The children sat together at the table and blew up all of the balloons. The balloons came in a jumbo pack of 40. They were blue, yellow, green, red and uniformly round. One by one their delicate skins swelled with the carbon dioxide expelled by the children’s bodies, as well as some nitrogen and oxygen, water droplets, trace gases, microplastic particles, spit. Inflated, the balloons refused to remain confined to the surface of the table, falling in slow motion on to the worn lino, drifting, mingling, bumping into each other and the legs of the table and chairs and children, collecting dust and hair and static electricity, until the adults arrived. The adults tied short strings around their necks and tied the short strings at intervals along long strings that ran the length of the mildewed ceiling. They were supposed to be buoyant, joyous. Instead all 40 pointed heavily toward the floor, like ripe fruit, testicles, cartoon bombs, and none of the adults were able to remember from previous celebrations whether balloons had always hung this way. Perhaps the jumbo pack had been a tainted batch, one of them suggested. Perhaps there had been something wrong with the air that came out of the children.
The children cleared the floor of anything that was not a chair: a table, a basin, a rack of shoes. There were not enough chairs, so they went out to the shed and carried back a folded deckchair, a milking stool, a pale blue beanbag. The deckchair leaked beach sand and the beanbag leaked tiny, white balls, weightless as atoms. The children lined the assorted seats up in two rows beneath the drooping balloons. They set the Casio keyboard up on the countertop and argued over what preset tune to play. Then they took up their positions. The music started.
When the adults arrived they found a clear space in the centre of the hall and chairs in high stacks around the perimeter walls. The chairs were bendable plastic, red, each with an oval hole at the top of the back, like a hollow eye. They were stacked eight, 10 or 12 deep, fitted snugly together, each cradling the curve of the seat above. One person started to dismantle a stack and everybody else methodically followed suit, and the old lino gradually filled with chairs.
At times they were set up in rows; at times in concentric circles, but always with their legs overlapping, touching. At times the hall was a classroom, and at times it was a community centre, and at times it was a church. At times the adults were there to receive instruction, and at times they were there to participate in group therapy, and at times they were there to pray. There was always noise and silence, confession and revelation, fidgeting and calm, but only rarely did one of the adults sitting in a plastic chair graduate into the person who stood at the front, or in the centre, and spoke. Usually everybody stayed seated until the event was over, then rose up en masse and cleared the chairs away again, lifting them back into stacks, pushing them to the walls.
Every year the old people gathered in the square to mark an anniversary of the missing, and every year there was some debate about what symbolic colour the balloons ought to be, though the final decision was always either black or white; nobody ever suggested any of the other, less reverent shades. The old people arrived very early in the morning of the appointed day and sat together along the wall of the fountain to inflate the black or white balloons. They used a disposable tank of helium in place of their weakened lungs. They tied a knot in each balloon neck and then tied a short string above the knot. They held on to the balloons in unruly bunches for a respectful length of time before letting go and watching as they sailed up and separated, soaring over the fountain, the square, the city. Then the balloons lost sight of the old people and flew on past the city and over the mountains, past the mountains and over the sea. In time, weather popped them or knocked them down.
They shrivelled and disintegrated and became microplastic particles, as naturally as leaves becoming mud, stones becoming sand, evaporation becoming rain. Then the children breathed them in, and blew them back into new balloons.
The children pulled all the chairs out from under the desks to make space for their bodies. They lifted them on to the desk tops, stacked them two, three or four deep. Then the teacher showed them how to hide in the space vacated by the chairs, with their knees raised up to their ear lobes, their hands clasped over their heads, fingers interlaced. It was only a drill, and so as they crouched on the floor the children only imagined a scene of missiles falling through the mildewed ceiling, cartoon bombs, and how the chairs would bear the brunt of the impact, legs shooting off, plastic flesh being torn to shards, its graffiti fragmenting into a puzzle of nonsense language and dislocated symbols: a heart, a smiley face, a penis, a star.
The music stopped. The children shrieked and clawed, shoved and grabbed, punched and kicked each other aside, slamming themselves down into sitting positions. The gentlest lost and lost. The congregation of plastic chairs shrunk and shrunk until only the pale blue beanbag was left, marooned on the floor like a pale blue planet.
It had leaked a little since the game began; it had become simultaneously sagged and charged. It sat in a corona of white balls beneath the executed balloons, and waited to be claimed.
Sara Baume is the author of “Seven Steeples”
This is a new story commissioned by FT Weekend Magazine, written in response to an artwork by Aristeo Jiménez. Read the three other stories in the series by Vinson Cunningham, Yomi Ṣode and Rebecca Watson.
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