Black Balloon

Chapter 1

Miles Vandergriff empties his unfinished coffee into the sink and places the cup neatly onto the upper dishwasher rack, exactly as he's done every morning for the past forty years. He gives his wife a good morning kiss before retreating to the attic, his cozy little respite from the outside world. The steps are narrow and steep, and each time he climbs them it takes just a little more effort than the time before. He's no longer the spring chicken he once was.

From his office window he can see the snow-covered pastures of the Swiss countryside. In the summer (the far too brief Switzerland summer) these fields will be dotted with brown and white cows carefully picking fresh blades of grass from in between bitter-tasting buttercups. Today, however, the fields sit empty; cold, white, and serene. The cows have been safely stowed in their barns to ride out the long winter like the rest of us: sequestered in our homes, antsy and bored and longing for springtime.

Miles sits at his desk and opens his laptop. In the center of the screen is a lone folder entitled "BB." The folder is an island, separate from others; folders, files, and applications neatly organized into a single-file row along the left-hand side of his screen: "Recycle Bin", "Taxes", and "Madison Graduation." "BB" contains only one file: A word document titled "Outline." He double clicks it and re-reads the same bulleted information he has read over scores of times before. His hobby the past six months has been recollecting the events of his life and committing them to paper, or digital paper at least. The outline is to serve as the framework for his autobiography. When completed—if ever completed—it will be part memoir, part confession, part exposé, his way of documenting the bizarre events of his life for historical posterity. He only hopes that anyone will believe him. Miles has a story to tell, and its one that's been weighing on him these past fifty long years. He's reached the age where a man begins to think about his legacy, all the stories and secrets that will disappear from the Earth when he does if they aren't written down. He wonders how much information has already vanished over the millennia, taken with its owner to their grave—petabytes upon petabytes of priceless data, a million Libraries of Alexandria.

In the upper left corner, Miles clicks 'File', 'New', and then 'Blank Document.' In front of him appears an empty white rectangle; virgin, desolate, imposing. It's intimidating, staring at all that blank space, all the words that have yet to be written, and hoping they will come. Before making a single keystroke, he saves the empty file as "Chapter 1". This is a habit he'd developed many years ago after suffering the dreaded fate of a lost day's work. His fingers will reflexively strike "Control-S" every few sentences as he goes, ensuring such a misfortune never happens again.

He stares at the wall of white for the better part of ten minutes, trying to decide where to begin. It's an impossible task. His laptop screen is the color of the world outside and every bit as barren. How does one possibly tell such a strange story? Getting started is the hardest part, he says to himself. Just start typing and the words will come. He begins...and thankfully, they do:

I've always felt like I had a guardian angel, he writes. When I was sixteen, I was driving my first car, a '92 Chrysler Sebring with three hubcaps and a missing passenger side mirror, a janky old beat-up thing. And being stupid, like most 16-year-old kids, I was texting while driving and not wearing a seatbelt. I was staring down at my phone, paying no attention to the road, when a rock or some such thing kicked up and struck the car. It made a loud pop. It might have been mechanical but I didn't think so. It sounded like an impact. Later, I looked for a mark on the side panels but it was hard to tell what was new and was old among the plethora of scratches and dents. Whatever the cause, the sound made me look up just in time to see a jackknifed semi-truck sitting diagonally across the highway, blocking both lanes of traffic. I dropped my phone, clasped the wheel with both hands, and slammed the brakes down hard. Two-thousand pounds of shitty car screeched to a grinding halt through a haze of burning rubber and brake dust. Even with the pedal pressed all the way to the floor, I still hit the truck and cracked my bumper. My heart was pounding. I was shaking. And I believe to this day that if it hadn't been for that rock, or whatever it was, I would have hit the truck at sixty miles an hour and my car would have folded like a tin can. I'd probably be dead. It was a wake-up call. I've never forgotten the weird coincidence of that rock hitting me at that moment, at the best possible time. I don't believe in superstition or divine intervention or anything like that...it's just weird, is all I can say. Some things in life don't make sense and that's all there is to it.