The sinister red balloon.

A sinister red balloon followed me home from school one day when I was a kid. It came right into the house with me, and floated up to the living room ceiling, rolling gently in the air currents. My mother didn't like it the minute she laid eyes on it.

"Get that thing out of the house, Timmy" she told me. "It's the wrong color red -- something's bad about that red color."

"S'not my balloon" I told her sullenly; she liked to blame me for everything in the world. "It just came along with me from school -- "

But before I could say anything else she exclaimed "Oh, my tuna fish gravy is burning!" and scuttled back into the kitchen, flapping her frilly apron in alarm. She turned up the radio to hide the smell.

Then my two sisters clambered onto the coffee table to grab the sinister red balloon, because they thought that would upset me. But they got blisters from handling it and went crying upstairs to put Ponds cold cream on their hands. Serves 'em right, is what I thought.

My big brother came home, with his dumb girlfriend, from high school, and tried to impress her by squeezing the sinister red balloon between his hands like a sponge to make it pop. But it wouldn't pop, no matter how hard he pushed his hands together. The balloon oozed out between his hands like a greasy red blob and floated back up to the ceiling. His dumb girlfriend looked at me like I was a plate full of thumb tacks and cottage cheese. 
"You should just shut up" she told me rudely. And I hadn't said anything. My older brother took her out into the garage so he could work on his crummy old car and they could make out in its musty leather backseat. 

Mom didn't wait for dad to come home for dinner. He always worked too late, and stopped at White Castle for a couple of sliders on his way home at night. After dinner mom got the broom and used the handle to prod the sinister red balloon out the front door. It floated slowly up into the branches of an elm tree and settled down for a long siege of our house.

It stayed lodged in the elm tree all winter. Even the banshee blizzards that came in February didn't move it or cause it to deflate. Snow piled up on top of it in a tight little cone, and icicles flowed down around its fist-shaped knot. That spring my friends and I started throwing rocks at it, to kill it, but we always missed. One of my rocks went far astray and broke a porch window at old Mrs. Henderson's house next door. Mom made me mow her lawn for free all summer long  to pay for the broken pane of glass. 

In July we went up to Lake Superior for two weeks on a family vacation. The beach was all slimy pebbles, and the water was too cold to stay in for long. The stove in our cabin emitted strings of black snaky smoke that wouldn't come off our hands and face unless we used a gritty pumice soap. I thought we were all cursed by some lake witch for disturbing her nearby cauldron or something, and made up my mind right then and there that there was no more happiness left in the world for me. 

When we got back home the sinister red balloon was gone. I thought that that would happiness to seep back into my life, but soon all the leaves on the elm turned a brownish yellow and dropped off. Then small branches snapped off in the slightest wind and cluttered up our yard with their brittle groveling. They were very hard to rake up with the rasping bamboo rake we had -- the bamboo tines snapped off like strands of uncooked spaghetti. And the tree began to stink -- dad said it was air pollution from the damn Purina feed plant down the road, but to me it smelled like fermented wood pulp; something I had once smelled at a newsprint factory on a field trip at school. The sinister red balloon had poisoned our elm tree as a final act of revenge before it lifted its siege.

That fall a man came to cut down the elm tree and used a chain saw to slice it up into logs for our fireplace. But our fireplace wasn't real -- there was no flue up the chimney, it was just a decorative brick gewgaw with a mantelpiece to place ceramic nondescripts on. So the logs were dumped helter-skelter in the backyard by the swing set to molder and turn ghostly gray. The pile sprouted lichen and moss and little club ferns, and housed a colony of voles that ate Mrs. Henderson's lapdog. Dad had them exterminated and then had my older brother load up the woodpile, log by log, into the back seat of his crummy old car to take down to the Mississippi to throw in the river. It took him six trips to get it all, and he lost his dumb girlfriend because she said his car was now full of nasty wood crickets that got in her hair. Turns out, though, he had a spare girlfriend waiting in the wings, and got her into the backseat of his car without missing a beat. She was a redhead, I remember, and gave me a packet of red birthday party balloons while smiling too wide, saying at the same time that she was from Duluth, on Lake Superior, and her cauldron was hungry for handsome little boys like me. I noticed all her teeth were pointy, just before I hit her in the face with my heavy leather baseball glove. 

This story is so true that I'm starting to forget it; that's why I've written it down and had it printed in the company newsletter several times.