Lost Balloon

 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.

_____________

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.

Let me introduce you to a woman you’ve been sleeping with. Every so often for the last nine months. I wish I could say she’s pretty like she has soft lips, large, limpid eyes, or that she sways gently when she walks. Say some detail like that her nose crinkles when she smiles. But she’s not like that. It’s okay if you don’t know if you like her right away.

She’s sleeping now, lying on a thin gray pillow, cradling one wrist with the other palm. The light is early morning muddy. Her neck is long and rises far over her shoulders, her chin is fleshy underneath. You can see her collarbones and shoulder nubs and other parts you cannot name under the skin. At rest her mouth curves down like a rainbow, her eyes curve down, too. Inside she has a hollow space under her ribs, the pit of her, an empty-feeling crevice.

She’s waking up.

The mattress is swaying beneath you both as she shifts. She bows her head to your shoulder, so the fly-away hairs stand up, making your nostrils twitch. Your cat will probably start screaming for breakfast in two more minutes.

This woman starts scratching her cheek in a way that makes a soft rasping that is kind of irritating and kind of sweet. She lifts her face to you (someone she’s been fucking and just recently fucked) says good morning. Nudges your cheek with her nose.

After a pause, she tucks her chin in, scrunches her nose, draws down her eyebrows. Nudges you again and speaks from the side of her mouth saying, would you still be with me if my face looked like this?

Listen very carefully. What she means is will you stay with her even if her face gets chewed off by a dog, or she gains two hundred pounds, or her vagina gets stretched out from having four babies.

I know. What’s inside is what counts; but that’s more of her body. The slick organs pumping, that would come slithering out like a long live snake if a slit were made in the wrong place. Her body, the shape of her face, her bones, are who she is. Her brain and her face are wired together with an intricate system of the same nerves and blood vessels. Her sense of humor is the way her eyebrows rise, or how her face stretches when she laughs. She is in her eyeballs and how the lashes move and how her spine bends and how her breathing sounds. I know.

Turn toward the body in your bed, grab her padded hip bone, kiss her spiky shoulder.

Tell her you’ll love her no matter what.

---

Madeline Graham is a writer and Minnesotan. Her work is available or forthcoming in HAD, Southern Humanities Review, Redivider, Forge Literary Magazine, and Ghost Parachute, among others. Find her on Twitter @madelineRgraham.

The dead horse has more strength today. It can usually only muster enough energy to lift its head, from where it was euthanized, in the Campo, thirty years ago. But now, no invisible pressure stops it from contracting its throat muscles. No one can see the relief it feels, stretching, fully, after all this time. Even though it cannot breathe.

It’s just as well. The air quality is bad. Wildfires surround the town. The famous race, scheduled for the weekend, has just been cancelled. Everyone alive is upset, everyone dead has their own problems.

For example, how to make it over to the jockey, sitting in front of one of the cafes. He doesn’t look like a jockey, currently, but the dead horse instantly recognizes him as the man it threw off its back, decades ago, during the last Palio it ever ran.

While the dead horse tries to stand, the former jockey looks around the square, trying to identify which of the thirtyish year-old women sipping coffee, alone, could be his daughter. It may be none of them. He was supposed to meet her, Angie, yesterday. But he didn’t leave the mattress. He thought, if I don’t get out of bed, for real, then I can later say, I’m so sorry, I honestly stayed horizontal. He wasn’t sure he could do it. He had to pee, early. Luckily he had some dishware on the nightstand, which he could reach, and did reach, without touching the floor.

He changes his mind, often. He’s aware of this. He enjoys making plans, only to break them, and, conversely, likes showing up unannounced, creating spontaneous plans, where others must change their schedule to accommodate him. And people often do, accommodate him, because when he is not depressed and lying next to cappuccino cups filled with his own urine, he is charming.

In fact, he’s charming the waitstaff, currently. Minutes earlier they were moping around, coughing, complaining about the smoke. But now, they are laughing. He’s making a big enough scene that Angie, sitting across the plaza, notices him, and wonders if he is her father. It was a relief, his absence, growing up. The fathers of all her friends were either too nice or too mean. She didn’t have to deal with any of that. Her mother dated, but none of them lasted. They all looked like tofu. The ones that worked inside, at desks, were soft and deformed. The ones that labored outside were gritty and burned. They all reeked entirely of their surroundings. Were, actually, nothing, inside. They all crumbled before she learned their names.

The dead horse hobbles toward the former jockey. Antonio, Angelo? Something like that. What it remembers is how great it felt, to whip the idiot to the ground. It fell, too. But it was worth it, to see him, in pain, before someone called for the needle. It wanted the earth to swallow him. But the guy landed near the edge of the crowd, and a woman pulled him out of the way. Oh well, at least the man’s legs were twisted, surely broken, thought the horse, just before it died.

Something jostles the former jockey’s table. He shrugs, and continues talking to the waitstaff about the benefits of his tofu scramble. He’s espousing its flexibility, how it takes on the taste of everything around it. How that’s exactly what life should be. That we don’t need keys. We need bendiness. That the spatula to happiness is rubber, not metal.

As she orders another coffee, Angie sees the man, across the plaza, become confused. Waving his hands while his chair, with him in it, scoots around the Campo. He must be her father. He looks exactly how he sounded, on the phone, outwardly jovial, but totally vacuous. Not just lacking any depth but completely unaware there could be depth, that there could be something other than the present moment. Exactly the kind of person that would get thrown off a horse, and have sex with the tourist who pulled him out of harm’s way, and then disappear. Angie had tracked him down, and contacted him, this past Christmas. Not because she wanted a relationship, but money. She had just had a child, her husband was out of work. She thought, why not? The worst he can say is no, and, if so, nothing changes.

When the chair topples over, the former jockey goes with it. He stands up, but continues moving forward. If he had any interiority, Angie thinks, she would call it “against his will.” But he goes with it, propelled by some force, which everyone around the Campo is commenting about, but which nobody intervenes in.

What made her mother, thirty years ago, intervene? Angie imagines her father, back then, falling, and looking placid, on the dirt. No, whatever caused her mother to rescue her father came from her, not him.

Its undetectable bones don’t ache. The dead horse pushes, and keeps pushing the man with its ghost muzzle. It doesn’t think about where it’s pushing, only that it wants to move the former jockey till it can’t anymore, till whatever well of disembodied energy runs dry.

Angie stays where she is. She puts a ceramic mug to her lips, but doesn’t drink. On the cup is a detailed representation of flames. Her flight has been delayed. Her father arrives, at her table, just as ash begins to fall upon the square. Just as the dead horse stumbles. It slips through the cracks between cobblestones, into the center of the planet, where it, at last, inhales. Its lungs are full of liquid iron. It gallops in place. It wins the race.

---

Thomas Mixon is a Kenyon Review workshop alum, and a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. He has poetry and fiction in miniskirt magazine, Radon Journal, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He’s trying to write a few books.

In these last dregs of winter, day and night hold each other close. Dusk lasts for hours as light brushes cool against darkness, and sunrise clings to the last sprinkling of stars. The cold brings with it its own silence, a silence that defies even the wind, raw and damp and searching, sinking so deep into the landscape that it ceases to shiver. Sometimes it’s impossible to believe that there’s anything other than this heavy quiet, but when she looks out to the lake, she hears things. The prickle of ice against water. The hushed lick of water against rushes. The glide of feathers.

The swans always come at this time of year, when it seems impossible that winter will ever end. Only then will she see them, slow white streaks against the bone-grey of the sky. They fly low and land on the lake, its water still pewter, its breath still mist that curls and condenses in the chill. Two of them, the same pair every year, defying her expectation that they will have forgotten her.

Her mother’s shadow also flies low. Unmoored by thin, barely-there days, it stretches over the kitchen and out into the garden, across the living room and up the stairs. It quivers in the wind but never disintegrates, its edges bolstered by the wan sunlight that trickles in through the windows and pools on the floors. Her mother’s shadow, a body swimming. She’s tried telling her mother about the swans, but her mother and the shadow both tell her that she’s making it up. How can she be, how can her mother not have seen them? But her mother will say that she reads too much and has too vivid an imagination, and the shadow will nod in agreement and the whole house will ripple with it. Look out of the window, her mother will say. There’s not even a lake.

But there is a lake, and she’s seen them building their nest in a clump of reeds, the same spot every year. She can hear that too. The thick rustle of twig against twig, a huge mound of them matted together until nothing can get in or out. She’s seen them with the eggs. How protective they are, how they nurture them through the spring storms that are fiercer than winter. What would it be like, to be held so safely? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think her mother has ever held her at all.

There are lots of things her mother doesn’t seem to do or to see, things that glimmer at the edges of vision like dust motes caught in a strand of light. Things that are just as easy as dust for her mother to sweep away. She’s given up asking her mother to look properly. Can’t you see them? she used to say, pointing to the lake and the swans. You must be able to see them, holding out her arm, her cheek, her heart, still bruised with her mother’s fingers even after so many years, still beating like the steady drip of water from a tap. Drip, drip. Her own body, finally thawing into spring. But her mother says it’s still winter. Her mother says that the bruises aren’t bruises at all. How could they be? she’ll ask, and the shadow will shake its head in puzzlement and the foundations of the house will feel like they’re shifting.

But each year there’s one less egg. Each year there is one less cygnet gliding in their wake. There is a gap in the nest that swells larger each year, but it’s not a quiet gap. There, too, she can hear things. A feather-touch of body against air. A whispering that she thinks must come from the swans. Each year it draws her closer, and last year, she knows, there was only one egg. This year there are none, and the noises from the nest are louder than ever.

She makes her way out to the lake. There is blue in the sky today. There is blue in the water too, pale shimmers of it that drift between the greys. She walks along the path that slides between ice and mud, and she feels her mother’s eyes on her back, feels the lingering fingers of her mother’s shadow. She ignores them. Out here, she is no longer her mother’s daughter. She is swan-call, lake-rustle, a soft feathery shade of grey, and she can hear the singing as she wades through the reeds, water falling away from her body and her feet webbing against the silt. She curls up inside the nest, cocooned suddenly from everything except the sky. The feathers that cover her are breast-warm and damp. She forgets her mother, forgets the bruises, forgets that the lake isn’t supposed to be there at all.

She closes her eyes. The nest, now, is silent.

---

Elodie Barnes is a writer and editor. Her writing is born at the edges
of nature, memory, trauma and the body, and is published regularly in
online and print journals including the Best Small Fictions anthology of
2022. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com.