Weather Balloon by Nicole Lynn

 The butane fumes make me want to move to Kansas. High and bored, we stream YouTube reaction videos of paranormal experts. They talk-talk-talk about why the lights in the sky are UFOs, not lens flare. To be an expert, we need a podcast, a job as a primatologist, or a book deal. We have a trailer, too many beer cans scattered on the side tables, and a dented sedan, but you were pulled up into a spaceship. Aliens stabbed an incision behind your ear that electrocutes your thoughts. It buzzes in strange rhythms, like an injured katydid. You seize when the spaceship is close. All the electronics do.

 “I felt time leave my body,” you say. “I should be an expert.”

 I should be an expert for putting up with you. I guide you home when you sleepwalk into open space, hands up in worship. Snap your pills to make them last. Jam the wallet in your mouth so you don’t crack your teeth screaming. I’m keeping you on Earth, and I buckle under that gravity.

 That’s why I’m high and you’re sober. It’s my turn to touch the sky.

 Again, I hold the canister to my nose. It’s a wet burn. 

“It’s bullshit,” I agree. “You’re the only conspiracy I believe in.”

 You find a documentary breaking down the last tape of a hobbyist storm chaser. They found his camera thirty miles away from his body. The high kills my ego. I become one with everything on the screen. Fizzle into the pixels.

 Westward is an ugly direction. 

 Flat land seems boring until the butane fumes change it. The sky on TV is huge, and nothing cages the horizon but the pulsing red hearts of cellphone towers. The storm presses from one horizon to the next. Red lights against black vapor. Blown transformers. Sparks, like Fourth of July.

 The downdraft forms and takes houses away from people with more than us. I’m giddy. Laughing. Their houses fall to make way for my trailer. I could live out there if storms are this ferocious: frayed timber and wind-caught cars. Teddy bears and photo albums caught under the rubble. All we lose is piles of mildewed laundry and empty cans. Easier to rebuild our lives.

 “We could move there,” I say. “It’s not like we would lose much in a storm. Let’s leave. Tomorrow! Make a new life.”

“Kansas is too flat. The Greys would find me.”

 “They always find you,” I say.

 My tone is defeated. There’s no point in arguing. I’m high like a weather balloon.

 You shiver. Are you afraid or cold? I wrap my arms around your body for warmth, even though you don’t ask for it. You never do ask for help, do you? Maybe I’m the cold one who needs your warmth. Your skin tastes like salt and smells like sweat and old shirts, and I’ve grown to love it. I love you. You’re the reason I get to feel this way—if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be floating. Or powerful. I would be alone.

Head on your shoulder, I stare at your puncture scar. If I glare hard enough, it might break the chip underneath your skin, freeing us both. I can hear the static coming off it. It smells like rubbing alcohol, or is it the butane huff still stinging my nose? Ones and zeroes stream through my skull, and they say Kansas is our destiny.

On screen, the storm eats the world. I confuse lightning for tractor beams. I need an expert, a meteorologist, to tell me thunderheads are cloaking devices made of water condensation, to hide flying saucers in plain view. I need to tear this trailer off its cinderblocks. Outside, a tethered dog barks at the sky or the wind. It’s sick of living in this dump. Trust me, I’m an expert at trading one dump for another. The floodlights flicker. I cut the power.

Nicole Lynn writes strange fiction from Maine and has been published by Nonbinary Review, Flash Fiction Online, and Orca, a Literary Journal. She lives with her pet rats and two dogs, who are too frequently mistaken for wolves. Deer gravitate to her; invasive fish fear her.