Deferred
“Look ma, balloons! Balloons!”
The velvet coat with embroidery around the wrist. The coat was a pale pink. His mother’s favourite colour. He always wished that she had got the red one instead, or the bright purple one so that he could be a magician in it when she wasn’t around.
“I can see them. You don’t have to wrench my fingers off my hand for that.”
How taut the strings were, the ones that held the balloons. And how big they were, floating there, yellow, full of promise. Like soap bubbles that don’t dissolve fast. Like dreams. His mother’s hand. He would do anything to hold them for one more time.
“Can I have balloons like that on my birthday? Like the big yellow ones you can see through. Please?”
Of course he had them on his birthday. Fifty-one of them, he had counted twice, fifty-one balloons tied to low branches in groups of five in their backyard. Happy Birthday Ronnie, the cake said, in cursive chocolate.
“Sure Ronnie. Yellow see-through balloons. Check.”
They stayed for two whole weeks after his birthday, the balloons. If bananas tried to look like giant grapes, they’d look like this. His mother had said one morning. Then she had read out to him one of her favourite poems. Later it became his favourite poem as well. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? He thought it was highly amusing when two weeks after his birthday, the balloons too shriveled up, like raisins. He was only seven then, and believed in trolls and dragons and dreams. And then they had to untie them and throw them away. The deflated rubbery dream carcasses. But the balloons never left him. They were always by his side, floating there, yellow and full of promise.
“Funny how you remember the details,” said Ronnie, now drunk, now crying, now twenty-one, now on a rooftop on a warm summer’s night. “Funny how you remember the details.” He said to himself and the night wind. The night wind replied, but details is life, life is details. “It’s called Impessionism moron,” he murmured. He looked at the bottles around him, three made six by his double-vision. He looked at the cityscape that surrounded him. He looked at his hands. He took another swig. “Chicago behold, the greatest artist is now standing here high above you where you cannot look down upon my balloons.”
“And why are there five suns in your landscape?”
“They’re not suns, sir. They’re balloons.”
“Are you trying to be funny boy?”
“No, sir.” But in middle school, Ronnie never talked back, he swallowed most of them: I’m just trying to draw something that means something to me. The trees and bridges don’t mean anything to me, neither do the ducks. I’ve never been to this place, I don’t know why I should try and copy that bridge and those bloody ducks.
“Bloody ducks. They can’t appreciate real beauty the way they used to.” Ronnie let an empty bottle fall from his hands. Had it been a movie, the bottle would be in focus, the building a blur of windows and city orange and yellow. The bottle would fall for two seconds, then crash onto the pavement, the camera capturing the shards catching light for a while before they flew out of sight, the city din would be removed, to replaced with something profound, maybe a piano piece playing in the background, to show contrast, to boast effects.
Truth is, it was not a movie. Ronnie Fanush was a normal guy (hey, that’s what most movie trailer says as well) but there’s no “but then one day, something changed his life” phase in Ronnie’s life. He didn’t meet a girl, he didn’t suddenly get zapped into another dimension nor did any bearded old man knock on his door to tell him that he had superpowers and was the chosen one who could save the world. Worst part: no one saved Ronnie’s world. So Ronnie who just dropped the empty bottle saw no slow-motion crash and heard no epiphanic piano. He simply sighed and cried all over again.
He cried because he thought his life was over. He had wanted to become a painter. He cried because nothing had happened to him although he had made it into art school, found that his medium was oil paint and discovered that he had a special talent to paint balloons. “If Picasso made it big by painting boxes, I’ll make it by painting balloons” was his motto, which he had imagined would be quoted some day, in Chicago Herald. He cried because he knew that it wouldn’t. He cried because he knew he was too drunk to think of anything else to do, but jump.
And jump he did.
So that’s it. This is how this story ends. In another jump. Another dream deferred. Or maybe it really ended this way.
And then Ronnie took a final breath, looked around—the city where he had spent twenty-one years gleamed red and yellow, dots and dashes, boxes and balloons for a final time, and then he plunged. For that one second where he still had his mind intact, he saw balloons everywhere. All around him, round, shiny, taking him along with them, floating there, yellow and full of promise.
Note:
My generated theme: Your story is about an artist in Chicago floating with balloons.
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