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the red balloons

chapter one

visits from large, irritated cows

The Red Balloons floated high into the sky to the delighted screams, and sometimes unexplained crying and whimpering, of the small children. It wasn’t long after this touching scene that the troubles began.

Late afternoon, the Principal was dismayed to see a great number of large bovines lining up outside the school, coming inside, making a racket of hooves on tile, heading towards her office.

The Principal sighed and tapped her pencil on the desk. The first cow looked huge in The Office, the calves rustling around it. The Principal would have no nurturing, no suckling in her office, none of that, and the calves were getting impatient and kept stumbling into furniture. But, nonetheless, the large cows, now lined up down the hall, crowding to see what was going on in The Office, would have their say this day.

“You know we eat the Red Balloons and then we, like, get sick and choke and throw up, and those that don’t, why sometimes, we croak and fall over and, like, die, especially the little ones,” rambled Mosey Two, a cow from the nearby Jenkins ranch, a small ranch now, a shadow of its original 5234 acres back in 1844, thanks to aggressive yet somehow maudlin development, bulldozers endlessly nibbling around the once great ranch.

(James M. Jenkins IV, not quite the man his great-great-grandfather was, often swore he would stop selling off parcels but he was only most adament about this after seven beers while sitting at Wildfire on his usual Friday night out. His shrinking ranch only bothered him half as much as his endless dark suspicions of his wife’s afflilations with the ranch secretary, both quiet unassuming women who often attended knitting parties, stories the bartenders had heard uncounted times.)

“Well, the Red Ballons symbolize just saying no to drugs, for the kids, you know, so they will be steered right, in their youth,” patiently explained the Principal, immediately blushing at her inadvertent pun.

Mosey Two paid no mind, though her huge cow eyes rolled a bit. This could have been actually due to the heat. Fanning herself, the Principal was worried the cows would soon faint and fall over, the School’s air conditioning system not equipped to have this crush of cow hugeness jammed into The Office, the halls, their huge cow bodies generating what seemed abnormal amounts of heat, especially the little calves, who were getting impatient for their afternoon snack.

The Principal blotted her forehead discretely, wiping away the sweat, giving the nod to several aides and assistants who ducked out to find the Maintenance Guys.

Back 1844, it was far simpler than this, and schools, what tiny schools there were, had no air conditioning. In fact, Old Man Jenkins, back then, often scoffed at the the notion of even wiring the one-room schoolhouse for “electricals” in what passed for downtown Georgetown at the time, claiming children, like cats and dogs and probably hamsters and gerbils, should rise with sunrise and sleep with sunset. (Old Man Jenkins never did understand cats were nocturnal animals. All the ranch felines mocked him behind his back anyway.)

Mosey Two’s ancestors, multiple generations and steaks back, would’ve agreed had they been aware of the discussion a’tall, cows not being as sophisticated and politically aware back then as they are nowadays.

Then the phone rang, that hideous warbling sound that she had grown to detest, and the Principal was disconcerted to find out the Mayor was coming over with his entourage on a fact-finding mission about The Red Balloons because, just that morning, a passel of squirrels showed up outside his office carrying above their little outstretched arms the inert sprawled body of one of their small fellows, the clear unmistakable remnants of a shiny red balloon tattering from its small squirrel mouth.

The Mayor was not pleased.

Coming Next: Mosey Two is joined by the Scientific Cows, long rumored to be part of the Green Party, for a demonstration with a captured red balloon of the uncanny stretching qualities whereby red balloons get caught in trees, birds fly into them unaware and are bounced back, fluttering mightily to regain their position not to mention their dignity, disrupting the natural rhythm of nature, and, eventually, resulting in Category Five Hurricanes in the Gulf around October end, just ruining Halloween. All this thanks to the Chaos Theory which is more of a fact than a theory, as researchers would sadly discover late 2007 on the Western seaboard.

Not that the Georgetown cow herds cared one whit about Halloween, you see, but bad weather could interfere with their dark secret pagan cow rites, such events not witnessed by many (thems that wanted to even remember such sightings) but events recently captured by a Discovery Channel team that camped out in what was left of the Baxter clan’s Easy-E Ranch, a shadow of its former self thanks to more relentless development and squandered mineral rights.

From the October 29, 2002 weekly blip, written during a new dawn, a new day, a new life, forever and ever, amen.

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Any resemblance of anyone in these fiction stories and seemingly disassociated ramblings about anybody living, dead, or in altered states is purely coincidental, all the character names are absolutely made up or chosen from thin air, products of overworked minds, figments of our imaginations, just a coincidence, stuff that occurred to us while driving to work or standing in line at the grocery store, above reproach, maybe a bit o’ satire now and then if we knew how to write satire, clearly an accident, we have no clue, ask our therapist, buy a Texas Lottery number, plant a tree, not our fault, we have no idea what happened, we were in Lonesome Town at that time or some other place, who knows, we don’t know, no one knows, and if we did know, we’d write a story about it. Written by Arden Henderson.

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