It's Still Life

What Remains When the River Leaves

The boy’s blue balloon escaped at the fair, and for three days it floated—over wheat fields, a highway slick with rain, the chimney where it bobbed, hesitant, in the rising heat.

On the fourth day, it settled in the branches of a winter-bare oak. A crow pecked it once. The pop sent a dozen starlings skyward, their wings stitching the air like freed needles.

By Sunday, all that was left was a rubber scrap, curled like a comma between roots.

“Balloons don’t die,” the boy insisted. “They just forget how to hold their breath.”