Thaddeus

We sat on the hill.
We watched the flames
inside the balloons heat
the fabric to neon colors.
The children played

Prediction.
They pointed to empty holes in the sky and waited. Sometimes all the balloons lit up at once and produced the nightly umbrella effect over the town beneath, whose buildings were filling with the sadness of February.
Nights like this will soon die, Selah whispered in my ear.
Days became cooler, clouds thickened. We sat on the hill. We watched the flames inside the balloons heat the fabric to neon colors.
Nights like this will soon die, said Bianca. She ran from the woods, where she saw three children twisting the heads of owls.
Nights like this will soon die, said the butchers, marching down the hill.
We sat there for the last time to watch the balloons, the neon colors stitched in our minds.
Pigs shrieked, and windows shattered across the town. A snout, massive and pink, traced the side of a balloon in its arc. The fabric stretched around the dark nostrils and stopped just before tearing, and it stayed there.
Still the children stood in a line with their lanterns raised to watch the first snowfall of February cover the crop fields.
Selah lowered her head. Selah folded her hands in her lap. Selah looked at the backs of the children’s heads and saw ice form knots in their hair.
We can only pray, whispered Selah.
I looked at Selah and remembered the dandelions stuck in her teeth. I thought of a burning sun, an ice-berg melting in her folded hands.

They held hands. They formed dozens of circles around their deflated, smoldering balloons. Balloons, silken globes in the colors magenta, grass green and sky blue, were mud-strewn, wet with holy water and burned black through the stitching.
Bianca said, I don’t understand.
Thaddeus said, I don’t either.
Is this February’s doing, she said.
Maybe, said Thaddeus, who looked up at the sky.
A scroll of parchment was nailed to an oak tree, calling for the end of all things that could fly. Everyone in town gathered around to read it. Trumpets moaned from the woods. Birds dropped from branches. The priests walked through town swinging axes. Bianca clutched Thaddeus’s leg, and he picked her up under the arms and told her to hold him like a baby tree around the neck, and Thaddeus ran.
Back outside their home, the balloons were spread out on the ground. Baskets hacked by axes. The priests dipped their lanterns into the fabric of the balloons.
Thaddeus, Selah and Bianca and others from town formed a circle by holding hands.
February, they repeated until it became a chant. Until they all imagined a little tree sprouting through the center of their burning balloon.

The priests walked down the hill and into town where they stopped at the town school and the town library. They confiscated textbooks, tore out pages about birds, flying machines, Zeppelins, witches on brooms, balloons, kites, winged mythical creatures. They crumpled up paper airplanes the children had folded, and they dumped the pages into a burning pit in the woods.
The priests sank their rusty spiked shovels into the mound of dirt and refilled the hole. Some of the priests felt tears roll down their cheeks but didn’t feel sadness. Others forced their minds to unravel the memory of wind. They nailed a second scroll of parchment to a second oak tree. It stated that all things possessing the ability to fly had been destroyed. It said that no one living in the town should speak of flight ever again.
It was signed, February.

Thaddeus, Bianca and Selah painted balloons everywhere they could. They pulled up floor-boards and painted rows of balloons onto the dusty oak. Bianca drew tiny balloons on the bottoms of teacups. Behind the bathroom mirror, under the kitchen table and on the insides of cabinet doors, balloons appeared. And then Selah painted an intricate intertwining of kites on Bianca’s hands and wrists, the tails extending up her forearms and around her shoulders.
How long will February last, Bianca asked, stretching her hands out to her mother, who was blowing on her arms.
I really have no idea, said Thaddeus, who watched the snow fall outside the kitchen window.
In the distance the snow formed into mountains on top of mountains.
Finished, her mother said. You will have to wear long sleeves from now on. But you’ll never forget flight. You can wear beautiful dresses — that’s what you can wear.
Bianca studied her arms. The kites were yellow with black tails. The color melted into her skin. A breeze blew over the fresh ink and through her hair.