Human Balloon by Katy Wimhurst (Lucent Dreaming Issue 10)

I saw the first one while walking in Castle Park one sunny May morning. Dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, floating in the air just above a horse chestnut tree. She was upright, her slender arms opened a little each side as if in a half-arsed ballet pose. Her face was tilted back a bit, staring skywards. From where I was, she looked youngish, twenty-something. Suspended in the air like that she looked like something out of a Chagall painting, or a lost angel in denim. Why was she up there?
I wondered if this would be a bit like the Fainters, the epidemic of fainting in town two years back, or the Hornies, the group of teenagers who sprouted little goat horns on their heads, a few years before that – my nephew Hamish, aged four at the time, had loved that.
Three men in business suits were halted on the path ahead, one filming the woman on his phone. I stopped behind them and stared up for a few minutes. I hope she’s okay, I thought.
Needing to get to work, I continued on.

That evening I arrived home late again. I was bored of my job. At forty-
one, it was hardly my dream to be writing the promotional material for an upmarket condiments company. My boyfriend Samuel called me the ‘Exclusive Chutney Champion’ but I’d always hoped one day to be doing something that mattered, like PR for a wildlife or refugee charity. Of course, the need to earn a living got in the way.
Samuel was already in my kitchen conjuring up dinner. He didn’t live here, though he spent most nights. We had been together three years, but much of our relationship now felt adrift.
Local news was on the television in the living room, adjacent to the kitchen, a feature on the floating woman. The image of her had pressed itself into my mind, making me sad for some reason. “Have you seen this?” I pointed to the television.
“Good to see you too, Ellie.” Samuel had cropped blonde hair, a pale round face, and small circular metal glasses. He looked a bit like a clever moon, though was neither lunar nor learned.
“Hey you,” I said with a sheepish smile. “This woman floating in Castle Park though.” I pointed again.
He glanced towards the screen. “Oh, that.”
“Don’t you wonder about her?”
“You’re not going to get worked up about her, are you? Like you did about those Fainters.”
He was asking for his sake, not mine. I bit my tongue, well aware he wasn’t that much of an emotionally available boyfriend. At least he was an exceptional cook. “What’s for supper?”
“Chicken and lime curry, wild rice, green salad and raspberry tart for pud. It’ll be ready in ten.”
“Sounds good. I’ll go and have a shower.” It was an excuse. Only home a few minutes and I already needed space.
Apart from the odd vox pop speculating on how the woman might survive up there, how she might drink or pee, local media quickly stopped paying her heed. Was this lack of concern or denial? Interest peaked again though, several days later, when a second woman appeared above another horse chestnut tree. This one was older, with short grey hair, funky red specs and a long dark skirt that billowed in the breeze. She also floated upright, her arms opened a bit each side, chin slightly tilted up. It transpired that she was a retired schoolteacher and her husband, who sat beneath her on a camping chair and refused to budge, was interviewed by local news. “I’ve no idea why she’s up there, like some human balloon,” he exclaimed, his brow furrowed.
I spent a good fifteen minutes in the park mesmerised by the women. Neither acknowledged the other, nor the spectators below. I couldn’t tell from where I stood if they were in a trance or just indifferent.
Later, Samuel came round. “Did you see the second woman today?” I asked.
“One woman is plenty enough for me,” he joked.
“I meant the floating one in the park.”
“Is there one?”
“Yes, Sherlock.”
Ignoring my words, he drifted over to my bookcase, then lifted a book from it. “Why do you read this leftie stuff?” He held up Capitalism And Bullshit Jobs.
Whenever I carped a bit at him, he always had to niggle back somehow.
“Don’t start, please,” I said.
He was super confident in his political opinions, while I, even when the world had seemed more anchored than I found it these days, had room for doubt. I still loved his hesitant grey eyes, desperately trying to pin order in a world that probably didn’t have much, his food fanaticism, and the way he teased me, but we rubbed each other up the wrong way at times. I’d thought of ending things, but the worry of hurting him and losing his friendship stopped me.
“The book was between Kafka and Hans Christian Anderson,” he teased . “Politics next to fairy tales. Can’t you keep anything in order?”
“Kafka isn’t a fairy tale.”
“It’s still Grimm,” he said, smiling at his own pun.

The next weekend, a total of four people were floating; the two women already there were joined by a middle-aged woman and a thin young male. By now, people were taking to the media to try and explain the phenomenon. “It’s human evolution being taken to the next vibrational level,” claimed some new age guru with an ankh pendant. I rolled my eyes. To me, the Floaters didn’t look in spiritual contemplation, close-ups of their faces on YouTube videos showed glazed expressions.
“It’s collective hysteria,” a psychiatrist, Simon Westerly, said – and Samuel agreed. The psychiatrist, concerned the hysteria would spread, asked to be lifted up on a crane to speak to the Floaters. I was glad when they didn’t acknowledge his presence. Then, on his advice, their feet were lassoed with rope, and they were pulled very gently down to earth. Two put up no resistance. The others struggled unsuccessfully, flapping their arms like frantic pigeons trying to escape a fox. Once back to earth they were bundled off in ambulances to hospital. I later learned that, following tests, medics proclaimed there to be nothing wrong with them except for some dehydration and a metabolism slowed to almost zero, which might explain how they had survived without nourishment. They were kept in hospital for a night, rehydrated and then returned home. The following day they were all back in the sky, with two more. I was secretly delighted.
“We need more robust measures,” said Simon Westerly. He recommended the Floaters be pulled down again and then weighted with a heavy object until they either responded to antidepressants or somehow ‘snapped out of it.’ The families of some agreed wholeheartedly, but relatives of the others objected and an online campaign by the local Let Them Float On group on Facebook got over 14,000 signatures in a petition. The council conceded to public pressure to do nothing. I made the mistake of telling Samuel I’d signed it.
“Ellie! Don’t encourage them,” he said.
“They’re not doing anyone any harm.”

Around that time, my sleep became disrupted. I’d wake at 3am feeling oddly disorientated with my adrenaline racing. My juddery thoughts coalesced around the Floaters. Once when Samuel was beside me in bed, I woke him to ask for comfort.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Come here.” He gave me a hug.
“Thanks,” I said, a tear in my eye.
He held me until he dropped off.
I lay there staring into space, then extracted myself from Samuel’s arms, got up and ate a banana. Food was a comfort. I stared out the window at the orange streetlamp, wondering what was up. Should I end things with Samuel? Was that it? The sex was good – apart from his tendency to ramble on afterwards about the problems in Ipswich Town FC’s midfield – but the relationship felt a bit like an empty van trundling down a motorway without a destination. God, that sounded like my life too. It hadn’t always felt like this. When had things changed?

The Floaters, growing in number, featured on the BBC and ITV. The Facebook group in support of them, which I was in, now had over 150,000 members nationally. Samuel joked that since there were now two dozen up there, it’d be good for them to actually do something, like play a game of volleyball in the air or do synchronised dancing. “Don’t you get a bit bored watching them just hang?” he asked.
“No.” I was spellbound by them.
He frowned. “You think any of them have young kids?” He probably had his own daughter in mind as he asked this, a seven-year old who lived with his ex.
“On the Facebook page it says a few do.”
“We should get your mum on the case. She’d sort them out.”
“Hmm.” Samuel often teased me about Mum, who still lived near Glasgow; he was well aware she had a mouth on her. Not keen on his Tory views, she had no reservation about telling him he was ‘talking bollocks,’ though she did appreciate his jokiness and the Thai curries he cooked her. I missed my Scottish roots. I’d come south first to study and then to find work, but my heart was still in the river Clyde and Loch Lomond.

A documentary about the Floaters screened on Channel 4. Relatives and friends were interviewed, talking about how, before the floating, there’d been signs that things weren’t right; bouts of moodiness, loss of appetite. I shivered as I watched it, and then wolfed down a KitKat – at least my appetite was good.
Floating did seem infectious, at least in this town. Over the course of the next month, a total of thirty-seven people appeared in the air, all upright. Mostly women of various ages, though a sprinkling of men too. Some in compact clusters, others spread out in isolated units. Castle Park looked like a cross between a Magritte painting and a human balloon factory.
People in town were increasingly split into Pro- and Anti-Floaters and there were regular heated arguments at public meetings. One night, some Antis broke into the park and spray-painted GET THE BLOODY LOT DOWN FOR CHRIST’S SAKE on the grass. In the local election an independent candidate stood on the basis of ‘dealing with the Floater problem.’ He claimed he’d, “Get ‘em down, lock ‘em up. They’re a public nuisance. Fortunately, he lost to the Greens. There was actually growing support for the Floaters. Many in town, like me, thought they’d all eventually come down of their own free will, and the local council and retail businesses had realised money could be made from them as a tourist attraction.
Samuel, unimpressed by all the Floater Spotters who descended on the town from around the country, and by those families who set up camp in the park to keep watch over their relatives, was Anti-Floater. “A walk in Castle Park used to be pleasant, now it’s an obstacle course,” he said. “And how the hell do they eat and shit up there?”
“I don’t think they do.” I’d read a long discussion about that in the Facebook group. I pointed to a congregation of three elderly Floater women above an oak tree, almost a holy constellation. “Look! It’s a miracle.”
“It’s incomprehensible.” His lip curled in annoyance. “I’m going to buy those Tuscan sausages with fennel, coming?”
“Think I’ll stay here a bit.”
“Okay. Be like that then.” He walked off.
I was left alone feeling irritated at him.

I became aware of feeling odd, as if a subtle gap had levered open between me and the world. It wasn’t that everything seemed a hallucination, more like the material world and I both felt a little more unreal. I didn’t feel depressed and coped fine with the basics. I went to work, did my chores, saw Samuel, watched my nephew Hamish play rounders for his school, chatted to Mum on the phone about the dismal state of UK politics. But I’d become a self I no longer fully understood, drifting through an environment I no longer recognised, a small cloud within a large hazy sky. I kept trying to shake myself out of this state – I started jogging, which amused Samuel – but even when the feeling went away for a few days, it eventually resettled.
I’d always taken over an hour in the morning on workdays to dress, style my hair and put on makeup, but found myself getting up half an hour later and just splashing on foundation and eyeliner. I went to charity shops, odd for me, buying a few sweat tops and jog pants when I usually wore smart Next or White Stuff outfits.
“This new fashion sense, sporty or sofa slouchy?” Samuel asked. “Actually, I like it.”
I wasn’t sure what I was aiming at, wearing such clothes just felt comforting.
I’d had fleeting times feeling like this before. On my 40th birthday the previous year, I’d had my family and close friends over for a small party. Samuel had kindly spent the best part of a week preparing all kinds of dishes and had even surprised me on the night with a chocolate mousse cake shaped like a butterfly. Partly for his sake, I’d chatted and smiled, pretending to have fun while feeling lost inside. I felt as if I were giving a poor performance in some amateur dramatic theatre of life. At one point I’d retreated to the bathroom just to stare in the mirror. At the bob dyed the colour of new pennies, the copper lipstick, the few crow’s feet gathered at the corners of the wide hazel eyes. Who the hell’s this? I’d wondered. My mind had flitted to Hamish; I couldn’t have kids myself due to a hysterectomy in my early 30s following ovarian cancer. I’d thought I’d come to terms with this. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted children with Samuel anyway, but maybe it still affected me.
One day, I cautiously mentioned feeling odd to Samuel.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be fine,”’ he said, turning on the television for the Ipswich Town football match.
I felt like hitting him.
Only in the park, mesmerised by the Floaters, did I feel vaguely okay. Not exactly ‘me,’ whoever that was, but not lost either. Staring at those Floaters, lyrics from an old 80s tune would loop through my head, ‘More than this, you know there’s nothing.’

A local man who made Youtube videos about the Floaters noticed that the original woman had vanished from the air. The Facebook group was awash with rumours. Some said she’d been dragged down by her family at night and stuck in a psychiatric institution; a few said she’d floated off into space, but her husband posted that she’d just had enough of being up there and had returned to earth without a fuss and now didn’t want any publicity, thank you very much.
Meanwhile, I spent more time in the park, lying on the grass, staring up. Floater Fan Girls – those (mainly women) who hung about in the park – became a thing. Some would even identify with one Floater in particular, and dress like them. Hamish, the only person I knew who also liked to watch Floaters, asked me to take him with me on Sundays. “They look like those angels, don’t they, Aunty Ellie? Only without wings or halos,” he’d say, beside me on the grass. My sister wasn’t keen on our outings. “If you want to take him out, go to the zoo instead,” she insisted.
On two mornings, having become transfixed by the Floaters, I was fifteen minutes late for work. The second time I got an earful from my manager. “This isn’t like you,” she said. “What’s wrong, Ellie? The last copy you sent me had major typos in it, too.”
Normally polite at work, I was tempted to tell her where to go. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.” Probably a lie.
Two days on, Samuel insisted I stop going to the park. “For God’s sake. You’re becoming addicted.”
“Stop being melodramatic.” I walked out, slamming the door behind me. In the communal car park outside I burst into tears, sobbing for a good ten minutes. I wasn’t sure why.
One early evening, staring up at a tight cluster of Floaters, I realised what relief it would be to be up there. For a time at least.
Suddenly, my body felt lighter, as if gravity had been partially switched off. A curious sensation like my veins ballooning gently with air. I’d taken off and was drifting slowly up and up. I wasn’t that surprised. It wasn’t exhilarating, more a sense of release, as if an argument begun years back had resolved effortlessly. Buoyed rather than overjoyed.

i’m not happy
neither am i sad or anxious
it’s chilly at night, wind tussles my hair
occasionally a crow perches on my shoulder
i miss curries, wine, hot baths, little else
i still don’t feel real but who cares
what’s real anyway? one day
i’ll return, for now
i’m just
f
l
o
a
t
i
n
g


Buy issue 10 today.
Lucent Dreaming is an independent creative writing magazine publishing beautiful, imaginative and surreal short stories, poetry and artwork from emerging authors and artists worldwide. Subscribe to Lucent Dreaming now, support us on Patreon and follow us on TwitterFacebook and Instagram

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