Three children stand in their local park, chaperoned and duffled against the cold Spring morning. Each child has a bright balloon, round with helium, string gripped in a tight fist. Each balloon has a label: Please return this balloon to the address below with news of who you are and where you found it. This is a race so ready, steady, go.
(Two children will release their balloons. One will make it as far as a large town, fourteen miles away, where it will snag in a tree and be returned, as instructed, in a neat brown envelope. The other will, somehow, escape its string and raspberry around, at first giddy and comic then alarming, landing in limp dejection on the damp grass.)
One child hesitates, then does not let go. As her hair fills with static and her soles peel from the earth everyone points, shouts Look! It’s Winnie the Pooh! (children) or Quick, grab her feet! Oh shit! (parents). But she escapes beneath her blue balloon. She rises with great purpose and direction, leaving their organised fun and hollow authority far behind.
She climbs. The town falls away. It seems to become a map of itself. Roads become ribbons. Buildings become boxes. There go the schools, the offices. Everything flattens. The horizon spreads. She can see more towns and cities. She soars away, higher. She puzzles migrating birds, agitates airline pilots. She gathers speed. Arrows through the boozy drag of fat clouds. The world turns towards evening, freckled with lights. She races away into the star-stippled sky.
Up and up. Until the continents shrink and the oceans puddle.
On and on. Until the very place where the earth and the cosmos hinge. She stutters for a moment (an age), caught there on the horizon of a decision. To go? To return? The weight, the density snags her, sticks her. Suddenly still, then?
Her balloon tugs her free. Let’s go. Let’s go.
She floats, weightless now, past the slingshot tin can satellites, the farthest-flung flags thrust into these distant territories. A space station labours its dismal rotation as she sinks down through the widowed light from far-off dead stars into all the promise of wonder.
What matters here is depth not height, volume not velocity. Time lengthens as it becomes space. The possibilities are vast, way out here, alone, far away from the velcro-quotidian, surrounded by unmade and unbegun universes hanging silent - among bright lights waiting for their histories to start, ready for the bang. At last, she is seduced by the romance of potential and an epoch arrives.
She bobs, buoyant.
She lives.
And then (of course) it comes. Even here an end is inevitable.
She holds on as the balloon scuffs along the very edge, coming to a gentle rest upon the sharp pinpoint of
what
comes
next