Storm Trees
As the clouds darkened and swirled above, the forest below came alive. Excitement bristled at the edge of the woods, then rustled all throughout. The trees came out of a stupor, shaking their branches and glittering their leaves in anxiety and alarm.
A storm is coming!
On a little knoll, the tallest tree in a stand of mighty sycamores watched the lightning crackle from cloud to cloud and began to creak and groan, overcome with worry.
Down by the brook, a weeping willow tried to end it all. With a baleful cry, it lifted its branches to the flicking tongues of electricity above, begging to be taken.
In the end, a mighty spruce tree felt the fury of the lightning. A jagged bolt reached down from the sky and touched its crown. Its trunk exploded, and its roots sizzled in the ground. Its branches gave a mighty sigh, and the air filled with the scent of pine.
And then it was over. The storm passed. The clouds lifted and the lightning danced away, leaving the trees to dry themselves in a gentle summer breeze.
Excerpt: The Red Balloon
None of us saw where it came from. Jimmy was the first to see it. He was only about four, and he didn’t know the words to really say it right, but we all heard him yelp in that excited and happy kind of way, and when we turned around, there it was: a red balloon, swirling on the breeze coming out of the alley beside the hardware store, rising slowly in the summer air. It wasn’t anything special, just a dirty red balloon tied with a long, thin, pink ribbon. Suddenly, though, we all wanted it. All of us.
Jimmy reached out both sticky hands to it as it drifted slowly past his head, but he was too uncoordinated and clumsy, and he missed it even though it went right past his head and even dragged the ribbon up over his shoulder.
From the alley, it rode the little breeze out toward the street. Jimmy’s sister, Elaine, ran to grab it. She was a couple years older than Jimmy, wearing a sundress and the composure of a little girl. She thought she had it, but it twitched on a puff of wind, up over old man Johnson’s car, just out of reach of her fingers.
Tommy had been crossing the street, coming back from the Dairy Queen to flaunt his ice cream cone in front of the rest of us. He was nine and we all hated him. When the red balloon popped up over the car and into the street, it was almost in his face. He was startled to find it so close at hand, and though he made a desperate grab, dropping his ice cream cone in the process, he missed it. It hovered for a moment over his head, agonizingly just out of reach, before leaving him, rising to the middle of the street.
“I’ll get it,” said Ralph. He was older than the rest of us, and he’d just come out of Newton’s barber shop. He quickly pulled the slingshot out of his back pocket, dropped to one knee, and picked up a pebble out of the gutter by the curb. He pulled the pocket of the slingshot way back and held it. His left eye closed and his tongue stuck out a bit as he took careful aim, then there was a brisk thwish. We all gasped as the red balloon danced sideways, and the pebble flashed under it.
Now the balloon had risen as high as the windows of the apartment over the laundromat across the street, and the breeze carried it up and across the street from us. Jimmy began to sob. “It’s getting away!” cried Elaine. Tommy’s hands flew to his face in horror. Even Ralph had turned frantic, desperately locating another pebble, then pulling the pocket of his slingshot back so far that one of the rubber bands broke.
Then a shadow swept over us. We didn’t have to turn to recognize the deep, reassuring voice of Sheriff Gordon. “Don’t worry there, children,” he said. “I’ll get that balloon for you.” And we knew that he would.
We heard him unsnap his holster as he took out his service weapon, but none of us flinched or covered our ears. By now the balloon had risen as high as the clock on the front of the bank, looking as small as the head of a push pin, and growing smaller by the moment.
The sound of the gunshot echoed back and forth across the street, and we all wanted to cheer. We watched the balloon anxiously. The pink thread of ribbon seemed to quiver, but the red balloon did not fall.
Sheriff Gordon fired again.
We never found out where the red balloon came from, and we were never able to explain to anyone why it affected us so much. None of us were ever the same after that day when the red balloon came into our lives, then drifted away. We could never forget the image of Sheriff Gordon, his left arm bent and bracing his right at the elbow, firing shot after shot over our heads, up at the red balloon, until he ran out of bullets and the balloon was just a distant speck, and then just a memory.
Years later, Elaine would still burst into tears at the mention of it. Tommy developed a nervous tic. Little Jimmy began to stutter, and Ralph never picked up a slingshot again.
Sheriff Gordon took it hardest of all. They found him back behind the transformer station, dead in his squad car. He’d filled it with red balloons, climbed into it with them, and put a bullet through every last one of them.
They say he saved the last bullet for himself.
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