Up, up and away

My mother drives us home after a meal at Duluth's Ground Round family restaurant in her dark orange Volkswagen Beetle, a quirky, tolerable pest still popular in its original form during the mid-1980s. I tightly hold my balloon, primary red like my favorite gum balls and with a long white plastic ribbon. The kind of ribbon I had always seen tied to the belly-button of balloons filled with the venerable lifting gas helium, noble in its lifting effects. This balloon is pumped full by a man in front of the table from a shiny aluminum, cylindrical tank. They tie the balloon to my high chair while my family eats.

I obsessively wind and then compulsively unwind synthetic white ribbon fibers around my fingers. Bursting with excitement, I squirm in the back seat of the two-door Bug at its full stop on the driveway in front of the garage. As my mother bends the lever to fold forward her driver's seat, I rush out, forgetting for a moment my balloon in the back seat. As I turn around, the balloon I had so carefully wrapped around my fingers all the way home bounces against the car's ceiling until a final bounce in the breeze releases what I had so carefully guarded against. I make a mistake and forget for a moment, unwinding the spiral ribbon from my small hand and wrist. Bouncing from the car ceiling with the wind, my balloon, compelled by wind and gravity, leaps for free air.

Eyes welling with fresh tears, I am unable to shift them from my increasingly blurry balloon, my eyes stare as it floats as the tiny dot enters an alien realm, becoming one of countless burning stars. My natively curly hair flaps in the air while I watch the balloon ascend, starkly red, rapidly becoming a pinpoint that disappears against the region's blue sky. I look away for a moment to first free myself from the car, difficult to enter and lacking two of four doors. “Mom!” I scream, realizing I have lost my precious item, “Mom!”

Slow to react—to divert momentarily her attention—my mother's hidden neck, her muscles and spine raise her head, so her eyes become visible. My mother does not realize the gravity of the situation, but she turns one hundred and eighty degrees, like a lazy Suzan. I witness visions composed by the atmosphere's layers until the last layer, something beyond the dots you see when you close your eyes. The sky blue runs vertiginously dark to deep indigo, toward the Aurora's cool and comforting nightly lights. Her bright blue eyes look to the early moon, a visage visible from Duluth on a clear afternoon. The remote dot hurdles toward space. Panicked by flashing internal images, I wonder where I can find its composite pieces, burst by subzero atmospheric temperatures, then lost in wet branches and anonymously hidden inside wild woods--woods resembling the linear demarcation between our family's yard.

Over the pavement, spirited and muddy canine paws run up to the deck, climbing the pinewood stairs. Hands slide up stained wood, dark like coffee, abounding in oily slivers due to a lack of weatherproofing and always ready to make contact. Stinging shards cling to hands, a ritual which allows passage to the house through the double-paned sliding door. I reason the balloon must at some point descend as it converges with this region's unknowable territory. I could possibly find it, I think, like a gold cache at the end of a rainbow which filters through the dewey grass on its descent, shining light on my face. In the evenings, I walk over to the raspberry bushes that line the woods to play for a moment on my swing. To keep me from getting lost in the feral woods, I hear in a high-pitched voice, “I'll get you my pretties, I'll get you,” as my father calls forth a warning into the woods that line our house, emulating The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West, which our family gathers to watch each spring for the film version's yearly broadcast. He insinuates that he will fatten me in a cage to cook me up, like Hansel and Gretel's witch. My uncontrolled adrenaline increasingly entraps me. I accept my father's evocation of fantastic, violent power which mythologizes him to me.