Cathy Ulrich
Something About a Balloon
And afterward, we’re on the crew helping clean everything up, broken plates and splinters from the wooden benches. You find something that could be the hollow shatter of someone’s tooth, show it to me in the cup of your gloved hand. I see you, later, slide it into your back pocket, and I want to tell you it’s not a thing you should keep, something cursed, something haunted. I can’t see your face under your mask, only recognize you by the way you turn your head from side to side before you bend to pick up another broken thing, put it in the black garbage bag they have provided, the way you only know me by the hunch of my shoulders when I see a yellow balloon draped over the edge of one of the tables. Something about it makes me think of the boy I saw on the news the night before, the way his body made that same sad arc before the camera cut away, and the balloon goes into my hand, and, then, into the bag.
Cathy Ulrich thinks there is something so sad about deflated balloons. Her work has been published in various journals, including Main Squeeze Literary Journal, trampset, and Washington Square Review.
