Lost Balloon

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.

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.