Roland awoke that morning to discover that he had, as a matter of fact, become a balloon.  He was not, he was sorry to discover, an anthropomorphic balloon; a sentient one, to be sure, but that was all.  He was capable of critical thought, much as he had been prior to going to sleep the night before, however he seemed unable to locomote of his own accord.  He found he was similarly incapable of expressing himself in any manner.  In fact, when he drifted over towards the mirror, a small change in the air current of the room guiding him towards the room’s single, open window, he noticed that disappointingly, he had become a rather plain and simple, and red, balloon.  One which, furthermore, possessed no outward expression of his current existential entrapment.

    Outside of his rather plain appearance he noticed two other things as he drifted past the mirror towards the open window.  One was that his bed, which sat lazily behind him did not contain a person of any sort, sleeping or otherwise.  Consequently he reasoned that this could not be a dream, as, he assumed.  If it had been a dream, wouldn’t he be able to glimpse his sleeping self on the bed, under the covers, snoring softly.  On the other hand, his round, slightly oval shaped balloon-shadow did lay right over the pillow on the side he preferred to sleep on, so he conceded he could not rule out entirely that he wasn’t dreaming; the artist in him just plain unable to ignore the seemingly symbolic shadow placement.  While it seemed unlikely, metaphor simply couldn’t be ruled out and so it remained possible that he was currently asleep, possibly about to wake up and regret the spicy paella he had for dinner the night before.  

    The second thing he noticed in the mirror was that someone had drawn two, un-lidded eyes on the balloon/him in thick black marker.  Simply two circles with dots inside of them, two unblinking, intensely staring eyes.  

    It seemed that he had awoken that morning, a sentient, sighted, red balloon.  

The last thing he noticed before he slipped through the window, brushing against frame of the raised window, was the long, white string tied to the knot of the balloon.  It likely should have secured him to something solid, but rather dangled rather carelessly below him; a thin, white tail trailing behind him.

    It was at least two if not three feet long, and rather dramatic.

As he floated slowly out into the yard, rising in smooth, if tiny incremental movements, he quickly became aware of the leaflessness of the tree branches in front of him.  Bare, unadorned and sharp branches that stretched wide and welcoming in front of him.  Right this way, they swayed in invitation.  As life up until now had been largely pre-balloon, he had never really found the need to consider the fragility of balloons.  So with only his childhood memories of thousands of bursting balloons to gauge by he seemed to be coasting slowly towards certain doom .  Quite suddenly he felt something akin to anxiety.  

    Did the rubber that his body consisted of, being wholly balloon now contain his DNA?  Were he to catch on the branches of the tree currently in front of him, the one which he did not seem to be rising fast enough to clear, and it were to pop him, was there any chance the truth of what had become of him could be discovered?  

    Anxiety became the balloon equivalent of panic.   

He willed himself to rise faster.  He pictured himself, his balloon-self filling with helium, becoming lighter, becoming faster.  He prayed to the balloon gods and made balloon promises, for what could he offer in exchange other than balloonish things.     It was not the balloon gods who answered him though, ultimately who could say if they even exist. One could not doubt the gods of mathematics and physics though, for they were the ones who rose up and answered him.  While he hadn’t felt an increase in the speed of his rise, or the angle of his ascent, or the force of the wind, when all the calculations were finished he somehow missed all of the branches and had crested over the top of the tree by, maybe a couple of inches.  

Maybe.

    That long string dragging behind him, bounced carelessly off the bare spring branches.  If he had been capable of looking down, Roland might have felt dread rising in his balloon stomach.  He might have found the panicked anxiety overwhelming had he been able to see that long, no longer so white string, bouncing off branch after branch after branch, threatening to catch and tangle at every height.  He might have even felt relieved whent at last, it hit the final, uppermost branch, a broken branch, barely half a branch really, a gnarled, withering, half-dead branch, twisted like a decaying hand.

Lucky for Roland that he had no balloon stomach where the dread could roil away, like an ocean with a sea monster beneath, having freshly dragged an errant merchant ship deeper into the murky depths. His balloon stomach would have been perched on its edge, watching as that string caught and wrapped itself around that last branch, one loop, then another, and another, catching fast and tight.  It took a moment for the string length to run taut as Roland drifted higher and higher and then suddenly…the string pulled tight and he plummeted the length of the rope as it bended itself in half, almost bowing in presentation.  

    Roland bounced harmlessly a couple of times and settled to a rest, two maybe three feet above the crest of the tree.

    A block away, a four year old pointed at Roland, swaying slightly, rhythmically above that tree.  A small, red beacon keeping watch in the dying spring light.  Next door, an ant hill at the base of Roland’s neighbours drive fell under Roland’s balloon-shadow unexpectedly and the ants, believing it to be night, rushed out of their hill and set about their daily tasks. Small birds, hopping around in the grass nearby, not nearly so easily fooled, set about making the hapless, confused ants into an impromptu and unexpected afternoon buffet.  Before long, all the ants too slow to escape through a hasty backwards retreat are eaten and the birds have lazily launched skywards again, loping back and forth, full of stupid, stupid ants.

    Roland watched the birds as long as he could, his slow, but steady rotation dictating his field of vision.  He rotated first to the right and then after a while back to the left.  For the most part though, he followed a clockwise direction, which suited his slightly OCD tendencies just fine.  

    Even suspended from the top of a tree, transformed as he was into a red balloon, he finds that he cannot help but be perturbed by the uneven nature of the lawn below him.  However, since he lacked the arms or legs which he would need to rectify the situation, he found himself left with only one option; rather intensely wishing for someone to come along, Weed Whacker™ in hand, and more evenly round the corners of the grass.  They, from his lofty vantage point, seemed rather unruly. 

    The sun continued it’s lazy momentum towards the horizon and after a few hours Roland was silently unraveling. Being tethered to the top of a tree left you with plenty of time to think.  Roland kept trying to think himself out of his predicament.  He thought super hard in the direction of family members and friends, would they be able to hear his psychic distress call?  The futility of these efforts inevitably led him into imagining the different ways this would all end.  He imagined himself slowly deflating, sinking lower and lower into the trees canopy.  Would he still be conscious once he had deflated fully?  Would that fade with as his gaseous interior vented itself into the atmosphere, a sort of balloon-alzheimers? Would he be dragged off by a mother bird at that point, fodder for a nest somewhere in the heights of another tree?  Would it hurt?  

Of course, that sort of thinking would set him off on another bout of silent, useless, inner-screaming, which he imagined, given voice would have been audible a town over.  Maybe even two.

When the sun is almost parallel with his height a loud crack interrupts the silence of a suburban evening.  He had been as close to sleeping as a sentient balloon can manage, having tired himself out with all the silent screaming and imagined tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth.  The surrounding street seems undisturbed by the noise.

    It had come from behind him though and so he could only wait as his seemingly inevitable and unending circular drift brought him around so that he could see the source of the noise.  It was likely a bird that had landing on branch, cracking it, just before it set about trying to pop him with a razor sharp beak.  That was how the day seemed to be going at any rate.

    His rotation continued uninterrupted and he maintained his current solidity.  What was it waiting for?  Why was it tormenting him?

    Finally after what seemed like an inexorably long time, a duration which did not seem to conform with the imperceptible downward slide of the sun’s descent, he came face to face, so to speak with the origin of the noise.  

    Across from him, sitting lightly on another branch, was a small man, blue of skin, wearing a shiny silver suit and a small, equally silver top hat.

    -Having fun yet? 

    His voice was like music.  He wasn’t singing but his words sounded like lyrics nonetheless.

    Suddenly it all came back to him.  He remembered this…man? thing? whatever he was, sitting on the edge of his bed, legs crossed over one another, his hands resting on his knee.  

    -What would you like the most he had asked?

    He had thought it a dream, this strange, silver suited man, not even a foot tall, who could make a top hat disappear off the crown of his head with just a snap of his fingers.  A small man who scoffed at his disbelief and instead made two shots of Jameson appear on a small tray held aloft on the back of a turtle that had similarly not been there a moment earlier.

    -Do you believe me now? he said, that same lilt in his voice.

    He realized that had he a mouth, he wouldn’t have had the words.

    -You did say you wanted to be content with your life didn’t you?  Your one wish?  It was contentment, no?  Did i get that wrong?   If you’re not happy just say the word and I’ll change you back?  

    Roland continued to rotate.  Silently. 

    -Perfect! Glad to see all things work out in the end then.  

    He disappeared with the same loud crack. 

    His voice stayed behind.  A final sentence audible after he left.

    -After all, what’s more content than single red balloon drifting aimlessly around.  

    Roland completed another full rotation, this time coming face to face with the sun as it met the horizon at what was surely terminal velocity.

    The little silver man’s final words hung in the air long after he had disappeared.

    Roland watched as the sun set, slowly sheathing itself in the earth for another night.  He wondered if he’d be facing the right way in the morning when it rose on the other side.

    He was surprised to find he was content to wait and see.

 

the end.