Sarah inflated balloon after balloon

by Brendan Todt

Sarah inflated balloon after balloon, and because she was so full of nothing, the balloons rose higher and higher into the air. She tied them to her sister’s mailbox—blue and black and dark green for it was her nephew’s birthday—and soon the balloons began to tug hard against the mailbox, then against the ground to which it was attached, through the mailbox, through the nephew, who now wrapped his arms around it.

Sarah watched, as Sarah often did. Do something, screamed the nephew. And Sarah, as she often did, did nothing. She saw the mailbox begin to unwind itself from the ground. Around the base, the dirt churned over and Sarah saw the roots of the flowers nearby. They were pale in the dark ground, and there was something intimate about them, almost embarrassing, the way they emerged like white undergarments exposed at a bad time at a bad place—like at a young boy’s birthday party. Please, shouted the nephew; Please!

Is it the mailbox to which he is so attached, Sarah wondered. Is it the balloons themselves? Do you have any idea how fantastic this is, Sarah wanted to say, but she was her sister’s sister, at her sister’s house, and though, according to her sister, Sarah did not know much, she knew enough not to say that.

Some times, said Sarah, we have to let these things go.

Long ago, she had let go of her sister, whom still she loved, so she sat, with her arms and legs around her nephew, who himself sat with arms and legs around the mailbox, which did not have arms or legs, but which had contained in its many years many things which it had subsequently learned to release.

Sarah held firm but did not try to pry the boy away from his mailbox: She had lived long and well enough to know that at some point his body would do for him that most necessary and most difficult work.