Lost Balloon

The flesh had been the first to melt away. The fire licked up the hair, eyes, skin, fat, stomach, heart, lungs and so on, until only the hard bits of my body remained. My skull rested on one end of the tray. The rest of the bones had been gathered into a desiccated bouquet of ribs and shards. A couple of knobby vertebrates peeked out from the bed of gray ash.

My family leaned over the tray, heads bent in watch. But I hung back, adrift but cinched by a sudden urge to reach into the remains and grab what appeared to be the clavicle. It was a sturdy rod, long as a palm is wide, wide enough to hang a skeleton on. I had felt it traverse my body once, where unlike the other bones buried in layers of fat and muscle, the clavicle protrudes gently out of skin. I remember what it was like to run my fingers along the deep crevice that a pair of them would form under a fluttering, silk shirt.

***

Before my body burned, it lay in a dark, plush casket in the sandalwood-soaked air of the temple courtyard. I sensed moving bodies through my closed eyelids. The murmuring voices called my name, bearing joss sticks. Above the altar hung my portrait, flanked by sumptuous flower wreaths. In the photo, large pearls were clinging to long, wrinkled earlobes that looked like dried mushrooms. The left corner of my lips was drooping, like a dog’s limp tail. I was wearing an inscrutable expression, a crooked grimace, a coda, my body cut off right at the collarbone by the frame’s edge.

Rites done right became ordinary. Old friends, neighbors, former colleagues, children of those who were too sick themselves to come, distant relatives, not many left in my generation still living, then, two sons, three daughters, four grandchildren, husband, their names dissolving fast like broth pouring through a sieve. Where does it all go? Them, me, this place? As I chewed a slice of guava upon the altar, fragrant smoke curled around me, and I pondered this.

***

The reading of the bones began. In the windowless room at the funeral hall, the suited attendant talked like a game show host, sculpting the stale air with his hands as he spoke. An intact skull, he announced to my family, indicates good karma.

Now, look here, he said, pointing to the tawny edge of a knuckle bone. Streaks of yellow mean heavy medications towards the end of her life. Healthy bones would be white.

I was glad to see the clavicle was a pleasing hue of ivory. I wondered in earnest if it was still hot. It looked fairly solid, but a few hours of incineration could have melted the marrow so all that remained was a thin shell. The urge to grab it was growing. Right as I reached in, there was a flicker in the corner of the room. Then a quiet bark.

A little white dog had appeared out of nowhere; it looked exactly like the one that used to live with us back on HPL Road, before he disappeared one night. Even his whiskers crusted familiarly around his snout.

I drifted low to scratch its ears. The dog said, you don’t have to look.

Look at what? I asked.

They’re going to bang the bones to dust and stuff it in an urn.

I sighed.

It’s the clavicle that ties me here, I told the little dog. I just want touch it one last time to see if it will crumble away in my hand.

I understand, said the dog. I love bones too.

***

So the dog and I decided to go outside and catch a breath. Next to the funeral parlor was a grove. The ground was covered in twigs and acorns. I dug up a stick to toss for the dog who ran back and forth a few times before tiring out at my side.

We came to an ancient tree lying on its side. Gnarled roots twisted out of the earth. From afar, the wood had looked firm and sound, but up close, I saw that the trunk had hollowed out. Its emptied core was bursting with ears of fungus and insect nests. The bark had started to peel, and a soft pelt of lichen crept over the side of its wooden body. The little dog sniffed at the mulch.

In the distance, I heard a cracking noise like a big dead tree coming down, another felled giant meeting the forest floor. I hoped no one and no house was in its path.

But then I realized it was the sound of my oldest daughter’s voice. In her booming way, she was talking directly to the bones in the tray, saying, there’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s okay to go.

***

My family took the ancestral urn aboard the bus. The dog and I sat in the back. We left the skyscrapers and boulevards of the city, passing stalls with steaming vats of buns, rain-washed buildings, the bus depot on the outskirts of town. When we reached the mountaintop, my family buried my body bits in a shaded plot where over several years the ashes would seep into the soil and one day grow into flowers.

A gray mist was brewing in the atmosphere, and it clung to the branches and buds of the pink trees like silk cloth. The bus drove away. I realized I had been here before, at the bottom of a breath, in the invisible world stirring to form. By then, I was fast dissolving into the ground, air, sky. There were no names nor shapes anymore, only a last whispered sound of an urge breaking apart.

Take care of the clavicle, I said to the little white dog sitting by the plot, its tail wagging and tongue hanging out. Then, even that final urge loosened, and the little that remained of me, let go.

---

Yasmine Yu is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has been previously published in The Cincinnati Review miCRo.

The neighbor boys carried the piano out into the rain. They’d taken the French doors off their hinges and left them leaning against the house. We watched them set the piano in the grass as thunder rolled and the cluttered gutters spilled over the eaves.

“It looks like something is happening,” you said.

“We should put on our boots,” I said.

It was still afternoon but already dark. Storm clouds were heavy and low. I could smell the lotion you left open on the dresser.

“Eucalyptus,” I said.

“No,” you said dipping a finger and touching it to my neck. “Japanese Cypress.”

“We should dress,” I said.

“Or turn off the light,” you said.

We stayed at the window and watched the neighbor boys carry the doors back into their jambs. They were home from college. They held the doors as if they weighed nothing at all.

“I remember when you were young,” you said.

“I’m not old yet,” I said.

“Not old,” you said. “But I remember when you were young.”

You raised the window and we listened to the sound of the rain in the leaves. Water puddled on the floor. Lightning lit and the neighbor boys shut the French doors. A lamp was on their parent’s bedroom. The curtain half closed.

You fell asleep in that room once. On the couch at the foot of the bed. You called it a davenport. A term your father used, you said. We were at a dinner party a few days after Christmas. The neighbor boys were children then. You drank too much wine and smoked a joint with the doctor’s wife in the basement. I found you asleep an hour later on the davenport in their bedroom. You wear wearing a string of the wife’s pearls. There was a pile of coats on the bed.

“I remember waking up there,” you said. “You had taken off your shoes. I thought that was strange.”

“The doctor wanted to look at my feet,” I said. “I’d lost you. I was telling the story about the sewing needle I stepped on as a child. The doctor didn’t believe it was still in my foot. He knelt down in front of everyone and untied my laces. It was late in the evening.”

“After he’d played the piano,” you said.

“Yes. The song you taught him,” I said. “After I lost you.”

“I wasn’t lost,” you said. “I needed to rest.”

In the yard the piano sat quiet in the rain. You went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. When you came back you were wrapped in a towel and the storm had begun to calm.

“How long will they leave it out there?” you said. “How long until it’s ruined?”

“I’m waiting for them to carry the doctor out and leave him there beside it,” I said.

“His wife must be behind all this,” you said. “She told me once to pull all her roses when she died,” you said.

“You didn’t,” I said.

“No,” you said. “I sent over a casserole.”

I watched you dress. You dropped the towel on the floor beneath the window and mopped up the rain with your foot.

“I’m going over there,” you said.

“Don’t,” I said.

“He can’t see the yard from his bed,” you said.

I imagined those pearl you wore that night, years ago. Where they were now. I took the towel to the bathroom and hung it to dry. The mirror was still fogged. I could hear your footsteps down the stairs. The backdoor opened. The screen slapped shut. When I came to the window you were crossing the yard. You stopped and looked back. You were wearing a pair of my boots. I touched the glass with the palm of my hand. You waved.

What I never told you about that night after the doctor took off my shoes, was that he touched the sole of my foot where the skin had grown over the needle and said, “Your wife is a hell of a teacher.”

You turned and walked through the rain. The neighbor boys hadn’t brought out the piano bench so you stood and raised the fallboard. You began to play. The rain was quiet and I could hear the notes. I looked up at the doctor’s window. I waited for the curtains to close or the light to turn off. I recognized the song. I touched my neck where you’d left the scent of cypress. The neighbor boys opened the doors and stood watching you. Their father was somewhere in the house. The roses in the garden were still in bloom.

---

Andrew Siegrist is a graduate of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His debut collection of stories, We Imagined It Was Rain, was awarded the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and published by Hub City Press in 2021. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, trampset, Juked, the Mississippi Review, Baltimore Review, Arts & Letters, Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, South Carolina Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Nashville, Tennessee.

Mara arrived in January, as regal as a beech tree, and planted herself in the yellow house across the street. From my bedroom window, I watched her skip rope like she was training for a NASA mission. She was like that from the start: formidable. By the first week she had made friends with almost everybody but me.

I still wore corduroy skirts and tall socks embroidered with apples. I was picked last for kickball. I had straight Bs. “You have such promise,” my teachers said. All around me people were blossoming, but any flowers I could muster yielded only hard, sour fruit. “Crabapple,” my mother called me affectionately, instead of honey, and I hated how well it fit.

In February, our science teacher paired Mara and me for a project. She thought Mara would rub off on me. Make me braver, maybe, less prone to sputter in class. But every time Mara got another answer right, anger fermented in my chest. When she raised her hand, the skin on her forearm was so thin I could see the blood moving. I dismantled a paper clip beneath my desk and daydreamed about etching my initials onto her skin.

I ran hot in those days: my temperature, my temper. I sweated in T-shirts on days Mara wore thick wool sweaters. She shed fibers every time she moved. Her scratchy sleeves rubbed against my skin. When I scooted away from her, her gray eyes pooled. The next day, her smile was even wider. Her niceness was one more thing I coveted but couldn’t reach.

“You should walk to school with her,” Mom said. “She’s new. She could use a friend.”

“She has more friends than I do.”

Mom laughed and told me that was all the more reason to be nice to her. Still, I scuttled away when she approached me in the hall. I side-stepped her smiles.

But something was changing. The trees in front of our houses draped their arms around each others’ shoulders. In March, we learned about inosculation: what happened when different trees chafed against each other. Their bark wore thin. Their cells merged. The trees grew conjoined. “Husband and wife trees,” our teacher called them. Mara shifted beside me, and I felt flayed. “That’s what we should do our project about,” she whispered.

In April she started waiting in front of my house in the mornings, underneath the kissing, sighing trees. She walked beside me in silence. It’s OK, I told myself. We’re not friends. We’re something else. Neighbors. At the end of the week, she held out her hand, her face serious. “Friends?” she said. I took her hand.

We started studying together, stretched out in her bed or mine. She swapped the story of her parents’ divorce for the location of my brother’s weed stash. We smoked by my open window, giggling against each other’s shoulders. We collapsed in my bed, our arms indistinguishable. We dared each other to become a dolphin, a boat, a rocket, a centipede. We squeezed our eyes shut and contorted our bodies into new shapes. With my eyes closed and hers on me I could be anything. Steel, bark, honey.

From then on, we linked arms in the hallway and split our sentences so we could share them. We made a new kind of fruit: bristly, nutty apples. “We’re going to be this close forever,” I told her. I hadn’t been the kind of person who thought about forever before, but now I was. She rolled her eyes at me, and I rubbed my shoulder against hers. “I mean it,” I swore.

I meant it the day she painted GO on my exposed stomach with pasty blue paint before her sister’s swim meet, and my skin prickled even in the places she didn’t touch. I meant it when we started high school and I memorized the 63 steps between her locker and mine. I meant it right up until the day in 10th grade when we were tangled in her bed, tickling each other senseless, and the joke in her eyes softened. I started to feel light-headed, exuberant, afraid. Her lips against mine were tentative, as if she were the one who didn’t know what to do.

I flinched. She didn’t. I started dating boys. She shaved the left side of her head and brought a girl to prom. I applied for college out-of-state. She stayed and made our town change around her. I told myself I’d never had her certainty anyway.

Still, I tracked her life on Facebook. I marveled at the dizzying shapes of her new friends’ hair. I tried to squelch my jealousy, that old prickly anger at how easily she reached for what I lacked. I closed my laptop and splashed cold water on my face. In the mirror my hair was flat, my eyes sad. Turning away was a habit. It was the only thing I was better at than her.

Then I stopped. I closed my eyes and tried to believe that I could remake myself the way she’d once reshaped me. That I could be anything: a girl, a tree, a rocket, all at the same time. My fingertips prickled, and I tasted apple-crisp beechnuts on my tongue. I turned back to the mirror and searched my eyes for the first flicker of something new.

---

 

Pauline Holdsworth is a writer and public radio producer who grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Necessary Fiction, Pithead Chapel, JMWW, and elsewhere. Her work has been shortlisted for The Masters Review 2021 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50.

 

 

 

 Three days after Eli stopped living, Talia saw him in a dream, wearing his old black hoodie and jeans and Converse sneakers, walking slowly toward her through the glass graveyard along the Rio Grande Bosque with a sea of shattered glass glinting at his feet, like Jesus walking on water. She wanted him to tell her to not be afraid, but he said nothing, his eyes fixed on the horizon, unaware of—or indifferent to—her presence.

As teenagers, she and Eli would get stoned there, wandering through the acres of dirt-encrusted glass to unearth old medicine bottles that survived the decades and weather and wildlife. It was a century-old landfill, but “graveyard” suited it better. Where glass goes to die, serene in its brokenness. There was a holiness to it, the garbage made beautiful in that fleeting golden light.

It was monsoon season, when the desert came alive from the violence of extreme heat, downburst winds, lightning, thunderstorms, flash floods. When she woke from her nap, she waited till the afternoon downpour subsided before driving to the South Valley. In the glass graveyard, the air bloomed, breathing out the fresh memory of rain-soaked earth—the scent of thirst quenched, dryness replenished, pungent with resinous creosote displaced by heavy droplets.

And she saw that, no, Eli was not there, of course, he was still dead, her brother as ephemeral as the petrichor that emanated from the soil, and Talia was alone, kneeling in the glass shards, dull now in the fading light of dusk, her hands burrowing in the ground like she might find his bones there among the weeds and broken bottles.

---

Jessie Carver is a queer writer and editor who grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals that include Entropy, Barren, The Normal School, HAD, and Watershed Review, and in the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems. She also co-authored the book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution. You can find her online at www.jessiecarver.com.

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Jessie Carver is a queer writer and editor who grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals that include Entropy, Barren, The Normal School, HAD, and Watershed Review, and in the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems. She also co-authored the book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution. You can find her online at www.jessiecarver.com.

The American pawpaw takes six or seven years to produce fruit. You may wait for the fruit to fall, or you can shake the tree if you’re impatient, or if you doubt the tree’s ability to know when it’s time, which must be the case sometimes since everything is so deeply confused what with the scorching summers, the smashing records. So, you shake and shake because it’s his favorite fruit and the dumb tree is finally ready and how much time does anyone really have, anyway? You hear the backdoor whine open and slam shut but all the pawpaws are down, so you are too busy to acknowledge. Pawpaws taste a little like mango and have small, shiny black pits inside of them. The fruit is so malleable, you can scoop out the meat with a spoon. You hear her calling you but you are gathering them in your shirt and oh my god it’s going to be so amazing when you bring them inside and scoop out the meat and you wonder if you could make pawpaw ice cream out of this and feel super earthy, like you’ve got everything by the balls for once and you’re the one driving. You hear it in her voice, the phone call. The prognosis. A pawpaw slips out of its shirt hammock, and you revel in the act of picking it back up, this little green bomb, about as big as a grenade. But she has the real grenade, doesn’t she? No matter how much life you bring into the house, the call came through, and now she knows. But you know too by the crumbling structure of her voice, the quiet care when she says, What are you doing? And you hold the pawpaws so tightly in their hammock, so safe. The American pawpaw is rich in vitamins A, C, P, K—basically all the letters. The pawpaw is life. If you could just bring them into the house…. It isn’t good. It isn’t good. You knew this wouldn’t be good. You hold them so tightly they all fall out but one, which remains stuck and squished against your rib cage and wrist. You will lose him. Soon, you will lose him. The American pawpaw produces the largest native edible fruit in North America. You let her hug you, and even though the fruit is smashed, you can’t let go of it. It remains between you, permeating your t-shirt, your hands, your fingernails until you don’t know where you end, and it begins.

---

EJ Green’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, HAD, Wigleaf, Juked, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. They live just outside of Philadelphia with their partner and two cats where they read for Philadelphia Stories, practice martial arts, and try not to kill everything in their veggie garden.