PARTY BALLOONS
ISSUE SEVEN: April, 2021
PARTY BALLOONS
The phone rang and I answered it.
“May I speak to Sergei, please?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You have the wrong number.”
I turned to Francesca and nodded. We got our coats, left the apartment, and made our way over the rubble to the main street.
At the corner, a pack of occupying soldiers were chatting to a pair of laughing local cops. They looked at us so we crossed the street.
We hung our heads and shuffled by more soldiers and cops standing outside the remaining buildings.
At the next corner, a tall woman in a black leather jacket said to me, “Do you have a light?”
I lit her cigarette.
“The boy with the balloons,” she said.
At the square outside the bombed-out post office building, there was the boy.
“Do you want to buy a balloon?”
“No, thank you,” said Francesca. “I’m looking for my lost dog.”
“The bald man in the blue shirt,” said the boy.
Francesca and I sat on a rock beside the bald man in the blue shirt. “Fine day,” said Francesca, “but the farmers could use some rain.”
“The long-haired kid,” said the man, who then got up and left, leaving his backpack on the ground. Francesca waited a long moment, then picked up the backpack and wandered over to the fence that separated the post office building from a new office building that was being built.
I approached a young long-haired man standing at the side of the road, screamed at him, and took a swing that missed him by a few inches. He grabbed me, threw me to the ground, and we wrestled. Some soldiers and cops came over and laughed at us.
Francesca scaled the fence, ran down the alley, threw the backpack through an open window, then came back, scaled the fence again, and resumed her place on the rock.
The young man and I got up, apologized to each other, shook hands, and went in opposite directions.
The bomb in the backpack went off, ripping out the sides of the first two floors of the new building. Soldiers and cops went through the gate in the fence to investigate. People emptied out of the nearby stores to watch.
The tall woman in the black leather jacket, the bald man in the blue shirt, and the young long-haired man ran out of the bakery across the street, carrying several boxes. They joined Francesca, me, and the boy, now without his balloons, sitting on the rocks outside the post office building.
We introduced ourselves and ate cake and cookies as we watched Emergency Services arriving at the scene of the bombing.
I looked up at some balloons that were working their way up the wall of the apartment building across the street. I said, “Maybe don’t tell the boss, but I know a great sandwich shop on Front St.”
WILLIAM KITCHER’s stories, plays, and comedy sketches have been published and/or produced in Canada, the U.S., Holland, India, Ireland, and the U.K. Recent stories were published in Writer's Block, The Blue Nib, Ripples In Space, Worthing Flash, Short-Story.me, and Twist & Twain, and he has stories forthcoming in Yellow Mama, 34 Orchard, The Bookends Review, Revolute, and Schlock!