They moved silently, at almost imperceptible speed. Slowly, achingly slowly, infinitely patient, they drew closer to the ground as night grew deeper and the darkness grew thicker within the house. Hours passed, and as the air grew chilled and noble gases escaped the weak prison of permeable membrane, they rejected the inexorable pull of heaven and together began their downward spiral, intertwining and colliding, weaving a tangled web of bright color unseen and unseeable in the gathering dark.
Somewhere, far above, great waves of air and torrents of wind cycled and recycled into funnels of kinetic motion, spreading outward and away like ripples fleeing the watery splash of stone.
The house was silent, sleeping, lost to thought and dream but for the endless slice of blade through air. Behind closed doors, children twisted into sibilant curls around plush tokens and invisible animal spirits. Our door, as always, remained open — to greet the cooler airs of night, to welcome weary dreamers, to avail us to those who would drift into our fleeting world of heavy slumber.
They came to the stairs. Eleven of twelve, crawling above and across each other in soundless, infinitesimal stampede, brushing against the wooden steps with a touch lighter than feather, gentler than love. And they began to climb, as if drawn up and into the stairwell by some new form of gravity that lifted them from the warm embrace of wood and into a new world of moving airs and Morphean figures.
(I imagine them: moving at a speed only possible in dreams. A stop-motion flurry of wet earth giving rise to sprout, flower and bloom in the blink of two eyes, as they move from place to place without ever seeming to be in between. They move in a way that does not seem right for this world.)
They rose as if they were tide drawn to shore, up the stairs, around the bannisters, drawn higher, ever higher, until they gathered by the frame of our door. Four feet and a million miles from where my wife lay, sleeping, dreaming, unaware, they gathered. Sliding against one another. Jousting for position.
And then one of them pulled free — slipped from the surly bonds of earth and soared into the heart of the maelstrom.
In an instant, the house was alive with a fury of motion and sound, a terrible pounding of yielding body against unyielding solid, a terrible and vivid drumbeat that echoed through the hallways and stairwell and foyer and filled my sleeping ears like water flooding into chasm and LIKETHAT I shot awake and aware of that sound that pounding that terrible, relentless crash and I knew IknewIknewIknew that it was one of my children, one of my girls, up and confused in the middle of the night, suddenly falling into the darkness and down the stairs and breaking apart in a hundred final and awful and unfixable ways and without even knowing it I began screaming "NO! NO! NO! NO!" as I leapt from the bed and launched myself into the hallway desperate and terrified and my heart exploding from my chest and not even fully cognizant of facing the unfaceable reality of what I was hearing, what it meant, what it...
And found myself standing in my hallway, four-thirty in the morning, ten semi-deflated mylar balloons circling my ankles and calves like sharks circling prey. Their long, colorful ribbons trailing across my feet like tentacles. The eleventh, ensnared in the ceiling fan, pounding a syncopated beat against the plaster.
"Jesus fucking Christ," I said, as my wife stepped from the bed to look at me and what she had presumed was something, someone, coming loudly up the stairs.
I reached over, and turned the fan switch off. Unraveled the tangled ribbon from the fan, then gathered the eleven intruders together. Walked downstairs, where I discovered their missing brother - purple, sheepish - floating alone near our front door. Pulled them all into our dining room, next to the pile of new gifts and bags of crumpled wrapping paper from our daughters' birthday party the previous afternoon. Tied them securely to a chair. And then stood there, for a moment, trying to will my heart back into my chest.
There would be no more sleep, that night.
(The next morning, I brought them into my kitchen. I set the purple one aside, and then took a knife to the rest. I watched impassively as the helium fled their broken skins, and they collapsed into wrinkled husks. Eleven of twelve, one by one.)
