blimp

Moored airships nod their snouts, like sea cows fat from feasting. Everything is in agreement: a golden section, a signed treaty, a list of irregular verbs—to lose, to make, to mean, to meet—and a mother and son joining hands at the start of a great adventure. The immediate future is rip-stop polyester with a Tedlar® coating, an envelope of helium, and a gondola fashioned like an Art Deco ballroom. Beyond that lie orchestras, linen suits, tigers at sunrise, and chilled cocktails with the tang of unknown fruit at the bite of spirits summoned in abandoned shanties; beyond that lie peacocks on parched verandas, names written in condensation on taxi windows, wind-up clocks with lost keys, and a lock of chestnut hair in an envelope in a drawer in a bedroom in a house in a street that will look like a river from 60,000 feet when the sun strikes it just so. The boy tells his mother that a sea cow eats a tenth of its weight in weeds and algae every day, and his mother smiles and tells him to remember to brush his teeth twice a day. He squeezes her hand tighter, but she is already drifting through the clouds, her arm stretching and thinning to rope, to smoke, then to nothing.