Lost Balloon

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.

The Moringa witch sits on her porch and calls to five-year-old Mira. Mira knows the woman is a witch because she is greenish, has no teeth and her tongue is red with paan. Her fingers, curled from arthritis, looked like pods from the moringa tree, long knobby pointy green things like string beans with big seeds inside them. Like they are green fingers only ten times larger. Drumsticks, they are called,  hard like sticks for playing the drum in a school band. Mira is scared, but she is with her aunt, who says, “She is just a bit mad.  She is lonely, let’s go talk to her. ”

The old woman gives Mira a chocolate and laughs. She brushes her drumstick finger on Mira’s soft cheeks. It leaves a red mark, but no one notices.

Mira moves to America. Drumsticks in America only grow on chickens, delicious with BBQ sauce or tandoori masala. Drumsticks to nurture and grow the children until they leave. Drumsticks to spice up a dying marriage.  And then one day, America discovers Indian drumsticks. And when America discovers something that is a miracle cure, think kale or turmeric, Americans are ashamed not to try it, so Mira gets a packet of seeds from Amazon.

The seeds grow drumsticks relentlessly. Mira picks them and cooks them and gives them to all her Indian friends. One of them pierces the bedroom window.  Luckily the insurance fixes it, but another one pierces the window within days. The insurance says to cut down the tree, and she does, but it grows back the next year and makes so many holes in their house that Mira goes around with duct tape as her husband points out new holes.

She calls Texas A and M, and those experts come to inspect, take some pods, and produce a research paper that touts moringa goodness but does not mention how to get rid of them.

Their house, her house, looks like a target for gun practice. Mira places her ears on the walls and can hear cannons and horses. Sometimes she thinks the war is inside her. Her husband, now retired, wants some time alone, takes their Winnebago, and leaves.

Mira is sixty-six when she wakes up one day to find a drumstick piercing her waist. She pulls it out and it creates a bruise. Mira wants to go to a doctor, but her husband says who goes to the doctor for a bruise? Her husband does not want to be blamed for the bruise, and Mira agrees even though he hardly lives with her. But drumsticks keep piercing her body, her sides, her arms, and even her cheeks. They are easy to pull out but create bruises that heal with a greenish shade. Her husband jokes about planting a turmeric tree beside the moringa and having a color fight.  Mira goes grocery shopping and to Walmart, no one comments about her greenness. When her children call, which they rarely do, she is cheerful. They don’t ask and she does not tell them that inside she is hollow and dry.

Mira sits alone on her porch during Halloween, calls to kids passing by, and dangles her drumstick fingers in front of them. The children ask if she is a real witch. Their parents comment on how inventive Mira’s costume is. Mira gives the children chocolate. And waits, and waits on her porch, for another Halloween, for the grim reaper, or whoever will give her any attention, until she becomes immobile, she becomes the tree and moringa drumsticks grow on her and everyone talks about the woman who became a tree.

---

Ani Banerjee is a retiring lawyer and an emerging writer from Houston, Texas, who was born and brought up in Kolkata, India. Her flash fiction has been published in Janus Literary, McQueen’s Quinterly, Grim and Griswold, Flash Flood, and other places.

I was delighted when the skin fit. It was cold when I found the roadside carcass on my
evening run, and after determining the blood had dried well enough, the guts dragged off by
some hungry beast eager to feast, I slipped the body over my own, punching my hands and feet
through the fur and into winter air.

I did not know what the creature was—coyote, raccoon, some swollen possum—just as I
no longer knew myself. I’d grown feral from years trying to survive as a woman, a wild
existence full of wound and want, body alert to predators, yet turning against itself as prey. I was
constantly hungry, hurting from the deprivation girls learn early on earns beauty, but when I
placed the new skin over my own, felt the warmth of fragrant fur, I stood straight for the first
time in years. I marched home with purpose, turning around to see my strong tracks etched in
ice.

Home was a compromise. An acquiescence. My boyfriend was the kind of mediocre man
so convinced of his greatness the world simply went along with him, never questioning his
likability or looks, which were unimpressive but the best I thought I deserved. The house was
always freezing, because I disappeared to please his need to feel virile despite the fact that most
days he waged imaginary wars on screen, bragging about virtual victories in real life.
That night I wore my new skin to bed. It rested between us like a shroud, but for the first
time in a long time I was warm enough to sleep.

The next morning he complained. This was not unusual—he did not like the groceries I
bought or how often I exercised to keep weight off, did not like if I neglected to shave or lotion
my skin until it shone like some strange taxidermy. Most days he forgot to wear deodorant or brush his teeth, smelled of onion and Mountain Dew, but he liked me doused in perfume that
smelled simultaneously of innocent baby powder and a desperate woman’s floral.

“What is that thing?” he asked when I returned from a morning run, though he did not
take his eyes from the computer screen. “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s new,” I offered, though the skin seemed ancient and wild.

“Well don’t wear it when we go out together,” he said before turning his attention to
strangers on the Internet. I promised, because we rarely went out, except for greasy pizza that I
never ate or when he played frisbee golf in the woods and I followed, looking deep into the trees
for paths to escape.

I loved my second skin, even if I did not love myself. Supple and thick, I could smooth it
until glossy. At night I rubbed my body, caressing myself with pleasure. When I was scared,
which was often, whenever my boyfriend raised his voice or his fist because his game did not
turn out the way he had hoped, or I did not put enough mayonnaise on his burger, or I forgot to
remind him to wash his own laundry, I hid inside my skin. It smelled of blood and musk, shit and
sweat, a pungent ferocity.

Soon I preferred this scent, preferred the feel of my growing body hair tangling with fur.
Each night I curled into the den of my skin, wildness cradling me all around, and dreamed of
meat and heat, the feel of my feet running through moss and mud, running as far away as I
wanted.

I began to crave what was rare. I ate large flanks, licked salted flesh from my fingertips,
sopped blood with bread to leave plates shining pure. Though I had lived a quiet life, now I
relished the sound of my stomach gurgling with the satisfaction of digestion.

“Will you be quiet?” asked my boyfriend over the sound of my stomach, of me flexing
my strengthening body, of me cracking bones to slurp out the sweet marrow. “I can’t concentrate
when you’re like this.”

I focused instead on feeding. I grew big and heavy, full of pleasure and prey, satisfied by
the skill with which I could identify a particular piece of meat in the butcher’s window or the
way I crept out of bed at night to howl at the moon while my boyfriend snored, the sheets sweaty
against his pale body.

“What is that smell?” he asked in the morning, pointing to the melting snow and mud,
viscera and bone in our bed. “What the hell is that?”

“I think a possum snuck in last night,” I said, wiping the blood around my mouth. “You
should be careful. I hear those things have rabies.”

It was snowing when he left. His technology cords coiled like serpents in his car’s
backseat. He left me the pots and pans because he did not cook. He left me the old couch,
sagging on one side from hours he sat pretending to hunt imaginary creatures.

He said he was afraid, which made me laugh and bare my teeth and claws full of flesh
and feces. He backed away slowly, shivering on the front porch.

I reminded him to take his coat, hurling it through the evening air like some dark bird of
prey. It landed like a body between us and he stared at me wide-eyed as I howled goodbye.
Inside I stripped my skin. Underneath my body hair was thick and coarse. I smelled of
sweat and blood. My feet were caked with mud from the many paths I’d forged. Muscle rippled
hard and capable.

I rested on the floor because he had taken the bed. It did not matter, I slept better on the
ground, curled around myself for protection. I lay there a long time, stroking my animal body,
smoothing myself until glossy, caressing myself with pleasure.

When I had my fill and the moon was high, I walked naked out the door to hunt.

---

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press), and three poetry chapbooks. She has a craft book on unlearning the ableist writing workshop and developing a disabled writing practice forthcoming with Sundress Publications, as well as a collection of flash nonfiction forthcoming with Harbor Editions. She is an associate professor at Bridgewater State University.

So last night I was imagining that I had lived my whole life and now it was over. I was saying goodbye for the last time to everyone I cared about, and then dying and being reunited with the people who died before me: my mother, my grandmother, my little brother. It was an exercise out of my inner child workbook, guidance for living in the now. Sometimes I have trouble living in the now. Tears were running down my cheeks, wetting the pillow, when Len came into the bedroom and said, “Hey, Peaches, you awake?” in his Come and Get It voice.

Let me tell you about Len. He always calls honey “teddy bear juice,” because what else would you call the stuff that comes out when you turn a plastic teddy bear upside down and squeeze it? I laughed about it the first couple of times, but after fifteen years of marriage, now I just ignore him. I almost cheated on him once with a man I met at the library who made me feel witty and brave and free.

He’s getting a little bald, and a little pudgy, and I can’t ride in his car for long because the smell of the cheeseburgers he thinks I don’t know about makes me queasy. Whenever I need some help around the house — a lightbulb I can’t reach or a heavy table moved, taking the kids to the doctor or calling the plumber or yelling at the plumber or paying the plumber — Len is out somewhere running some pointless errand. He almost cheated on me once with a woman at work who made him feel witty and brave and free.

But he doesn’t gamble, and he has a decent job, and he shaves every morning, even on the weekend, because he knows his beard gives me a rash.

And the kids still shout “Daddy’s home!” and run to him with big grins and open arms when he rolls his smelly old fast food clunker up the drive.

And his smile is still the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen.

So last night he came into the bedroom and said, “Hey, Peaches, you awake?” in his Come and Get It voice, but when he saw me crying he wrapped his arms around me and held me without saying a word. I told him about dying, and he smoothed my hair and tucked the quilt around me, got into bed with me and just held me. Someday one of us will have to bury the other one.

In the morning, while I’m brushing my teeth and imagining I’m not getting older, Len grins at me in the mirror, winks and says, “You owe me one. I come to bed all horny and you pretend to be dead.”

In the mirror the laugh lines around my eyes get just a bit deeper. “Talk to the butt,” I say. I flip the bottom of my robe up at him, dart out of reach, and go downstairs to make his coffee and toast with teddy bear juice.

---

 

Elissa Matthews was born, raised, and began work many years ago at the phone company in New Jersey. At some point she got fed up, launched on a journey of discovery, and explored a bit of the world. One frigid day in November, at 5 in the morning, climbing into cold water scuba gear looking for a dead body, she realized that maybe a 9 – 5, climate-controlled job in an office somewhere (even New Jersey) wasn’t as bad as it sounded. She has published one novel, Where the River Bends, and short stories and poetry in several journals and anthologies, including Red Rock Literary Review, Lilith, and Art Times. She was previously Editor-in-Chief of Goldfinch, A Literary Magazine.