Balloon Boy Quotes

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word home means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bedroom when you were eight. See, I want to know the first time you felt the weight of hate, and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms or would leave your snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name, and if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you to tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. Tell me, knowing I often picture Gandhi at ten years old beating up little boys at school. If you were walking by a chemical plant where smokestacks were filling the sky with dark black clouds would you holler “Poison! Poison! Poison!” really loud or would you whisper “That cloud looks like a fish, and that cloud looks like a fairy!” Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin? Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea? And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me — how would you explain the miracle of my life to me? See, I wanna know if you believe in any god or if you believe in many gods or better yet what gods believe in you. And for all the times that you’ve knelt before the temple of yourself, have the prayers you asked come true? And if they didn’t, did you feel denied? And if you felt denied, denied by who? I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling bad. I wanna know the first person who taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. If you ever reach enlightenment will you remember how to laugh? Have you ever been a song? Would you think less of me if I told you I’ve lived my entire life a little off-key? And I’m not nearly as smart as my poetry I just plagiarize the thoughts of the people around me who have learned the wisdom of silence. Do you believe that concrete perpetuates violence? And if you do — I want you to tell me of a meadow where my skateboard will soar. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving, and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes from other people’s wounds, and if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon — that if you wanted to, you could pop, but you never would ‘cause you’d never want it to stop. If a tree fell in the forest and you were the only one there to hear — if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound, would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist, or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness? And lastly, let me ask you this: If you and I went for a walk and the entire walk, we didn’t talk — do you think eventually, we’d… kiss? No, wait. That’s asking too much — after all, this is only our first date.

Want your boat, Georgie?' Pennywise asked. 'I only repeat myself because you really do not seem that eager.' He held it up, smiling. He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons. A bright tie, electric-blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore. Yes, sure,' George said, looking into the stormdrain. And a balloon? I’ve got red and green and yellow and blue...' Do they float?' Float?' The clown’s grin widened. 'Oh yes, indeed they do. They float! And there’s cotton candy...' George reached. The clown seized his arm. And George saw the clown’s face change. What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke. They float,' the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held George’s arm in its thick and wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea. George craned his neck away from that final blackness and began to scream into the rain, to scream mindlessly into the white autumn sky which curved above Derry on that day in the fall of 1957. His screams were shrill and piercing, and all up and down Witcham Street people came to their windows or bolted out onto their porches. They float,' it growled, 'they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too–' George's shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy in a yellow rain-slicker, a small boy who was screaming and writhing in the gutter with muddy water surfing over his face and making his screams sound bubbly. Everything down here floats,' that chuckling, rotten voice whispered, and suddenly there was a ripping noise and a flaring sheet of agony, and George Denbrough knew no more. Dave Gardener was the first to get there, and although he arrived only forty-five seconds after the first scream, George Denbrough was already dead. Gardener grabbed him by the back of the slicker, pulled him into the street...and began to scream himself as George's body turned over in his hands. The left side of George’s slicker was now bright red. Blood flowed into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where his left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth. The boy’s eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell-mell down the street, they began to fill with rain.

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I’d be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don’t know, I guess finally I want to be alone a little while longer. And I want to let my thoughts wander freely.

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time... For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars... And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined our street... Or my grandmother's hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper... And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird... And Janie... And Janie... And... Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday.

...because there will never be any boy's wrist to tie the balloon of your helium heart to (it has floated high far away from the heavy stone of that unnameable boy in chicago), you would never be with someone and then someone else, and you would definitely never be someone to someone else's else.

I think all geniuses - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around.

The kind of laughter that keeps going until you’ve forgotten what was so funny in the first place. The kind that cements friendships instantly. A warm balloon expanded in me, lifting me for a few moments out of the shadows. When I caught my breath and came back to earth, I belonged around this fire, with these guys.

Sophie stood there all perky with her hands on her hips in a model-like stance, and a smile that showed way too many pearly whites…and a helium balloon that shouted It’s A Boy!!! “Nice balloon, Sophie,” he said, slightly amused. “What?” she asked, all innocently. “They were out of Get Well.” The hell they were. This little stunt was so Sophie. I knew exactly what that balloon meant – that I came into this hospital alone but I was gonna leave it with a boy wrapped in my arms. Sophie probably thinks he’s ready to suckle my breasts too.

A boy was staring at me. I was quite sure I'd never seen him befroe. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed and the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggresively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans. I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this pageboy haircut, and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the canckle situation. And yet-I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me.

Even as he spoke, the boy appeared to have forgotten the subject, as if it was a balloon he had abandoned to the sky.

I felt this boy whose name I couldn't be bothered to remember grunting and heaving inside me; I was that empty and that far away. And suddenly I knew what became of all those lost balloons: they were the loves that slipped out of our fists; the blank eyes that rose in every night sky.

The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.

Don’t worry. I’m going to give you a balloon, Grandpa. So you can have it in space.”   “A balloon won’t stop me from disappearing, Noahnoah.” Grandpa sighs.   “I know. But you’ll get it on your birthday. As a present.”   “That sounds unnecessary.” Grandpa smiles.   The boy nods.   “If you keep hold of it you’ll know that right before you went into space someone gave you a balloon. And it’s the most unnecessary present anyone can get because there’s absolutely no need for a balloon in space. And that’ll make you laugh.”   Grandpa closes his eyes. Breathes in the boy’s hair.   “That’s the best present I’ve never been given.

Anyhow, even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn't be able to concentrate. I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I'd be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don't know, I guess finally I want to be alone a little while longer. And I want to let my thoughts wander freely. In that sense, I guess, I'm probably still "on the road to recovery.

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home. Silver and blue, blue and silver. Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears. The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be. Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed. “Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass. The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon. Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.” Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it? The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light? Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand. “Stop,” he calls. “Halt,” he calls. But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

He could no more resist pricking the conceits, the hypocrisies and the flamboyant patriotism of those about him than a small boy can resist putting a pin into a balloon. He neatly deflated the pompous and exposed the ignorant and the bigoted, and he did it in such subtle ways, drawing his victims out by his seemingly courteous interest, that they never were quite certain what had happened until they stood exposed as windy, high flown and slightly ridiculous.

Thumb-rule in Equity markets is that big boys chase either your shares or your money ... In former case, they will beat down the share so cheap that you will be forced to sell it ... In latter case, they will balloon the prices to an extent that you will be lured to buy!! Either way, heads they win, tails you lose!!!

And so it went. OxyContin first, introduced by reps from Purdue Pharma over steak and dessert and in air-conditioned doctors’ offices. Within a few years, black tar heroin followed in tiny, uninflated balloons held in the mouths of sugarcane farm boys from Xalisco driving old Nissan Sentras to meet-ups in McDonald’s parking lots. Others,

I explored the literature of tree-climbing, not extensive, but so exciting. John Muir had swarmed up a hundred-foot Douglas Spruce during a Californian windstorm, and looked out over a forest, 'the whole mass of which was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire!' Italo Calvino had written his The Baron in the Trees, Italian editionmagical novel, The Baron in the Trees, whose young hero, Cosimo, in an adolescent huff, climbs a tree on his father's forested estate and vows never to set foot on the ground again. He keeps his impetuous word, and ends up living and even marrying in the canopy, moving for miles between olive, cherry, elm, and holm oak. There were the boys in B.B.'s Brendan Chase, who go feral in an English forest rather than return to boarding-school, and climb a 'Scotch pine' in order to reach a honey buzzard's nest scrimmed with beech leaves. And of course there was the realm of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin: Pooh floating on his sky-blue balloon up to the oak-top bee's nest, in order to poach some honey; Christopher ready with his pop-gun to shoot Pooh's balloon down once the honey had been poached....

...I realized that even when people know the pep talk is phony, they still want to hear it. Maybe it was easier to believe a lie when somebody else was saying it rather than you saying it to yourself.

She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker and she starts writing on the dozen or so balloons, one for each member of our family who died. She doesn't think she can write well and asks me not to read her notes. She likes to think they'll soar all the way to heaven. I think she knows they end up tangled in power lines or deflated in a pile of orange leaves in someone's backyard miles away, but I can never bring myself to say that to her. I've often wondered what they must think, those people who find our balloons. I've wondered if they read the messages and understand what they mean. I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring toward the sun until I began to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.

They looked like her, or she looked like them. Something in between, something she didn’t know the name of but recognized. A lightness filled her, the way it had when her mother had cut her hair and she’d first put on boys’ clothes. She opened her mouth and let the lightness escape, almost surprised not to see a bubble or a balloon floating away from her, like in the pictures in front of her. How could one feel like this and not be flying? Like the Aerostat or a balloon; like Harriet before she

There's a joke about the balloon boy who has a balloon mum and a balloon dad and he goes to a balloon school with balloon friends ad a balloon principal. And one day, the balloon boy decides to take a pin to his balloon school, which is, of course, a disaster. And he's called into the balloon principal's office, and the balloon principal tells him, 'You've let me down, you've let your school down, you've let your parents down, you've let your friends down. But most importantly you've let yourself down'.

I think all - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around.

An older boy pointed. “Look,” he told his friend. “It’s Violet Beauregarde!” That was the bratty girl in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who turned blue and ballooned into a huge ball. I was puffy because they’d pumped me up with steroids to get me ready for surgery. I ran to Mom, who was sitting on the edge. I stuffed my face in her breasts. “What is it, Bee?” “They called me it,” I squeaked. “It?” Mom’s eyes were across from mine. “Violet Beauregarde,” I managed to say, then burst into fresh tears. The mean boys huddled nearby, looking over, hoping my mom wouldn’t rat them out to their moms. Mom called to them, “That’s really original, I wish I’d thought of that.” I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn’t fall, because Mom was in the world.

On the way to after-prom, Peter says he’s hungry, and can we stop at the diner first. “I think there’s going to be pizza at after-prom,” I say. “Why don’t we just eat there?” “But I want pancakes,” he whines. We pull into the diner parking lot, and after we park, he gets out of the car and runs around to the passenger side to open my door. “So gentlemanly tonight,” I say, which makes him grin. We walk up to the diner, and he opens the door for me grandly. “I could get used to this royal treatment,” I say. “Hey, I open doors for you,” he protests. We walk inside, and I stop short. Our booth, the one we always sit in, has pale pink balloons tied around it. There’s a round cake in the center of the table, tons of candles, pink frosting with sprinkles and Happy Birthday, Lara Jean scrawled in white frosting. Suddenly I see people’s heads pop up from under the booths and from behind menus--all of our friends, still in their prom finery: Lucas, Gabe, Gabe’s date Keisha, Darrell, Pammy, Chris. “Surprise!” everyone screams. I spin around. “Oh my God, Peter!” He’s still grinning. He looks at his watch. “It’s midnight. Happy birthday, Lara Jean.

We are Volunteers Fighting Disease, And we’re cheerful all day long. If someone said that we were sad, That person would be wrong. We visit people who are sick, And try to make them smile, Even if their noses bleed, Or if they cough up bile. Tra la la, Fiddle dee dee, Hope you get well soon. Ho ho ho, hee hee hee, Have a heart-shaped balloon. We visit people who are ill, And try to make them laugh, Even when the doctor says He must saw them in half. We sing and sing all night and day, And then we sing some more. We sing to boys with broken bones And girls whose throats are sore. Tra la la, Fiddle dee dee, Hope you get well soon. Ho ho ho, hee hee hee, Have a heart-shaped balloon. We sing to men with measles, And to women with the flu, And if you breathe in deadly germs, We’ll probably sing to you. Tra la la, Fiddle dee dee, Hope you get well soon. Ho ho ho, hee hee hee, Have a heart-shaped balloon.

During this pep rally, the cheerleaders would call two members of each class, one boy, one girl, to come down and take part in some embarrassing game--a relay race, or water balloon toss, or singing competition--all in the name of school spirit. Invariably, I was the seventh-grade boy called down. I suspected that this is because the head cheerleader was Rob Cantrell's girlfriend. No misery I feel as an adult can match what I felt as I carefully stepped my way between the kids down the bleachers to the floor. The high school kids called my name, again and again, in falsetto, "Ves! Vessy!" and made kissing noises. Then I tried to run like a boy in the relay race, or sing whatever stupid song I was forced to sing in a voice quiet and masculine. [...] The next year the torture continued, but in a different way. It was less creative, a simple "Fag," as I passed the boys in the hall. What could they do? I didn't give them material anymore. I had swallowed my voice, and my walk was utterly nondescript.

Whether you're a bride or a birthday boy, your options are much the same. Cake comes in chocolate, yellow, or white. Frosting comes in chocolate or vanilla buttercream, or you can opt for whipped cream. Fillings are either chocolate or vanilla custard, fresh bananas, or strawberries or raspberries in season. For birthday cakes, you can have either flowers or balloons in your choice of colors. For wedding cakes, you can add either fondant or marzipan covering, or either smooth or basket-weave buttercream, in white or ivory, with either pearl-like dots or ribbony swags made of frosting, and fondant faux flowers are extra.

We walk inside, and I stop short. Our booth, the one we always sit in, has pale pink balloons tied around it. There’s a round cake in the center of the table, tons of candles, pink frosting with sprinkles and Happy Birthday, Lara Jean scrawled in white frosting. Suddenly I see people’s heads pop up from under the booths and from behind menus--all of our friends, still in their prom finery: Lucas, Gabe, Gabe’s date Keisha, Darrell, Pammy, Chris. “Surprise!” everyone screams. I spin around. “Oh my God, Peter!” He’s still grinning. He looks at his watch. “It’s midnight. Happy birthday, Lara Jean.” I leap up and hug him. “This is just exactly what I wanted to do on my prom night birthday and I didn’t even know it.” Then I let go of him and run over to the booth. Everyone gets out and hugs me. “I didn’t even know people knew it was my birthday tomorrow! I mean today!” I say. “Of course we knew it was your birthday,” Lucas says. Darrell says, “My boy’s been planning this for weeks.” “It was so endearing,” Pammy says. “We called me to ask what kind of pan he should use for the cake.” Chris says, “He called me, too. I was like, how the hell should I know?” “And you!” I hit Chris on the arm. “I thought you were leaving to go clubbing!” “I still might after I steal some fries. My night’s just getting started, babe.” She pulls me in for a hug and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Happy birthday, girl.” I turn to Peter and say, “I can’t believe you did this.” “I baked that cake myself,” he brags. “Box, but still.” He takes off his jacket and pulls a lighter out of his jacket pocket and starts lighting the candles. Gabe pulls out a lit candle and helps him. Then Peter hops his butt on the table and sits down, his legs hanging off the edge. “Come on.” I look around. “Um…” That’s when I hear the opening notes of “If You Were Here” by the Thompson Twins. My hands fly to my cheeks. I can’t believe it. Peter’s recreating the end scene from Sixteen Candles, when Molly Ringwald and Jake Ryan sit on a table with a birthday cake in between them. When we watched the movie a few months ago, I said it was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. And now he’s doing it for me.

June Afternoon" Didn't I tell you everything is possible in this deja vu? Try the river boat, the carousel, feed the pigeons, Bar-B-Q. Look at all the people, happy faces all around. Smiling, throwing kisses, busy making lazy sounds It's a bright June afternoon, it never gets dark. Wah-wah! Here comes the sun. Get your green, green tambourine, let's play in the park. Wah-wah! Here comes the sun Some folks are on blankets, slowly daydreaming and reaching for their food. Let's go buy an ice-cream and a magazine with an attitude and put on a cassette, we can pretend that you're a star cos life's so very simple just like la-la-la It's a bright June afternoon... There's a painter painting his masterpiece. There are some squirrels jumping in the trees, There's a wide-eyed boy with a red balloon. All my life I've longed for this afternoon.

I was on my way to talk to Davis when the car hit me". . . . . . "A dark figure emerged from the shadows, half-lit by the glittering streetlight and the pale glow of the moon". . . . . . . "Huge black wings erupted out of her back like a blooming rose. She was beautiful." . . . . "I knew who this woman was.’Are you Death?'" . . . . . “'Most people have something holding them down to this world,' she said, 'like a tether on a balloon. It could be something material, a person, or persons, an unfinished goal. There are many reasons to want to keep living. I wonder, Juvenalius, what is yours?' I smiled just thinking about it. 'His name’s Davis.' Her hand stroked my cheek so gently I wanted to cry. 'Tell me about him,' she whispered." And Juvenalius does. And you will be transfixed as Juve's first friend comes to life in his memory in this Tale with a gay twist.

The professor pointed out how he could drop a keel and a propeller into the water, in case he came down at sea, and after cutting the gas bag loose he'd have a seaworthy boat. He had everything on board for survival at sea, including fancy fishing gear, flares and weather balloons for distress signals, and both shortwave radio equipment and a low-frequency system for round-the-world communications. "Boy! This is somethin' right out of Jules Verne...only better, maybe," said Homer. You are right, Mr. Snodgrass," said the professor. "It is ze only way to travel. You don't go so fast, but it beats swimming! Yes? And we have everysing for safety and comfort at sea, if we have to come down. Ze only thing we have to worry about is piranhas. Oh, zey are terrible! Zey will eat everysing in sight!" "Piranhas?" Homer gasped. "I thought they were only found in South American Rivers?" "Oh?" said the professor. "Do ze piranhas know zat, Mr. Snodgrass?

Knock, knock. Who's there? A: Lettuce Q: Lettuce who? A: Lettuce in, it's freezing out here.. . 2. Q: What do elves learn in school? A: The elf-abet . 3. Q: Why was 6 afraid of 7? A: Because: 7 8 9 . . 4. Q. how do you make seven an even number? A. Take out the s! . 5. Q: Which dog can jump higher than a building? A: Anydog – Buildings can’t jump! . 6. Q: Why do bananas have to put on sunscreen before they go to the beach? A: Because they might peel! . 7. Q. How do you make a tissue dance? A. You put a little boogie in it. . 8. Q: Which flower talks the most? A: Tulips, of course, 'cause they have two lips! . 9. Q: Where do pencils go for vacation? A: Pencil-vania . 10. Q: What did the mushroom say to the fungus? A: You're a fun guy [fungi]. . 11. Q: Why did the girl smear peanut butter on the road? A: To go with the traffic jam! . 11. Q: What do you call cheese that’s not yours? A: Nacho cheese! . 12. Q: Why are ghosts bad liars? A: Because you can see right through them. . 13. Q: Why did the boy bring a ladder to school? A: He wanted to go to high school. . 14. Q: How do you catch a unique animal? A: You neak up on it. Q: How do you catch a tame one? A: Tame way. . 15. Q: Why is the math book always mad? A: Because it has so many problems. . 16. Q. What animal would you not want to pay cards with? A. Cheetah . 17. Q: What was the broom late for school? A: Because it over swept. . 18. Q: What music do balloons hate? A: Pop music. . 19. Q: Why did the baseball player take his bat to the library? A: Because his teacher told him to hit the books. . 20. Q: What did the judge say when the skunk walked in the court room? A: Odor in the court! . 21. Q: Why are fish so smart? A: Because they live in schools. . 22. Q: What happened when the lion ate the comedian? A: He felt funny! . 23. Q: What animal has more lives than a cat? A: Frogs, they croak every night! . 24. Q: What do you get when you cross a snake and a pie? A: A pie-thon! . 25. Q: Why is a fish easy to weigh? A: Because it has its own scales! . 26. Q: Why aren’t elephants allowed on beaches? A:They can’t keep their trunks up! . 27. Q: How did the barber win the race? A: He knew a shortcut! . 28. Q: Why was the man running around his bed? A: He wanted to catch up on his sleep. . 29. Q: Why is 6 afraid of 7? A: Because 7 8 9! . 30. Q: What is a butterfly's favorite subject at school? A: Mothematics. Jokes by Categories 20 Mixed Animal Jokes Animal jokes are some of the funniest jokes around. Here are a few jokes about different animals. Specific groups will have a fun fact that be shared before going into the jokes. 1. Q: What do you call a sleeping bull? A: A bull-dozer. . 2. Q: What to polar bears eat for lunch? A: Ice berg-ers! . 3. Q: What do you get from a pampered cow? A: Spoiled milk.

Everyone knew there had never been a cowardly Confederate soldier and they found this statement peculiarly irritating. He always referred to the soldiers as “our brave boys” or “our heroes in gray” and did it in such a way as to convey the utmost in insult. When daring young ladies, hoping for a flirtation, thanked him for being one of the heroes who fought for them, he bowed and declared that such was not the case, for he would do the same thing for Yankee women if the same amount of money were involved. Since Scarlett’s first meeting with him in Atlanta on the night of the bazaar, he had talked with her in this manner, but now there was a thinly veiled note of mockery in his conversations with everyone. When praised for his services to the Confederacy, he unfailingly replied that blockading was a business with him. If he could make as much money out of government contracts, he would say, picking out with his eyes those who had government contracts, then he would certainly abandon the hazards of blockading and take to selling shoddy cloth, sanded sugar, spoiled flour and rotten leather to the Confederacy. Most of his remarks were unanswerable, which made them all the worse. There had already been minor scandals about those holding government contracts. Letters from men at the front complained constantly of shoes that wore out in a week, gunpowder that would not ignite, harness that snapped at any strain, meat that was rotten and flour that was full of weevils. Atlanta people tried to think that the men who sold such stuff to the government must be contract holders from Alabama or Virginia or Tennessee, and not Georgians. For did not the Georgia contract holders include men from the very best families? Were they not the first to contribute to hospital funds and to the aid of soldiers’ orphans? Were they not the first to cheer at “Dixie” and the most rampant seekers, in oratory at least, for Yankee blood? The full tide of fury against those profiteering on government contracts had not yet risen, and Rhett’s words were taken merely as evidence of his own bad breeding. He not only affronted the town with insinuations of venality on the part of men in high places and slurs on the courage of the men in the field, but he took pleasure in tricking the dignified citizenry into embarrassing situations. He could no more resist pricking the conceits, the hypocrisies and the flamboyant patriotism of those about him than a small boy can resist putting a pin into a balloon. He neatly deflated the pompous and exposed the ignorant and the bigoted, and he did it in such subtle ways, drawing his victims out by his seemingly courteous interest, that they never were quite certain what had happened until they stood exposed as windy, high flown and slightly ridiculous.

The very next morning It was Valentine’s Day! They grabbed all their cards and went on their way. The classroom was decked out in red, pink, and white, with balloons and streamers, so festive and bright. Someone dropped by with a giant bouquet addressed to the teacher, who blushed right away. The card was signed “From a secret admirer,” but everyone knew it was Mr. O’Meyer! They played pin the heart and won goofy toys, and girls ran away from kissy-face boys. The art teacher came and painted kids’ faces. She put hearts on cheeks and sillier places! At last it was time to deliver the cards. Look! One for Lisa, Jim, and Bernard. They opened them up, read them and smiled, and laughed at the cards that were totally wild. Then they ate goodies, sweet cherries, and grapes, and drank punch with ice cubes in little heart shapes. And just when they thought the party was done, a knock on the door came at quarter past one. When what to their wondering eyes should appear, but the principal himself dressed in full Cupid gear! His arrows--how golden! His bow--curved and tight! The wig that he wore was a comical sight. He spoke not a word and was gone in a minute, leaving a present behind. Now what could be in it? They read Cupid’s note as he leapt down the hall: “Happy Valentine’s Day-- to one and to all!

Luca waits patiently while she clutches him, kisses him, pats his cheek, muttering “mio bellissimo figlio,” “my beautiful son,” something an English boy would loathe and detest with every fiber of his being. Luca doesn’t seem to mind at all: Italian boys are clearly very used to being complimented in public by their mothers. Finally he detaches himself, kisses Catia goodbye, and looks over at me. I realize I’m between him and the main door. I actually start to slip behind the armchair, as if I need a barricade between me and Luca; I’m frightened, physically frightened, of what might happen if he kisses me in public. Not that we might become overcome with passion, nothing that silly, just that I might give myself away, cling to him like the principessa just did… “Violetta,” he says softly, and before I know it, he’s crossed the room to me with two brief strides of his long legs. He takes hold of my shoulders, looks down at me. I brace myself. But he doesn’t kiss me at all. He just says, equally softly, “A presto,” releases me, and walks out of the salon. There’s silence for a long moment as we all watch him go: then, like air whizzing out of a balloon, we all deflate. No more excitement for us. The hot boy has left the building.

There’s silence for a long moment as we all watch him go: then, like air whizzing out of a balloon, we all deflate. No more excitement for us. The hot boy has left the building.

Day an' night they set in a room with a checker-board on th' end iv a flour bar'l, an' study problems iv th' navy. At night Mack dhrops in. 'Well, boys,' says he, 'how goes th' battle?' he says. 'Gloryous,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'Two more moves, an' we'll be in th' king row.' 'Ah,' says Mack, 'this is too good to be thrue,' he says. 'In but a few brief minyits th' dhrinks'll be on Spain,' he says. 'Have ye anny plans f'r Sampson's fleet?' he says. 'Where is it?' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'I dinnaw,' says Mack. 'Good,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'Where's th' Spanish fleet?' says they. 'Bombardin' Boston, at Cadiz, in San June de Matzoon, sighted near th' gas-house be our special correspondint, copyright, 1898, be Mike O'Toole.' 'A sthrong position,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'Undoubtedly, th' fleet is headed south to attack and seize Armour's glue facthory. Ordher Sampson to sail north as fast as he can, an' lay in a supply iv ice. Th' summer's comin' on. Insthruct Schley to put on all steam, an' thin put it off again, an' call us up be telephone. R-rush eighty-three millyon throops an' four mules to Tampa, to Mobile, to Chickenmaha, to Coney Island, to Ireland, to th' divvle, an' r-rush thim back again. Don't r-rush thim. Ordher Sampson to pick up th' cable at Lincoln Par-rk, an' run into th' bar-rn. Is th' balloon corpse r-ready? It is? Thin don't sind it up. Sind it up. Have th' Mulligan Gyards co-op'rate with Gomez, an' tell him to cut away his whiskers. They've got tangled in th' riggin'. We need yellow-fever throops. Have ye anny yellow fever in th' house? Give it to twinty thousand three hundherd men, an' sind thim afther Gov'nor Tanner. Teddy Rosenfelt's r-rough r-riders ar-re downstairs, havin' their uniforms pressed. Ordher thim to th' goluf links at wanst. They must be no indecision. Where's Richard Harding Davis? On th' bridge iv the New York? Tur-rn th' bridge. Seize Gin'ral Miles' uniform. We must strengthen th' gold resarve. Where's th' Gussie? Runnin' off to Cuba with wan hundherd men an' ar-rms, iv coorse. Oh, war is a dhreadful thing. It's ye'er move, Claude,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. "An

One time, I spent six months back in time. I fell in love with a boy who had no obligation to love a world that only gave him gray skies and loneliness.

I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring towards the sun until I begin to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.

When you are a senior boy in an English Public School, you perhaps reach the pinnacle of your self-importance.

Each family was required to have two things in order to be chosen. They had to have: a) one boy and one girl between the ages of three and eight; and b) they had to have definite creative interests, such as interests in painting, writing, the sciences, music, architecture, medicine. These two requirements would not only assure future generations of Krakatoa citizens; but also he assumed that people with creative interests are not liable to be too bored on a small desolate island; and people with inventive interests can more easily cope with unusual situations and form a stronger foundation for a cultured heredity.

In the balloons of grandeur that kept Stephenson aloft, the presidency was just a few puffs of helium away. “Boys, I’m not in this for the money,” he told his cronies. “You’re going to put me in the White House.

In another second he had turned on full power, the propellers whizzed with the quickness of light, and he rose in the air, off the shed roof, the live wire no longer entangling him. Then he made a short circuit of the work-shop yard, and came to the ground safely a little distance from the balloon hangar. "Saved! Tom is saved!" cried Mr. Swift, who had seen the act of Mr. Peterson from a distance. "He saved my boy's life!

When the Afang growled, the bushes shook and the oak leaves trembled on the branches, as if a strong wind was blowing. But after its dinner, when it had swallowed down a man, or two calves, or four sheep, or a fat heifer, or three goats, its body swelled up like a balloon. Then it usually rolled over, lay along the ground, or in the soft mud, and felt very stupid and sleepy, for a long while. All around its lair, lay wagon loads of bones of the creatures, girls, women, men, boys, cows, and occasionally a donkey, which it had devoured.

There had to be something near racial parity in the early stages because setting up the infernal machine required at least as many Europeans as Africans. Consequently, the original contact language had to be not too far from the language of the slave owners. Because at this stage Europeans were teaching Africans what they had to do, the contact language had to be intelligible to native speakers of the European language. Because so many interactions were between Europeans and Africans, the latter would have much better access to that European language than at any later stage in plantation history. We should remember that Africans, unlike modern Americans, do not regard monolingualism as a natural state, but expect to have to use several languages in the course of their lives. (In Ghana, our house-boy, Attinga, spoke six languages-two European, four African-and this was nothing out of the ordinary.) But as soon as the infrastructure was in place, the slave population of sugar colonies had to be increased both massively and very rapidly. If not, the plantation owners, who had invested significant amounts of capital, would have gone bankrupt and the economies of those colonies would have collapsed. When the slave population ballooned in this way, new hands heavily outnumbered old hands. No longer did Europeans instruct Africans; now it was the older hands among the Africans instructing the new ones, and the vast majority of interactions were no longer European to African, the were African to African. Since this was the case, there was no longer any need for the contact language to remain mutually intelligible with the European language. Africans in positions of authority could become bilingual, using one language with Europeans, another with fellow Africans. The code-switching I found in Guyana, which I had assumed was a relatively recent development, had been there, like most other things, from the very beginning. In any case, Africans in authority could not have gone on using the original contact language even if they'd wanted to. As we saw, it would have been as opaque to the new arrivals as undiluted French or English. The old hands had to use a primitive pidgin to communicate with the new hands. And, needless to add, the new hands had to use a primitive pidgin to communicate with one another. Since new hands now constituted a large majority of the total population, the primitive pidgin soon became the lingua franca of that population. A minority of relatively privileged slaves (house slaves and artisans) may have kept the original contact language alive among themselves, thus giving rise to the intermediate varieties in the continuum that confronted me when I first arrived in Guyana. (For reasons still unknown, this process seems to have happened more often in English than in French colonies.) But it was the primitive, unstructured pidgin that formed the input to the children of the expansion phase. Therefore it was the children of the expansion phase-not the relatively few children of the establishment phase, the first locally born generation, as I had originally thought-who were the creators of the Creole. They were the ones who encountered the pidgin in its most basic and rudimentary form, and consequently they were the ones who had to draw most heavily on the inborn knowledge of language that formed as much a part of their biological heritage as wisdom teeth or prehensile hands.

The evening air smelled like secrets. The breeze that stirred his hair had been places Matt could only imagine. It had twined through trees and ushered clouds and whistled through caves. It had slid on its belly over desert sands and swirled snow on mountaintops. It had ruffled the feathers of baby eagles and extinguished the matches of sailors far out to sea. It had stolen balloons and floated bubbles. It was timeless. It had swept dust off the backs of dinosaurs, filled the lungs of pharaohs, and it would abrade the bones of the last human to fall on some distant, devastated plain. But tonight it was here, in this little town, fluttering curtains, rattling blinds, and caressing the face of a ten-year-old boy with a troubled mind.

A Communist soldier told my family that a big truck would come for the men in the morning. The trucks had been picking up men and boys from their village for months. Those who had gone on the trucks had not returned. The soldiers said that they were sent to reeducation camps, but the family knew better. All over the mountain villages, people could smell the strong stench of rotten flesh coming from the jungle. Women and girls followed the smell in search of the men they loved. Sometimes the bodies were in a pile. Other times the bodies would be in different spots. Close to my father’s village, Grandma and my uncles had found the body of a young boy inches away from his father. He had left finger tracks on the ground where he had been pulled away from his father. He was sliced at the throat. The father had been shot. Most of the time, the bodies were remnants, half eaten by wild animals. What remained was bloated and blue, flesh ballooning from stained, torn clothes. The Hmong of Phou Bia mountain knew that the coming of the trucks meant death. My father’s family knew that they had to leave their village before the soldiers arrived with their guns on the big trucks.

It's like crawling into a cave I always knew was there but never explored. I remember putting my head into his salesman's briefcase when I was young. This time the bright eye I entered pulls away, a helium balloon. The musty air wheezes, sighs trapped for years in old motel rooms. Further down the sound turns to grey drippings that fall on my cheeks. Some boy has been here before. Burned matches in a corner, a tennis shoe, unreadable scratchings on the walls. This is far enough. Turning to find my way out, I tiptoe along a narrow black stream where white hands are rising, sinking. I find myself stepping into the water: like slipping my small feet into large dark shoes, it is deeper than I expected. Up to my knees, my waist, I see the opening again— a circle of sky cut with a dull car key, a blue mouth singing a melody I know by heart but have never heard before. As I go under, my arms, thick as my father's, reach above the surface then return to embrace me.

Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man’s instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years’ curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off.

Knocking on their door, a panther's paw that rubbed until it became a pounding no one responded to. He tried the handle. They were there all right, fancy pretending like that, it wasn't as if he had disturbed them from sleeping. He coughed, and gasped, while walking rapidly up and down the landing. Should he go back into his room, shout from there, scream in fact, as though in the middle of a nightmare? He remained at the top of the stairs, cutoff from the rest of the house, the neighbourhood. Had they gone out, or were they dead— copulating too fast, too much? He moved down one stair head bowed considering the best way into the next event. The other doors had, during his stay, remained part of the walls, a slight murmur or hum of a radio escaped occasionally through a crack. But if he knocked, enquired the time, wouldn't the crack immediately be sealed, not even space for an eye, let alone his finger? He hovered on the front door step, two hundred yards from the Palais de Dance. Coloured tickets, spent out balloons, contraceptives divided pavement from road. Berg leaned slightly forward in order to see the pub clock. On his back he stared at the buildings that were giants advancing. Snatch the stars, pull out the moon for my navel, a button hole for my own personal identification. A shadow pushed itself across his face. He spread out his arms. I implore to be left where I am, as I have been given, I am satisfied, attuned to my world. He shut his eyes, and foetus-curled from the pavement. His lips, dry leaves, slowly parted. Have I ever been inside? Edith's tears, not coping, timid amongst robust mums. You discovered: dormitory pleasures, what is considered a pretty boy at the age of nine, to be taken advantage of.

Clown Skills I finish twisting the balloons and give it to the birthday boy. “This doesn’t look like a tiger, stupid clown!” “Where did your mom hire this doofus anyway?” “What kind of loser works as a clown?” Even though these brats are twenty years younger, their words are hurtful. After years of constant mistreatment, I finally had enough. I grab the birthday boy and forcefully twist and knot his arms and legs, breaking all limbs in the process. He screams. The others, shocked. His mom comes running. With a true (unpainted) smile, I offer her son saying, “Look, a pretzel!

When we’re young, everything is new and exciting, and everything seems to matter so much. Therefore, we give tons of fucks. We give a fuck about everything and everyone—about what people are saying about us, about whether that cute boy/girl called us back or not, about whether our socks match or not, or what color our birthday balloon is.

15- Why can’t Elsa have a balloon? Because she will let it go.

What a brilliant idea of mine!” said Amber. The girl obviously wanted to be back in charge again, and didn’t like this new boy stealing her thunder. “What?” protested Tom. “I was about to suggest balloons just before you did,” she fibbed. “Of course you were!” said Tom. “Come on, ladies! Let’s not fall out!” joked Robin. “I bet there are ’undreds of those balloons in this ’ospital,” said George in a rush of excitement. “There’s loads for sale in the gift shop on the ground floor. I often sneak down there to buy a chocolate bar or two. All we need to do is steal ’em!” “Borrow them!” said Tom.

Mom sends me another text with pictures of cakes she found on Pinterest for a gender reveal party. “How do you feel about having a gender reveal party?” Iask. “What is that?” Archer gets up to make a pot of coffee. “Basically a party announcing if the baby is a boy or girl. You don’t tell anyone until the end, and you pop a balloon with pink or blue confetti in it or something.” “And it’s a thing people donow?” “Yeah. If you have a halfway decent Instagram following and you don’t do one, people will wonder what’s wrong withyou.” Archer chuckles. “I don’t really care either way. Any excuse to have a party is good in my book. Do you want to haveone?” “I know they’re a little lame, but yeah.” I bite my lip, looking at the photos my mom sent. I haven’t told anyone besides my family and Marissa about the baby. I’m a modern woman with a successful job, and shouldn’t worry about people judging me over having a baby when I’m not married. But I do, just abit. “Then let’s doit.” Archer’s words make me smile. “My mom is going to go crazy over this. She wants to know where to have the party?” It’s a simple question, but I know it raises the same concerns to Archer too. He turns on the coffee maker and comes back to the table. “If you’re going to take impressive Instagram pictures, your parents’ farm has the perfect setting.” “I’m glad you have your priorities in check.” He nods. “I gotcha, babe. We’ll make sure to have everything posed perfectly. I’ll even take pictures of all my food before I eat it. Actually, we could invest in some of that realistic-looking fake food. I hear it photographs better.” I look at Archer, a big smile on my face. He makes it so easy tofall. “Good idea. Anything for the likes.” “Exactly. The number of likes is a direct correlation to how loved this baby is. We really have to step itup.

A popular U.S. Army marching song, “The Water Cure,” gleefully described the process: Get the good old syringe boys and fill it to the brim. We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him. Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim. Shouting the battle cry of freedom. Chorus: Hurray. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee. Hurray. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free. Shove in the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty. Shouting the battle cry of freedom. We’ve come across the bounding main to kindly spread around Sweet liberty whenever there are rebels to be found. So hurry with the syringe boys. We’ve got him down and bound. Shouting the battle cry of freedom. Oh pump it in him till he swells like a toy balloon. The fool pretends that liberty is not a precious boon. But we’ll contrive to make him see the beauty of it soon. Shouting the battle cry of freedom. Keep the piston going boys and let the banner wave. The banner that floats proudly o’er the noble and the brave. Keep on till the squirt gun breaks or he explodes the slave. Shouting the battle cry of freedom. Chorus: Hurrah. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee. Hurrah. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free. We’ve got him down and bound, so let’s fill him full of liberty. Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

The winter garden turned out to be a glass conservatory, two stories high and at least one hundred and twenty feet long. Lush ornamental trees, ferns, and palms filled the space, as well as artificial rock formations and a little streamlet stocked with goldfish. West’s opinion of the house climbed even higher as he looked around the winter garden. Eversby Priory had a conservatory, but it wasn’t half as large and lofty as this. An odd little noise seized his attention. A series of noises, actually, like the squeaking of toy balloons releasing air. Bemused, he looked down at a trio of black-and-white kittens roaming around his feet. Phoebe laughed at his expression. “This room is also the cats’ favorite.” A wondering smile spread across West’s face as he saw the sleek black feline arching against Phoebe’s skirts. “Good Lord. Is that Galoshes?” Phoebe bent to stroke the cat’s lustrous fur. “It is. She loves to come here to terrorize the goldfish. We’ve had to cover the stream with mesh wire until the kittens are older.” “When I gave her to you—” West began slowly. “Foisted,” she corrected. “Foisted,” he agreed ruefully. “Was she already—” “Yes,” Phoebe said with a severe glance. “She was a Trojan cat.” West tried to look contrite. “I had no idea.” Her lips quirked. “You’re forgiven. She turned out to be a lovely companion. And the boys have been delighted to have the kittens to play with.” After prying one of the kittens from his trousers as it tried to climb his leg, West set it down carefully.

Think of it like a fast-food franchise, the informant said, like a pizza delivery service. Each heroin cell or franchise has an owner in Xalisco, Nayarit, who supplies the cell with heroin. The owner doesn’t often come to the United States. He communicates only with the cell manager, who lives in Denver and runs the business for him. Beneath the cell manager is a telephone operator, the informant said. The operator stays in an apartment all day and takes calls. The calls come from addicts, ordering their dope. Under the operator are several drivers, paid a weekly wage and given housing and food. Their job is to drive the city with their mouths full of little uninflated balloons of black tar heroin, twenty-five or thirty at a time in one mouth. They look like chipmunks. They have a bottle of water at the ready so if police pull them over, they swig the water and swallow the balloons. The balloons remain intact in the body and are eliminated in the driver’s waste. Apart from the balloons in their mouths, drivers keep another hundred hidden somewhere in the car. The operator’s phone number is circulated among heroin addicts, who call with their orders. The operator’s job, the informant said, is to tell them where to meet the driver: some suburban shopping center parking lot—a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a CVS pharmacy. The operators relay the message to the driver, the informant said. The driver swings by the parking lot and the addict pulls out to follow him, usually down side streets. Then the driver stops. The addict jumps into the driver’s car. There, in broken English and broken Spanish, a cross-cultural heroin deal is accomplished, with the driver spitting out the balloons the addict needs and taking his cash. Drivers do this all day, the guy said. Business hours—eight A.M. to eight P.M. usually. A cell of drivers at first can quickly gross five thousand dollars a day; within a year, that cell can be clearing fifteen thousand dollars daily. The system operates on certain principles, the informant said, and the Nayarit traffickers don’t violate them. The cells compete with each other, but competing drivers know each other from back home, so they’re never violent. They never carry guns. They work hard at blending in. They don’t party where they live. They drive sedans that are several years old. None of the workers use the drug. Drivers spend a few months in a city and then the bosses send them home or to a cell in another town. The cells switch cars about as often as they switch drivers. New drivers are coming up all the time, usually farm boys from Xalisco County. The cell owners like young drivers because they’re less likely to steal from them; the more experienced a driver becomes, the more likely he knows how to steal from the boss. The informant assumed there were thousands of these kids back in Nayarit aching to come north and drive some U.S. city with their mouths packed with heroin balloons.

A woman walks by the gate, leading a little boy with a balloon of hunger in his belly and hair bleached by malnutrition.

SEVEN YEARS AGO… “You notice anything different about Ash?” my cousin Sawyer asked as he climbed up the tree to sit beside me on our favorite limb overlooking the lake. I shrugged, not sure how to answer his question. Sure, I’d noticed things about Ash lately. Like the way her eyes kind of sparkled when she laughed and how pretty her legs looked in shorts. But there was no way I was confessing those things to Sawyer. He’d tell Ash, and they’d both laugh their butts off. “No,” I replied, not looking at Sawyer for fear he’d be able to tell I was lying. “I heard Mom talking to Dad the other day, saying how you and me would start noticing Ash differently real soon. She said Ash was turning into a beauty, and things between the three of us would change. I don’t want things to change,” Sawyer said with a touch of concern in his voice. I couldn’t look at him. Instead I kept my eyes fixed on the lake. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Ash is Ash. Sure, she’s always been pretty, I guess, but that’s not what’s important. She can climb a tree faster than either of us, she baits her own hook, and she can fill up water balloons like a pro. The three of us have been best friends since preschool. That won’t change.” I chanced a glance at Sawyer. My speech sounded pretty convincing, even to me. Sawyer smiled and nodded. “You’re right. Who cares that she’s got hair like some kind of fairy princess? She’s Ash. Speaking of water balloons, could you two please stop sneaking out and throwing them at cars right outside my house at night? My parents are gonna catch y’all one of these days, and I won’t be able to get y’all outta trouble.” I grinned, thinking about Ash covering her mouth to silence her giggles last night when we’d snuck down there to fill up the balloons. That girl sure loved to break rules--almost as much as I did. “I heard my name.” Ash’s voice startled me. “You two better not still be making fun of me about this stupid bra Mama’s making me wear. I’ve had it with the jokes. I’ll break both your noses if it doesn’t stop.” She was standing at the bottom of the tree with a bucket of crickets in one hand and a fishing pole in the other. “Are we gonna fish or had y’all rather just stare down at me like I’ve grown another head?

You really are a perfect little preacher’s daughter, aren’t you, Ash? Once upon a time you were a helluva lot more fun. Before you started sucking face with Sawyer, we use to have some good times together.” He was watching me for a reaction. Knowing his eyes were directed at me made it hard to focus on driving. “You were my partner in crime, Ash. Sawyer was the good guy. But the two of us, we were the troublemakers. What happened?” How do I respond to that? No one knows the girl who used to steal bubble gum from the Quick Stop or abduct the paperboy to tie him up so we could take all his papers and dip them in blue paint before leaving them on the front door steps of houses. No one knew the girl who snuck out of her house at two in the morning to go toilet-paper yards and throw water balloons at cars from behind the bushes. No one would even believe I’d done all those things if I told them…No one but Beau. “I grew up,” I finally replied. “You completely changed, Ash.” “We were kids, Beau. Yes, you and I got into trouble, and Sawyer got us out of trouble, but we were just kids. I’m different now.” For a moment he didn’t respond. He shifted in his seat, and I knew his gaze was no longer focused on me. We’d never had this conversation before. Even if it was uncomfortable, I knew it was way overdue. Sawyer always stood in the way of Beau and me mending our fences, fences that had crumbled, and I never knew why. One day he was Beau, my best friend. The next day he was just my boyfriend’s cousin. “I miss that girl, you know. She was exciting. She knew how to have fun. This perfect little preacher’s daughter who took her place sucks.

Max had left a week’s supply of foul-smelling dog food and two pages of instructions about doggie daycare. Neve had expected advice about dog-walking, worming tablets and the vet’s emergency phone number, but it turned out that Max had a very dim view of her dog-sitting abilities: • Do NOT let him in your bedroom. • It also goes without saying that he is NOT to sleep on your bed. • Do NOT let him in the bathroom. He’ll try to drink out of the toilet bowl. • Do NOT feed him at the table. He eats dog food not human food. • And do NOT give him chocolate. I’m serious. Human chocolate can make dogs very ill. Have left a bag of liver treats instead. • He doesn’t like old men, especially if they have walking sticks or zimmer frames. • He doesn’t like balloons, carrier bags or kites. • Also avoid small children. • A small child trying to fly a kite, while holding a balloon and a carrier bag in their other hand would just about finish him off. By the time Neve went to bed that night, Keith had stayed in the bathroom while she had a shower (and tried to get in the cubicle to drink the water), because he’d barked and scrabbled at the door so hard, she’d feared for her paintwork. He’d also had a piece of steamed haddock from her plate because she hadn’t been able to eat dinner without his nose in her crotch and his paw prodding her leg until she fed him. Neve had secretly suspected that Keith wouldn’t have so many emotional issuesif Max refused to indulge him, but it turned out that she was the softest of soft touches, unable to wield any sort of discipline or say, ‘No, Keith, you have to sleep in the lounge,’ in an authoritative voice. She’d lasted five minutes until the sound of Keith whimpering and howling and generally giving the impression that he was being tortured had forced her into the living room to pick up his bed, and his toys and his water bowl. But if he had to sleep in her room, then he could do it in his own bed, Neve reasoned as she sat up, eyes fixed on Keith. Every time she took her gaze off him and tried to read, he’d dive out of his bed and start advancing towards her. ‘Back to your basket, you wicked boy,’ she’d say and he’d slink away, eyes downcast, only to be given away by the joyous wag of his stumpy tale, as if it was the best gameever. It was inevitable – as soon as Neve turned out the light, there was a scrabble of claws on the wooden floor, then a dead weight landed on her feet. ‘Bad dog,’ she snapped, but they could both tell her heart wasn’t in it. Besides, if Keith stayed at the bottom of the bed, he could double up as a hot-water bottle. Keith had other ideas. He wriggled up the bed on his belly as if he was being stealthy and settled down next to Neve, batting his paws against her back until she was shoved right over and he could put his head on her pillow and pant hot doggy breath against her face. ‘Celia was right,’ Neve grumbled. ‘You are a devil dog.

Francisco, who had lived in the San Luis Valley his entire life and under the drought for half of that life, could barely fathom such festivities. Little girls in fiesta dresses rode painted carousel horses on a merry-go-round powered by men turning a massive wooden gear. Boys one-third his height wore crisp and dustless sombreros. The dancing was so vigorous that he felt his legs stepping out without his permission, his body an unwitting mirror. The music replaced Francisco’s blood, and he felt he could do anything. That was when the blue sky stopped, right over Antonia Alamilla, who was dancing in a white dress. He saw now that it was not blue sky at all, but rather a blue balloon whose string was tied around her wrist. When she saw Francisco in his dust-covered overalls, she immediately stopped dancing and declared, in facile Spanish, “I love dogs.” The rest of the townspeople looked on in shock. No one had heard Antonia speak since she’d been born, and once she had met Francisco, she did not stop. He asked her to be his wife, and when they were married in Bicho Raro two months later, Antonia’s tears of joy coaxed rain from the sky and ended the decade-long drought.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.