop-N-Save, I stood in the popsicle aisle with my head stuck into the Ben & Jerry’s section, holding the door open.

I knew it was Billy’s hand the moment his thumb grazed my knuckles over the freezer door handle. What have you been up to all these years, he asked. Running away, but I don’t have the energy anymore, I wanted to answer, but instead I hugged him like old times. His arms a stabilizing vice, his gentle gaze as he pulled away. I asked Billy to tea or something stronger back home, and it was like past me ripped that bus ticket up and tossed it into the river.

He now clutches me less like bone porcelain and more like a winning lottery ticket, like deep-rooted sage grass at the edge of a cliff. Billy’s slowly catching me up these weeks. His own loves and losses and our years apart he whispers into my hair when Mom’s asleep and the nurses head home. He stays for breakfast, helps Mom sip orange juice and always recaps the Tennis Channel happenings muted in the background when she’s feeling up to it. He interlaces his fingers with mine, and I don’t pull away. I’m learning to like the sweet, subtle hints of vanilla, the surety of knowing what’s coming.

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Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. The Molotov Cocktail, Spry Literary Journal, hex, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction 2022, and The Lumiere Review are just a few of the fine publications that feature her stories and poems. You can find more of her work at www.laurenkardos.co.

Pete didn’t live, but that didn’t mean Holly had killed him. The car that struck him was a completely different color—some intern from Elizabeth Warren’s office had seen the whole thing. They hadn’t caught the driver, but after the young man came forward, gave Capitol Police his smattering of details, Holly was even more certain she did not do this. In fact, she’d really been sure all along, had never thought hitting Pete was something she could have done. If it had been her, her behind the wheel—surely—she would remember.

“You’d think the intern would have gave a better description,” she told George, “at least gotten a plate number,” the guy coming out of Rayburn House when he saw George’s campaign manager hit on Independence, dialing 911 as he ran toward the body in the middle of the road, shouting, “Sir? Sir?” like he was flagging Pete down in chambers.

“Maybe he was a little busy,” George said, “trying to help Pete survive? Still, the less they look into this, the better.”

Holly had been fighting with George when it happened—well, not when it happened, but when they found out—attempting to talk through her distress, Holly having read in Psychology Today that communication was the route to a healthier self.

“You’ve got to perk up a little,” George had been saying. “People only ask questions when you act that way.”

They’d spent the afternoon at a luncheon where Holly had played the college-sweetheart wife, cropped blazer over navy shell dress, and nodded. This particular event had been quite de trop, a private fundraiser for Vanderbilt alums.

“Pete buttered them up, I’ll give you that,” George recapping the afternoon (salads had stretched into entrees, entrees became dessert). “Are you even paying attention to me?”

After leaving the Rayburn Reception Room, Holly had spent the rest of the day alone. She couldn’t remember exactly what she had done, but she did remember what she had not. She had not walked through the members’ parking lot, feet pounding on the pavement. She had not sat in the car, feeling the wheel, its leather smooth beneath her fingers. And she most certainly had not killed Pete.

This wasn’t the first time she’d blacked out like this; she’d actually lost count, initially marking the days in her August to August calendar with one or two question marks, depending on how much time she was missing.

Once, her husband had seen the marks and asked, “Is your period off?” thinking they were feminine calculations, which made her realize yes, it was.

There were also the headaches; the anger; the lack of deep sleep — something that had not been present when she was younger, that started right before graduation, that got worse after George decided to run, its pinnacle the night he won: Holly lying in bed with her eyes closed, connecting to the fact that while the campaign was through, that didn’t mean much. For the past two years, election day had been a promise, one that the scrutiny would be done (appearances, investigations) and all her fake smiling could be over. But the minute those cameras turned off, acceptance speech complete, Pete had walked right up to George and said, “Now it begins.” And that’s when Holly knew this would never stop.

They were the same, campaigns and marriage. Politicians got elected through courtship, they stayed in office through attrition, every day making its mark.

It was exhausting. Holly hadn’t even realized how tired it made her until she read a Tennessean article that said women were 92 percent more likely to store guilt in their bodies: headaches and backaches, inner fatigue, spanning across cartilage, bone, and spine; and she’d reached around her torso as she read, feeling.

“I thought you were doing better,” George said, “I really did, but if today’s event was any indication, maybe stay away from my work?”

“You asked me to come,” Holly told him—or maybe that had been Pete—“I’m doing the best that I can,” and sighing, George mumbled, “It gets old.”

Holly rested her hand on the granite kitchen counter, feeling the weight of her skin on the stone.

“Look,” George said, “it’s been a tough term. I’ve done a good job—we both know I have—but I can’t assume come November I’ll be reelected.” (Dessert had stretched into coffee, coffee became cocktails.) “I know your life isn’t easy. But you’re not the only one with needs. Do you know how much I needed you to just be polite? You can’t go around in this daze all the time. Maybe if you tried—I don’t know—engaging?”

The night George proposed, they had been in his car, West End Avenue right off of campus. They’d been out to dinner on Music Row and she was the one who was driving (cocktails had stretched into more drinks, after those drinks a ring). They were talking dates, sometime after graduation — when it happened. A young man ran out and Holly didn’t see him. She knew she had not seen him. She just heard the clump and they both felt the jolt, everything in this haze: the touch of the wheel, asphalt under her feet; then George said, “Give me the keys.”

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Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Her debut short story collection, Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit), was published December 2022. Her work has appeared in more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, Playboy, Salamander, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. A Sinking Fork, Kentucky native, she lives in New York. Get one story delivered to your inbox every month by subscribing here: patreon.com/terenaelizabethbell.

Scooping out dead leaves and red solo cups from the pool at Dracula’s castle, he swings his hips knowing they’re thirsty, watching the sunlight making him sweat. Chunky headphones paired to the phone strapped to his speedo, he bops to hip hop and tries to pretend he’s alone.

Alone, he thinks about everything: unpaid student loans, all his unfinished paintings piled in the closet, stumbling into bed with his ex, the sting of hot pavement on his feet, spending a nice day at the beach and what that must feel like, that he needs to pick up cat litter from the store tonight, all those sweet and funny messages from that guy who ghosted him, what true love must feel like, if he’ll ever afford a home or grow a garden, so many nights binging Netflix while slurping reheated noodles.

He knows he’s only here because he’s young, lean, and blood type O-negative.

But still he wonders if he was always going to end up here. Or was it out of his own stubborn choices?

He smacks his net against the cement, crunching a plastic cup in half.

The squashed white rim inside the cup reminds him of Dracula’s lips.

On his first day on the job, Dracula had suddenly manifested out from the shadows in the corner of the pool shed.

You are a virgin? Dracula asked.

After thinking for a moment, he then tried to widen his eyes and pretend to be embarrassed. He put his hand to his mouth to cover a gasp, then stammered in reply, Y-yes.

That was the night he would later drunk text his ex who came over reeking of cologne, and they were too drunk for anything other than stale pizza and sloppy foreplay. They both fell asleep in front of the TV and later woke to the tinkle of canned sitcom laughter, feeling nauseous and ashamed.

Dracula had leaned further out of the shadows. Eyes like throbbing cinders, liver-spotted jowls jiggling closer.

He kept still and didn’t gag at the stench of Dracula’s breath, which smelled like rotten bananas souring in the sun.

Thought you were, Dracula said, too close. You’re ripe.

He backed away just a bit and squeezed every muscle on his face into what he hoped came across as a smile, coy and devilish.

That was also the first day Dracula tipped him hundreds of dollars, the first of many days Dracula name dropped celebrities and people with ancient and obscure titles, or slipped in suggestions of how much money he could make with Dracula, if he really wanted to.

After bagging the debris he shook out of the net, he kneels and swabs one last pH test strip across the water. He shakes it in the air to dry, then waits. As the white pads slowly bleed into different colors, he considers how far he’s willing to go.

The pool boy looks up to the stained-glass windows of the castle—

Too many eyes twinkling above broken smiles.

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Seth Wade is a tech ethicist studying and teaching philosophy at Bowling Green State University. You can read his fiction and poetry in publications like Strange Horizons, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Hunger Mountain Review, Apparition Literary Magazine, HAD, hex, The Cafe Irreal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, BAM Quarterly, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Gateway Review, and now Lost Balloon. He is also a Pushcart Prize nominee. You can follow him on X: @SethWade4Real or Instagram: @chompchomp4u or Bluesky: @sethwade.bsky.social

“I’m thirty-seven,” I say. “I want to have a baby.”

He looks at me the way my cat looks at me sometimes: with expectation and judgement and unblinking green eyes. Except his eyes are dark. And here he is with this look that tells me not no exactly, but that I’m maybe crazy.

It doesn’t help that we’re in line for a rollercoaster when I say it. Surrounded by teenagers with too much makeup and hairspray. I didn’t know hairspray was still a thing. I didn’t know fake eyelashes were such a thing. I imagine them ripped off in the wind of the rollercoaster: a pile of plastic caterpillar carcasses below the tracks.

I wish we were away from the amusement park: in some sunny garden near a coast with too many tulips. I wish I were pregnant already. So we could avoid the whole talk of becoming pregnant. The talk of becoming pregnant means me admitting I am just a normal woman who wants a baby. Means me thinking about being pregnant. I don’t want to be pregnant exactly: body huge and unmanageable and somehow delicate too. I want and don’t want. My body wants. My body feels some existential doors closing and it has jammed its foot in and demanded to be served.

We’re next in line for the rollercoaster, and he still hasn’t said anything to me about babies. He has said: “Do you want to finish that?” (my cotton candy) and “I think it might rain” (the weather?) and “Rollercoasters always make me think about physics” (physics?). So, we climb into our seats, and a teenager in a bright shirt tugs on the plastic at our chests.

“I want a baby,” I say again, as we move forward on the tracks.

He squeezes my hand. And in the hand squeeze is either everything I want or everything I don’t want: the confirmation of baby or the accusation of crazy.

I start to speak again but the rollercoaster blasts forward and I feel my face melt backward and my stomach drop out. He yells in delight and I yell because it’s impossible not to. And he keeps holding my hand and I see eyelashes fly overhead or maybe just flecks of dirt or stray hairs and the whole scene seems blurry and for a moment my body doesn’t care one way or another about babies and I hold onto him tight and feel everything I need to feel about rollercoasters and the sky and the way the world tilts and spins and coasts forward without us.

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Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Without Woman or Body, forthcoming June 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, Edge of the Sea, forthcoming Spring 2025 from CutBank Books. Allison’s prose appears in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2024,The Gettysburg Review, DIAGRAM, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Smartish Pace, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Blood stains come out easily, but the water must be icy. Too warm, and the blood bonds with the fabric, never leaving, like a terminal stage of cancer, each cell contaminated. Wring the garment. If the stream still runs pink, red, or brown, squeeze lemon juice on the stain, how you would lighten your hair. Sprinkle a teaspoon of baking soda. Or substitute with salt, crushed aspirin. Combine water with meat tenderizer, and apply the slurry.

My daughter crouches on top of the toilet, her knees encasing her head. Her thin pajamas reveal the bumps of her spine, like door knobs. I imagine rotating one, opening my daughter, peering inside. Learning why her body has only just begun to shed, at sixteen years old. I tell myself not to worry, it has started now, a good sign. She looks away from the sink, the streaky water swirling around islands of dried toothpaste. I want to do everything for her.

Whenever we cross the street, I grab her wrist, testing how easily my thumb and index finger connect. “Mom,” she says, breaking free. It is unclear which worry of mine she is rebuking.

I pick small, burgundy particles from her underwear. The openings for her legs are so small. I turn around, and my husband is in the doorway, watching me. His rectangular shape, and flat, stony face, like a bas-relief. I scrub harder, my hands tingling from the repeated motion.

That night, he chastises me for still doing her laundry. His bright teeth float in the dark, everything else invisible, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. “She is too old to be this dependent,” he says. He expects me to break the news. I am often the osmotic membrane between my husband and my daughter, allowing them to communicate without speaking. Showing him a photo where she is scary-thin. Reminding her that he is working the night shift. My watery body, and their hard, linear ones.

I balance the laundry basket at my hip, full of snowy whites. My daughter is organizing a pile of Penguin Classics with acid orange lettering. Only my side profile is visible to my husband, watching from our bedroom. “When you were younger,” I say. “We pressed our noses to the washing machine. We wanted to shrink, so we could fly around the drum, tumble with the clothes. Do you remember?” `

“No,” she says.

“Well, it’s your turn now.” I place the basket next to her bookshelf, her lacy A-cup bra folded on top. Then I wink at her, using the eye that my husband can’t see. She nods slowly.

She washes her own clothes now, with the exception of anything blood-stained. These, she leaves outside my door. They remind me of the pools of fabric abandoned after transformations, when a movie character becomes a rodent, or suddenly tiny, no longer fitting into their clothes.

When I watch her loads thump against the machine, it feels like I have water in my ears. My husband says something to me that I can’t make out, but think is gracious. “It looks violent, right? The clothes chasing each other?” I say. He responds with nothing. Or I miss it. My back is to him, so I can’t tell.

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Nora Esme Wagner is a rising sophomore at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Litbreak Magazine, Milk Candy Review, Flash Boulevard, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel.

Devon Mahew knew how to get girls off. Nobody in their small town of Bradford had
fingered as many girls to orgasm as he had—feeding the pony, he called it. It was the
only thing he enjoyed more than minor vandalism and whippets. He liked pranks too.
One time, he emptied a whole thing of Dawn dish soap into the fountain on Main,
creating tidal clouds of suds that stopped traffic—that was back when Bradford still had
traffic, before they built the highway. He was known locally as the black sheep, a bad
seed, trouble, at least until the night he wrapped his truck around a telephone pole and
died. Nobody said a bad word about him again after that. Suddenly, by all accounts,
Devon had been a bright and promising young man and not just a horny miscreant who
could hotwire old cars.

“What a shame,” Jenna’s mother said over breakfast the morning the news broke. “That
poor family. I can’t even imagine. You didn’t know him well?”

“No, not really.” Jenna stared into her Cheerios, and thought back to the one night in
May, behind the baseball diamond when Devon had slid his hand down her jeans and
brought her to a trembling mess.

The accident was big news for a small town and yet people didn’t talk about what
actually happened. Nobody mentioned the speed he’d been driving or how many empty
Fireball bottles were found in the wreck. No one seemed to remember the boy with the
devilish grin who’d do anything for a rush or a reaction. Instead, people said things like
he really had so much potential and he had a real shot at making state next year and it
could have just been a popped tire, the asphalt out that way is rough. Jenna was
grossed out by it, the way it felt folks were wiping the whole thing down with Clorox. It
was like nobody really knew him, or nobody would admit to really knowing him, and she
wasn’t sure which was worse.

She and Hailey sat cross-legged on the large ice box outside Joe’s Garage & Gas eating
Otter Pops, which was how they spent most of their summers. Lucas who worked behind
the counter would knock on the glass behind them and point to the No Loitering sign,
and the girls would roll their eyes or stick out their tongues, all red and blue. Back when
the busses passed through, they used to come here to watch folks pile out for pee breaks,
the tourists, they called them, not that Bradford was ever the final destination. Who’d
want to end up here? The highway was the end of all that, but the girls still hung out and
annoyed Lucas and occasionally convinced him to sell them a scratcher. There wasn’t
much else to do.

Hailey had brought the death notice with her today, torn from a local paper.
In memory of Devon Mahew.

It was jarring to see it in print. He finally had a permanent record.

The girls recognized the accompanying picture as a crop from his prom photo. That was
the night he’d brought Megan Archer as his date, and she later found him out back with
his hand up Megan Miller’s dress.

The notice read generic. It could have been about anyone, anywhere.
A shining star, taken from us too soon… Beloved son, brother, and classmate…
Eternally missed… Now reunited with his heavenly father.

It struck Jenna as bleak, how you could seemingly bury an entire life in under a hundred
words, and that would go down in history, how something so far removed from a real
person could persist over time.Hailey shrugged. “What do you expect them to say, Jenna? In memory of our dear Devon. He loved petty crime and heavy petting. He once ate a banana, skin-and-all,
for a five-buck bet. May he rest in peace. I mean, come on.”

Jenna chewed on the freeze pop’s plastic and said nothing. She wondered what
revisionist drivel they’d write about her.

When summer break was over, Principal Heller held a school assembly. He said nice,
bland things about Devon that weren’t true. Then Coach Filmore got up and did the
same. They both insisted he’d had a bright future ahead of him. There was a minute’s
silence. Boys who Devon had raced dirt bikes and tagged buildings with stood squarely,
hands in pockets. Girls who’d had the pleasure of his acquaintance dabbed at their eyes
with Kleenex. Megan and Megan exchanged somber nods.

She woke at five thirty am, dressed quietly and made her way down to Main while the
streets were still dark and nobody was around. Just before sunrise, she pulled a half-full
bottle of Dawn from her backpack and emptied it into the fountain, then stood back, out
of view for a bit and watched the bubbles start to form, and froth up and overflow and
billow down the empty streets of a town that was slowly fading from the map.

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Amanda King lives and writes in Berlin. Her work has appeared locally in Berlin Flash Fiction.