Balloon

A Short Story

The sky was a laceration—too wide, too still—spitting up a balloon like it had swallowed wrong, like it was gagging on yesterday’s grease. Teeth jagged, rusted, crusted with something like disease. I turned—dragged by reflex, by guilt, by the old ache—and there she was: my wife, Sorel, levitating high above the cushions—a heat shimmer, limbs slack, fever pulling a glow off her skin, rot pretending to be light. Not here, not gone. Held. Hinged open by something I couldn’t see.

Miri was sitting, pixel-pinned, her fingers crawling over the floor like broken legs still trying to move. The television breathed blue onto her, spore-soft and spreading. She didn’t look at me, didn’t need to. She already knew the moment I broke from the static.

Her voice came as something pried out of the air. “Daddy, why did you leave, Daddy?”

And outside, the balloon hung, patient, waiting.

“There’s a balloon,” I said. “Up there. In the sky.”

“Do you think people can live up there?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Even after they die?”

“Some people, maybe. Maybe it’s where people go when they can’t stay.”

Miri blinked. “Like Mama?”

I nodded, but it didn’t feel like nodding. My head moved; my answer didn’t.

Door. Open.

The hallway sucked back like skin peeled from meat—airless, red-thick silence. Nothing touched me. Not wind, not God.

Miri was motion—screech, blur, heat. Her scream sawed down the middle of the house, vertebra by vertebra, like something feral chewing through bone.

“Mama!”

She shoved me. I was a wall already cracked, and I cracked more. I hit. I folded.

She didn’t see. She climbed the couch, a drowning thing climbing breath. Her hands didn’t reach right. Her leap was off. The shape on the couch—Mama—shifted slow, unsound.

Miri collided with absence and screamed again, louder, like maybe if she screamed enough, the body would fill back in. Sorel remained still—as still as death.

The sound of Miri’s voice fell into a vacuum, unanswered. She was languid. Something shifted. I called out, “Miri? Miri? Baby?”

She turned her head a fraction, just enough to bend the angle into something off, something skewed and quietly disfigured—just enough for me to see that whatever was inside her had begun to move.

Something was malignant with Miri’s mouth. The angle, the luminance, the shape—it didn’t fit. There was too much of it. Too much teeth, too much gloaming behind. She looked at me like her eyes had forgotten they were eyes—like windows in a house no one lived in anymore, curtains breathing slow without wind.

She came to me soft—almost gently—and knelt. Her eyes didn’t look cruel. They looked devout.

Then she leaned in and bit.

Not all at once. Not wildly. Just began. Quiet, like beginning a prayer.

At first I thought it was some new kind of hug, something her grief had invented. But then there was heat, and a wetness, and the sound—an awful suction, a peeling—and by then she was already feeding.

She was eating me, slow and strange and reverent. She looked almost sorry. But she didn’t stop.

I didn’t fight her. I think I even touched her hair.

Outside the windowpane, just at the edge of my sight, the balloon began its slow drift downward toward the mountains. It was sinking, like a thought settling deeper in the brain.

Miri’s hands and feet began to float, and she drifted toward the office. Suspended. Ghosting. She opened the window. The air outside crackled, gleamed—filaments of blue distortion threading through her fingers, into her mouth, down her throat. She swallowed volts like candy—soft and bright and fatal.

I tried—I tried—to speak, but my jaw unhinged with a rubber click. My head turned on its own axis, slow, too slow, then too fast, like a marionette being twisted for fun.

Light collapsed in on itself.

My neck: a rag wrung dry. My body: something to hang from. Miri: full from me. Smiling, mouth chewing.

I stared at Miri—her lips melting. I stared at myself in the blank of the television. I stared at Sorel, barely breathing, flickering like a burned film reel. I stared at myself again. Over and over. Stuck.

“There was a train,” Miri breathed—not voice, not sound, just presence, just pressure curling inside my ear like steam. “In my dream last night. It never stopped. Just kept going. Same tunnel. Again. Again.”

“What was in the tunnel?” I leaked out, soft and catatonic. The line between inside and out had thinned, gone membrane-thin, everything seeping.

She looked at me without eyes—just turned her face, or the idea of it. “Nothing,” she said. “That was the worst part. Just the same nothing. Forever. Like it wanted me to know it.”

The roof disintegrated above me, curling like paper dropped in acid, until the raw firmament unveiled itself in full.

I watched the sky enter the house. I watched the balloon enter the sky. Light disappeared beneath it. The sky was being erased. A slant of fire cut the house in two.

The base of the balloon peeled back. Not like fabric, but like fruit. Overripe. Soft. From within it, clumps of hair drifted down. They moved as though they were underwater. They moved like they were alive.

I could faintly recognize the smell—a mix of sweat and honey. The kind of sweetness that rots if left too long. I remembered how she used to hum before bed. I remembered how she used to vanish, even when she was right beside me. I remembered Miri waning and then appearing in terror for her mother.

“Maybe Mama didn’t leave,” Miri said. “Maybe she... just changed altitude.”

On the coffee table sat a half-empty grape juice box—Miri’s favorite kind. It had gone warm. Ants curled inside the straw.

I was puking and seizing.

Miri sat down on the floor next to me, watching the last few gasps leave my lungs. The television flickered, cords twisting slowly around her ankles. Miri lifted her arm and signed I love you with her hand. Miri danced outside the window. Miri walked on the ceiling above me. Miri was running for Mama. Miri was looping.

The balloon had removed all light, and the blackness became total. I knew, though, that something was watching us. Something fond of our memories.

“Am I going to disappear?” I tried to ask, or maybe just thought. It didn’t matter.

No one answered. Or maybe they did, and I just wasn’t listening.

I blinked, and Miri was gone.

I blinked again.

And so was I.

The juice box on the table collapsed inward.

The balloon kept drifting.