Lost Balloon

Mrs. Hatch is a slouch-shouldered, boulder-footed ogre. When she writes on the board, chalk shrieks and crumbles. Her voice is deep and moist, sonorous, an abandoned, slime-slick well with something unspeakable at the bottom. If there even is a bottom. Not a well you’d entrust with your precious coin, your secret wish. Dead flies pepper her windowsills.

At recess, Angela and I sit in the forked maple, knees touching, hers immaculate in white tights and mine mottled with scabbing scrapes and Band-Aid residue, whispering what we know about Mrs. Hatch. Her feet are toeless slabs of putrid flesh; her shoes are stuffed with dirt and earthworms. She keeps a human heart in a Baggie inside her purse, gnawing at it in the teacher’s lounge to maintain her (barely) human form. She lumbers through the halls at night, rattling doors, searching for unlocked classrooms with hamsters or guinea pigs, and when she finds one, she chomps off its head, slurps its innards, crunches its tiny, brittle bones between her yellowed teeth. Sometimes she makes do with goldfish. She doesn’t like iguanas: too dry, too green.

Angela supplies the bloodiest details – she has older brothers and knows things – but after recess, I’m the one who creeps back to Mrs. Hatch’s shady lair, while Angela skips across the hall to the other third-grade class. Her classroom is bright and warm, windows open to the smile of spring breezes. A plant twirls in the corner, flowers like bell-skirted fairies cascading over the edge of the pot.

Karen M, who lives on Angela’s street, waits by their classroom door. She doesn’t say hi to me, just grabs Angela’s hand and pulls her inside. They wear the same sparkly nail polish. Both have charm bracelets, tiny talismans tinkling on their wrists: ballet slippers, hearts, crowns. Both bring food from home, packed in rainbow unicorn lunch boxes, while I wait in line with the other free-lunch kids. Both have the long, shiny hair I crave, sometimes in intricate French braids with ribbons. My mom doesn’t have time for that and chops at mine with kitchen shears. Pixie cut, she calls it, but I look more like a lost boy.

Standing outside after school, last as always to be picked up. Mrs. Hatch on duty, prowling by the door. Angela waving, low and quick, as she climbs into Karen M’s mom’s car. Karen M thinks she’s Angela’s best friend but she can’t be because I am, at least this year, even when we’re separated by that hallway between light and dark, even when Angela’s nibbling a still-warm cookie handed over the back seat by Karen M’s mom and I’m out here with Mrs. Hatch and the sinking sun.

Even though everyone seems to know we’re destined for different stories.

Mrs. Hatch rummages in her handbag. Her stomach must be growling. I hope there’s enough heart left.

I’m an iguana. I stare at the street, shivering, willing my mom to appear. Too dry, too green. It’s the next car, I tell myself. Okay, the next one. The one after that. If I hold my breath. If I close my eyes. If I don’t cry. If I stop crying. One of these times I have to be right.

Didi Wood’s stories appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Often she is festooned with cats. More at didiwood.com.

Drugged and dying, Bigby thinks about dreams. How, long ago, maybe two or three beers in, he told his roommate he wanted to be an umpire. He was going to drop out of school. He was going to spend years in places like Topeka or Huntsville, Des Moines if he got lucky, and, one day, he was going to be behind home plate in the World Series. He was going to wait until things got real high-leverage. Full count, runners on, etc. There was going to be a close pitch, and he was going to call it a nothing. He’d make a small noise. Put his arm one-tenth of the way up. He’d flinch, basically, and there wouldn’t be so much to it that it could be clearly labeled a strike. There’d be too much for it to be clearly called a ball. He told his roommate (poetically, he thought) that he was going to be “an absent God out there, and the cameras will catch the frenzy that ensues, the terrified chaos of attempted coping.”

Maybe it goes without saying that he never made it to the World Series. He never even dropped out of school. He did umpire as a side hustle (is that what they’d call it, these nurses with the dark hair and eyes so tired they seem authentically kind?). Weekend tournaments across the river in Davenport, or at that complex in the mud down on the Rock River, and one time he was behind the plate for a U-12 championship in Burlington. Late innings. Fifth or sixth, probably, and it’s tied at seven. Bases loaded. It’s a 2-2 count, and the pitch is outside, but by a margin even Major-League pitchers sometimes get (and without stopping the narrative of his thoughts there’s here a series of images and graphs, lines of all the text he’s read about the philosophy of the strike zone, about borders and particle physics and the many ocular biases, the barriers to definitive categorization), and Bigby goes into action. He has a whole complex array of thoughts, weighing pros and cons and thinking how at 3-2 the hitter might well swing, and so it’s now or never basically, isn’t it? It is. So, he does exactly what told his roommate he’d do.

The batter stares at him. The crowd starts to yell. The pitcher shrugs and then (with a touch of devious brilliance, one could argue) starts walking off the mound, trying to play it off like he heard the call loud and clear, and the base umpire comes jogging in.

“Hey, buddy, you alright?” he says.

But Bigby’s catatonic. Performing frozen. There is language everywhere. The three most common words are fuck, Jesus, and Blue, and the crowd is milling. Fathers are tapping their feet. Some of them are standing. Somebody’s going to run onto the field at any second, and a mother is wondering if maybe the umpire is having a heart attack, and he chooses that moment to turn and bolt away. He darts off like a deer or trout or something, and Bigby, he could always fucking run. He still could, he thinks. He could get up from this place and focus on every step until nothing worked anymore, until physical failure, and how far do you think he could get? He’s heard of people running a hundred miles at a shot. Younger people, though. In much better aerobic shape than he is now, but maybe back then he could have held his own. Darting to the parking lot. Driving away clad in full gear with the face mask and the chest protector, and, in the rear view, a few people giving futile chase. Kids kneeling, gloves on their heads. The base umpire trying to get in between punches and getting himself clocked, though maybe that’s an embellishment. Memory. Maybe it’s the morphine, and Bigby’s never told anybody about that day. He’s never gone back to Burlington, never even looked for notes in the newspaper or been tempted to check the internet. For him, it was enough just to do it, and now he’s watching it all unspool on loop in his mind, and it’s playing to an empty multiplex. The whole place has that cleaned-up butter smell. Dust in the projector. The film is silent, and the non-existent audience is nonetheless alive, and there must be bacteria in there waiting. Witnessing. Moths curl in the corners. Thoraxes rub against the floor. Bigby’s a disembodied eye, and in front of each fat recliner he sees these little collections of molecules. They float in the strobing light, these foggy ghosts, these piecemeal fossils of all our bated breath.

Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction,48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.

Remove pieces from box and place them flat on the ground.

There are going to be more than you expect.

Assemble from largest to smallest.

Piper set a place at the table for her dad. When I tell her again that he’s not going to show up, she asks again what he said on the phone. And what he said is that he’s probably not going to make it.

But he is probably and almost a lot of things. He always has been. I used to think that meant our lives were going to get better. I wish I had figured out sooner that together, Probably and Almost, become synonyms for Lost Time.

Use this diagram as a guide.

Do not contact us to report the diagram is two-dimensional. We know. Come to your own conclusions about anything that is not clearly visible. Then keep going until you are right.

I make Piper whatever she wants for her birthday dinner. This year she wants Fancy Spaghetti. Fancy Spaghetti is just regular spaghetti with pepperoni and cut-up mozzarella sticks mixed in.

As I cook, I hear her at the Cul-De-Sac Deluxe, making us a pantomime version of the same thing. Every few minutes she wants to know what’s taking so long. She’s done already, so I should be too.

This is best completed by two people but can be done alone.

I bought a confetti cake at the grocery store and put it in the Cul-De-Sac’s oven before I wrapped the whole thing in wrapping paper. This meant she had to open her present first, but she was fine with that. We’ve learned to not get hung up on doing things in a certain order.

This will take longer than you expect.

I lit the candles and sang Happy Birthday. I tried to sing with the enthusiasm of two parents, with the enthusiasm of a room full of friends. I tried to sing so it didn’t sound like we’ve had to move twice in one year.

Piper forced a smile and stared at the table until I was done.

You will still be putting this together long after all the pieces are gone.

This is intentional and along with our contemporary design, and commitment to quality, is a part of the charm of the KidTown family of products.

The cake was too stale to ignore. We took turns dumping our pieces in the trash and cutting ourselves another. Every time we passed each other, we felt closer, and with each new piece, we thought that maybe this time it will be different.

We do this over and over, year after year, passing each other, pretending the next time will be better, until it’s not about the cake anymore. Until it’s not about her dad or where we live or what is and is not ok to keep hidden from each other.

It’s about not stopping until we can throw something away without feeling guilty.

It’s about both of us knowing that we’re not alone.

Nathan Willis (@nathan1280) is a writer from Ohio. His stories have appeared in Split Lip, Pithead Chapel, Passages North, Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.

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.

On the morning the sea decides it’s time to come home, Anna wakes up in her bedroom, where the windows stand open to the four blowing winds. Summer air brims with the scent of seaweed and iodine.

She slips on the dressing gown and makes her way down to the living room. At the bottom of the stairs, suitcases stand packed and ready for the move. Anna sidesteps them, giving their rectangular bodies a wide berth.

In the kitchen, she sets on the stove her favorite kettle, the one with a small dent in its shiny copper, a vestige of the time her youngest son had childhood tantrums. Once the water begins to bubble, she throws into the tea infuser a spoonful of mint, a pinch of bitter flowers. A measure of valerian root gets added into the mix. Staring at the steaming cup, Anna contemplates the limited benefits of self-medication in a world about to drown.

Outside, car horns begin to blare. Evacuation buses calling for passengers.

Anna ignores them. She steps out of the back door and takes a walk in the garden, where grandmother taught her how to walk, traces the lines in the bark of her grandfather’s oak with her fingertips. Under the old tree, a porcelain bowl with a thin crack running down one side sits abandoned in the grass. She squats down beside it to watch the bright green froglets splash in the shallow rain water and contemplates the meaning of the word “amphibian”.

Anna remembers rumors of the coming flood sparking panic, the townsfolk leaving one by one. First, the people she occasionally met at the market. Then the ones who raced their bicycles to school with her. Family and friends were the last to go. “Aren’t you scared to stay in the lowlands?” they kept asking.

She comes back inside and takes a long look at the suitcases. Outside, the wheels of departing buses start to roll, scraping the gravel. Somebody rings her doorbell.

Anna sighs and clicks the latches of the suitcases open, one after another, carefully hangs up the blouses and dresses in the closet, sets her favorite books back on their shelves. By the time she is done, the doorbell ceases to ring.

She steps out into the now deserted street, letting the gate fall shut behind her, and walks towards the sea. In the distance, gulls soar in the pale sky. Dandelions and weeds bloom in the ditches. When she reaches the abandoned watchtower of limestone and rusted nails, Anna contemplates the lives of those who built it so many centuries ago, how no one remembers who they were. She shakes her head and keeps going.

Outside the town limits, Anna scrambles up the hill on all fours, tufts of bright green grass sliding through her fingers. She stands on the wind-swept top, where flat rocks are imprinted with antennas and segmented tails of the long-gone trilobites. This place was once the home of the sea. Now it wants to come back. Anna can certainly understand this particular kind of longing.

The sea swells and expands, breaching the dam. From her place up on the hill, Anna sees the cars and buses scuttling down the winding road below—tiny toys made of red and yellow tin can metal, unable to outrun the waves.

The sea stands tall. It is a swirling, moving wall of blue, indigo, and azure. Anna leans forward, hands thrown wide in a welcoming embrace. She calls to the sea, and the sea listens. It rolls into her open arms.

Blue, it crushes into her chest.

Green, it pours down her throat.

Teal, it cuts open the gills in her neck with shards of bottle glass.

Shatters her into a myriad tiny specks of sea foam and puts her back together.

*

Anna walks down the hill, her steps slow and measured. There is a new sway to her hips, a reassuring heaviness resting in her body. She flows along the familiar road, past dandelions and weeds, the nameless watchtower, and the neat white fences.

Back at the house, Anna opens the gate with a gentle caress. In the kitchen, she makes herself a new cup of tea, curls up in her favorite armchair with a half-finished book. Outside, the sky goes dark, and the pale pink flowers open on the low-hanging branches of magnolia trees.

Anna and the sea are home, and everything is at peace.

Laila Amado is a migrating writer of speculative and literary fiction. She writes in her second language, has recently exchanged her fourth country of residence for the fifth, and can now be found staring at the North Sea, instead of the Mediterranean. The sea, occasionally, stares back. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022, Cheap Pop, Milk Candy Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Flash Frog, Best Microfiction 2024, and other publications.

Dan sees his stepfather’s face in El Capitan, his jaw outlined in the crag. Though it’s been two decades since the day he made Dan follow him miles down the trail, Dan has, until now, avoided parks. Dan has pictured this moment—crossing into Yosemite—so many times, but it’s nothing like he’d imagined. He had wanted to fall on his knees, weeping before granite.

Dan tries to steady himself, gripping the plaque that reads, A Journey Through Time. His wife, Laurel, eight months pregnant and exhausted from two days in the car, wipes juice from Krista’s cheek in between squalls. He wasn’t afraid when Krista was born, but this time, it’s a boy. Contrary to any evidence, he’s terrified he’ll hurt his son on purpose. You are here, he tells himself. Still, in the red flame of rock: His stepfather’s sunburned cheeks when he decided they’d veer off trail, travel cross-country.

By the way Laurel sets Krista on the ground and stretches, he can tell she’s determined to enjoy the sunset. She spent so many hours managing Krista while he drove, the endless snacks and crying and adjusting of the car seat. She takes Dan’s hand, kisses his knuckles. This trip was his idea—he’ll never go back to Florida, but he thinks he might find something ecstatic in mountains. And he sees how much she wants this for him, so he squeezes back.

Besides, there’s no need to rehash—she already knows about how his stepfather made the kids call him Captain, about the diamondback rattler sleeping in the grass. He’d handed Dan a stick, said, Go ahead.

Dan unzips his day pack, readies his camera. He focuses the lens on his wife catching her hair in the wind; his daughter, patting the rock fence.

Across from El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall reminds him of the rattle, just before.

Laurel, lifting Krista into the air. Krista, waving at a scrub jay. Behind them, shadows move across the rock face.

In the last of the light, he captures the fullness of Laurel’s belly, the ripples the breeze makes in the fabric of her dress. The darkness as it passes through the valley.

Elissa Cahn completed her MFA at Western Michigan University, where she served as the nonfiction editor for Third Coast. Her work has appeared in Witness, Harpur Palate, Hobart, PANK, Sou’wester, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and she teaches creative writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.