Lost Balloon

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.

The girl, undeterred by my watching, adds raspberry-frosted Pop-Tarts to a shopping cart. An aisle later, her mom finds the box, grabs her daughter by the arm, grumbles something in her ear, and places the Pop-Tarts on a shelf next to a box of gluten-free crackers. The girl, whose name I discovered on social media is Sophie, turns to me, crosses her eyes, and sticks out her tongue.

I watch as the white fingermarks on Sophie’s arm pink up, and I see her mother, my lover’s wife, the wife he never told me about, the wife who appeared one morning as a blue bubble of text on his phone, pick out his favorite 82% dark chocolate bar, the one that donates to endangered species, the same one I buy for him. The wife is wearing Lululemon leggings that accentuate her lithe frame and has her blonde hair pulled back into a careless ponytail. He told me he loved me for my curves and raven hair and the laugh lines around my eyes.

When I turn the corner in the dairy aisle, Sophie is opening a single-serving size of Organic Valley chocolate milk. She drains it and drops the empty carton next to a selection of organic, free-range eggs while my lover’s wife—I refuse to learn her name—reads the ingredients on a tub of Greek yogurt. Sophie flies me the bird and turns with a saucy flair of her private school skirt. When I told him I couldn’t have kids, he said he didn’t want any.

In the produce department, my lover’s wife gushes over the selection of kale—curly kale, dinosaur kale. The red Russian kale gets her hands flapping and her mouth orgasming. She chats with another yoga-clad shopper, discussing how sweet and tender the red Russian is, how beautiful its oak-shaped leaves, its colors ranging from blue-green to purple-red.

Meanwhile, Sophie switches the price tags of sweet potatoes and Okinawan sweet potatoes. Cucumbers and zucchini. She sidles up to me behind the pyramid of apples, and I can’t resist leaning in to catch a whiff of young adolescence-like onion wafting off her. She takes a bite out of a Honeycrisp and hisses, “Don’t think I won’t tell on you.”

But she won’t. She likes the game too much. This isn’t the first time I’ve followed Sophie and my lover’s wife around the grocery store and Sophie knows it. She’s getting more daring, more sassy with each visit and, still, I cannot stop imagining her as mine. My life as her mother. I imagine us going to the contemporary art museum. Playing tennis. Training a puppy to walk on a leash in the park. I’d be a good mother, I think, and she’d be a good daughter.

In line, eyes on mine, Sophie snags a Snickers off the rack at checkout and slides it onto the belt under a bunch of red Russian kale. I watch as my lover’s wife runs her credit card, smiles as the cashier hands her the receipt, and I see a woman, a wife, a mother. The Snickers is bagged without my lover’s wife seeing it, and, for a second, I think about ratting out Sophie. But I don’t, and Sophie smirks as she grabs the paper bag. When she gets to the door at the front of the store, Sophie turns to me and mouths, Perv.

The cashier has to call next twice before I place Lay’s potato chips, Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, and Hostess Donettes on the belt. At the last go, I add a Snickers bar. When the cashier asks for a phone number to qualify for Safeway Club discounts, I give his—my soon-to-be ex-lover’s.

The cashier looks at the readout on her register and says, “Thank you, Mrs. Wilcox.”

Kim Steutermann Rogers lives with her husband and 16-year-old dog Lulu in Hawaii. Her essay, “Following the Albatross Home” was recognized as notable in Best American Travel Writing. Her journalism has published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Gone Lawn, The Citron Review, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She was awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska in 2016 and 2021 and Dorland Mountain Arts in 2022. Find her @kimsrogers.

Aaron Sandberg has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Phantom Kangaroo, Qu, Asimov’s, No Contact, Alien Magazine, The Shore, The Offing, Sporklet, Crow & Cross Keys, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his writing—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.

The highway was slick and iridescent, bleeding red from brake lights scattered on either side of our car. Mac had hit something small, a raccoon or maybe a possum. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my head. But when a voice shot out of our radio—a voice that sounded like a jumble of sentient vibrations—I winked one eye open in case a claw pushed through our janky AM radio and grabbed Mac by the throat.

“Hello? Anybody there?” Mac asked.

A muffled echo on the other side of the air waves mumbled a reply, which Mac treated like a friendly greeting.

“Could be some trucker on a CB radio,” I suggested.

“Going north?” Mac asked.

The response was a staccato of static and dead space before one of our fan belts drowned out all other sound with whirs and thudding.

Mac balled up his right fist and pounded the dashboard.

“Goddamn’t I told you to get that fixed, didn’t I?”

I stared out the window and drew imaginary lines between droplets and runnels. Mac’s question was for me.

The last twenty miles had felt like a painful endurance test: the murderous thump, the squeak of the wipers, scattered riffs of dance music by artists we were too old to recognize. Flood season had come early. Rain beat against the windshield, leaving a wet curtain the wipers try in vain to beat away.

By the time Mac killed something small and nocturnal, we were two hours away from his parents’ house and his brother’s house and a river that left most of the backyards and driveways ankle-deep in water. Mac wanted to move back home.  He spent our first hour on the road telling me why we needed to live near family—which meant his family. I spent the last forty minutes telling him why I didn’t want to buy a two-flat with his fifty-something uncle who smelled like weed but knew how to “fix things.” After our last stop for gas about twenty miles ago, we’d settled into stubborn silence. Then a stranger crackled through the air waves.

“Hello? Hello?”  The voice on the other side of the radio was clear, curious, feminine.

“Holy crap!  You can hear me?” Mac slapped the steering wheel and scooted higher in his seat the way he did whenever he got to the good part in a story.

“Yes,” she answered. She sounded impatient.

Mac wiggled his eyebrows and grinned at me like we were in cahoots, like hearing some stranger acknowledge us over a car radio on a rainy stretch of highway was some big victory. I uncrossed my arms.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The reply was a distorted collection of syllables.

Mac shouted the question a second time. I fiddled with the radio, but he pushed my hand away and adjusted the knobs himself.

“Help…Help.”

“Help? Do you need help?” Mac shouted.

“Maybe she thinks we need help,” I offered. Mac shushed me and fiddled with the knobs again.

“How can we help?” By then Mac had resorted to a kind of slow yelling like he was translating his thoughts for someone who was hard of hearing.

The response was a crackle that could’ve been sailboat or salesman. Mac persisted, determined to let this faceless, disembodied stranger know we were there to provide whatever assistance she required. I pressed my eyes closed. The darkness only magnified the hiss of the radio static and the sound of the rain pounding the windshield and the roof.

My eyes opened in time to see a vanload of college kids speed past us fast enough to hydroplane. Their tires spit an angry torrent of water across the driver’s side of the Camry. Mac swore at them before apologizing to the voice from the radio. She repeated a word that sounded like a question—who? through?—while I watched the van fishtail across the road, narrowly missing a Cadillac and a truck hauling gasoline. I mourned all the creatures they must’ve crushed beneath their wheels that night. Mac wouldn’t stop talking. He clutched the steering wheel with both hands and went on about the rain and the flood and the long drive home from St. Charles. His cheeks were frozen in the perma-grin he plastered across his face for family get-togethers and work events. He complained about gas prices and loneliness and settling.

“I think we missed our last turn,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

Mac told her about the car he wanted and the house he planned to buy two hundred miles away from the house we already owned. I wanted to talk to the voice too, but there was no room. I wanted to tell her that Mac is the kind of man who eats out of boxes and cans instead of dinner plates and serving bowls. That Mac sits in the same chair every Sunday; that he doesn’t look at me when I walk in a room. That he only says my name when he needs something, and he drags out the second syllable for too long. 

“Help is on the way,” the voice said, only this time she spoke with robotic clarity.

The steering locked. Mac was hairy elbows, clawing fingers, a string of strangled profanities. Our car skidded off the road, and we flipped over into a sloppy ravine. The chassis cracked with painful violence.

“Hello?” I ask. Between the angry hum of the busted windshield wipers, the car draws in tiny, ragged breaths. A fresh pressure throbs through the narrow folds in my brain. I want to reach over and feel his face with my fingers, but I can’t move. My chest and neck are a shimmering mosaic of shattered glass.

“Mac?” I whisper. His reply is a garbled groan, and I know it’s too late. I know that whichever way we turn, we won’t see what’s headed our direction until it runs us over and leaves us both broken and grieving.

Martha (Marty) Keller’s short stories have appeared in Cagibi, Midway Journal, Roanoke Review, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and elsewhere. She is also a reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms. She lives with her family at the end of a long trail somewhere outside of Chicago.

I was our city-island’s 303rd Atlas, I tell my Tinder date on our first outing at a seaside tavern. I expect him to look suitably impressed at me for holding up our whole town, our whole world for a full year. Never once faltering, nor dropping all its citizens to their watery waste.

Do you have a shellfish allergy? he asks as he peruses the salt-laminated menu.

No, I reply. When I held our city up on my shoulders, the seagulls would often deposit little morsels of mussels in my waiting mouth. The guards administered a new saline injection into my veins every night but the birds, oh the birds wanted me to have the first catch of the day, to not subsist on bare sustenance, but savor the salt of the living.

What was your first kiss like? he asks once our food arrives, and I tell him how my former classmates—they in high school, me randomly chosen to hold the groaning city on my growing shoulders—would slip past the guards after class. They would take turns kissing me—free practice for their older crushes—and I could not let go of the world long enough to push them away. Only once did I resist: my bite led to a slap, which caused a minor earthquake across the city’s lower tiers.

Did you ever want to let the city go? he asks next, sky-eyes clouded as they look out to sea. Did you wish to let us fall and sink in the water forever? His mouth twists, an unspoken “after everything, I would” in the furrow of his brow. I don’t reply, instead asking a question of my own.

Did you know I carried you too?

He makes a sound, questioning, like the boy he once was. I tell him I remember the exact frequency of his pulse, and all the times he almost succeeded in snuffing it out. His heart used to be the heaviest of them all.

In the intruding years, I have ceased to intuit the intricate mechanics of my city. I don’t know who the 313^th Atlas is, what they look like, if the seagulls favor them with treats and secrets the way they once favored me. I have long since fulfilled my duty to my cursed city-island. But my arms are still corded with muscles like twisted tree limbs. When I sleep, I don’t dream in words, but in heartbeats.

I reach across the white-clad table and put his scarred hands on my shoulders. Let him feel along adamantine muscles, under a button-down shirt that can never close all the way. His touch slides down until he takes my hand and I let him lead me down to the waterfront, shellfish lunch a long-overdue offering to the seagulls flying watch overhead.

We enter the sea in our first-date clothes, and he lays me out in the cool water. Warm palms under my muscle-roped back, holding me up, up, up until I am one with sea and sky, buoyed by saltwater.

Avra Margariti is a queer author and poet from Greece. Avra’s work haunts publications such as SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).