Barnstorming

The policeman’s red and blue flashing lights signaled for them to pull over. Nikki, the driver, told Trini, who had drifted into the backseat and was blocking the rear windshield, to calm down, and Trini did her best not to freak out, but her left arm kept floating up to the dome light of the car. Cynthia, next to her in the backseat, grabbed Trini and tugged a seatbelt haphazardly across her torso to restrain her. They hoped the officer wouldn’t notice that the shoulder harness was only crossing her waist.

This started some seasons ago, around freshman year, when Trini dozed off one afternoon and woke to find herself on her back with her legs and arms buoyed up above her, like some cartoon dead bug; or, more specifically, as if she were playing Light as a Feather, but while sleeping. It soon got out of hand: one day she awoke, startled, when her head bonked into a brass curtain rod in the very top corner of her room. Her body had levitated, like a girl-shaped mylar balloon, to her bedroom’s ceiling—all as she slept. She had to climb down her bookshelf back to the carpet. 

It began interfering with her waking life: while reading at school, the librarian would become flabbergasted, as Trini’s whole body drifted upward, as if gentle underwater currents sought to take her up to the ceiling tiles. At first it was terrifying, then exhilarating. Then it quickly became a massive pain in the ass: her little brother Brian would have to step on her shoes at the breakfast table so she wouldn’t float up, all to hide it from mom and dad.

In class, hooking her penny loafers under her heavy desk didn’t always work, as her desk and chair would sometimes float up with her, only to dislodge and fall to the ground with a disturbing clatter. Friends took turns holding Trini’s desk or stepping on the back feet of her chair to keep her out of detention.

One day, Cynthia’s mother Nancy came to have a word with Trini’s mother, Doreen. She’d walked into her daughter’s bedroom and caught her at her sewing machine attaching pendulous fishing weights to Trini’s skirt (We’re experimenting!). It occurred to her that something was surely going on, though she did not know what. Doreen agreed: something was definitely going on. And so the women sat down, and over tea, Doreen regaled Nancy with stories of Trini as a little girl, running great big circles in the playground yard. It was nearly impossible to rein her in: out there in the streets and fields, zig-zagging around the neighborhood, this way and that, until sunset; sometimes well after. 

Trini was always quite irrepressible. Doreen beamed with pride. Nothing could keep her down.

That doesn’t help, Dori, Nancy replied.

Not five blocks away, a policeman tapped the driver’s window of a car, whose backseat contained Doreen’s daughter Trini, and a well-meaning friend, clutching an unbuckled seatbelt in a desperate attempt to prevent Trini from violating the laws of physics; but when he returned to his squad car to run Nikki’s license, Trini knew it was time: she flashed her beloved friends a beatific look and said I love you all and touched Cynthia’s hand as she cranked down the rear passenger window, and they bore her out of the car, giggling, into the wide air, smiling and waving as Trini floated up; first barely above their heads, like a balloon; then as a kite, as the policeman shouted an APB for a floating girl into his radio, then screamed get back into that car right now; he even pointed his gun at her as she struggled to free herself from the jagged cross of a church steeple, then proceeded up and up and over the trees until he and her waving friends became only so many ants congregated around shiny Tic Tacs, which were their cars; she waved at Brian, her brother, as he walked home from school by himself and looked up, only to drop his gaze back down to his feet, as if there was something shameful up there in the blue-grey that he couldn’t admit to seeing; she kept waving like a princess, despite this; smiling until the box grid of their neighborhood disappeared, and the entire town became geometric color patterns on large, dull fabric, and she hung there, in the high air, still; soon thereafter, surrounded only by clouds, clouds, and sky.

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H. A. Eugene is an O. Henry-nominated writer of strange stories about food, work, and death. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Radon Journal, HAD, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Witness him talking to himself on Bluesky @autobono.bsky.social and Threads @h_a_eugene.