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The Third Balloon | Mar 14 2002

Two summers ago the guy on the first floor had a party in the backyard. It was a nice summer party with music and food and what smelled like a boatload of marijuana. The next morning I looked out my bathroom window and saw that there were two balloons stuck in the tree outside my bathroom-mate’s apartment. The balloons reminded me of old sneakers hanging from telephone wires—a thing I’d see in certain “bad” (read: black) neighborhoods we used to drive through, but never stop in, when I was kid. I wondered if my bathroom-mate, a man named Michael (one of three Michaels in the building at that time, out of five tenants), was going to try to get the balloons out of the tree, for they appeared close enough for Michael to nab them from his back window using a rake or mop or some other long thing with a curved thing at the end of it.

But Michael never did this. And now it’s over a year and half later and the balloons have long since gone limp. They’re the kind of balloons which when inflated are shaped like round pillows. One is mostly blue; the other, mostly silver. The strange part is, suddenly a third has joined them. Or did I miss this one before? It too is silver, a sibling of the other. I assume I must have come to think of there being just two balloons when really there were three, and so every time I looked out the bathroom window, I saw two, not three; or rather, saw three and yet failed to revise the thought in my head that there were two. Because the only other explanation is that the third balloon appeared there recently, deflated like the others, faded like the others, and caught in the same cluster of branches.