My grandfather had a blimp. He would fly over fields where workers sweated and harvested crops.
He waved to them. They waved back.
He flew the blimp in circles. He aimed it into the mouth of clouds, like a magic trick. He imagined what the people on the ground were thinking. They wished they were floating too, he thought.
The blimp drifted above houses and he would see peoples’ faces, looking out their windows. Cars would stop on the roads. Animals would look up. Birds would marvel.
It made him feel like a hero. Though, at the end of the day, he wasn’t really doing anything important.
But that time in the air felt glorious. Like he was doing something. And everyone knew him. They expected him. He was a beacon.
We, the descendants of Grandfather, would walk the mile down the road to his farmhouse and assist him each Tuesday and Thursday (and sometimes Sunday) as he untethered the craft and prepared for his day’s journey. As it billowed upward, I wondered what was inside of it. I pictured a movie theater, a bowling alley, a dance floor pulsing with strobe lights. I knew my thoughts were fantasies. My older brother, Dirk, told me there were birds inside it and that’s how it flew. He couldn’t fool me though because I was twelve and already entering the eighth grade.
Only my mother had seen the inside. She told us it was full of cakes. She described them to us. Frosting whipped into waves and shining with the glint of its subtle sugars. Sheets of chocolate heaven. Perfect circles of lemon begging to be cut into.
My dad didn’t care for cake. Plus he was in a wheelchair and would constantly remind us that he couldn’t do anything fun like look into a blimp to see what was inside. He did play trumpet though, and that seemed to be the only thing that brought him joy. That and Walter Cronkite on the nightly news.
One day, Grandfather stormed into our house and said his blimp was shrinking. “How am I going to continue my duties?” he asked to anyone who’d listen. We went outside and walked quickly down the road to look at the blimp. It did seem smaller. Perhaps it was deflating. Maybe, if my brother was actually right, some of the birds inside had died.
My curiosity was reaching a breaking point. “What’s inside a blimp?” I asked Grandfather.
“What’s inside a blimp?” he repeated back at me incredulously. His rubbery lips quivered for a second, searching for an answer. “What’s inside you?” he finally said.
It was a Thursday, so we continued, business as usual, to help Grandfather get into the air. He was visibly angry as he steered his smaller craft toward the clouds. We saluted him and when he saluted back, it was like a quick karate chop.
Just a few days after this happened, someone on the other side of town started flying a Cessna 350 over the town. This was especially noticeable because the plane was painted to look like a giant purple hawk. It was flown by a beautiful blond woman who had recently moved to town after a divorce.
She flew over the fields and waved at the workers. Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. Her plane sparked against the sunlight. It made its own clouds. It stopped traffic and concerned the birds.
Every day she flew, she did a different trick and people began to cheer for her. As she did loops and dramatic dives, all eyes were on her. Dirk and I rode our bikes to the other side of town one summer day to spy on her, to learn more about her.
She lived on Corncob Road, in an unassuming brown house next to a lot where she kept her plane under a red, white, and blue hangar that bowed in the middle from rain and age. The lot also served as a takeoff and landing strip for the plane and next to it was a cornfield, lined with tall stalks of corn, all green, yellow, and gold. Dirk and I steered carefully between them and imagined we were on a narrow city street and the stalks were tall trees, showing us the way and keeping us shaded. The chains of our bikes had different squeaks—mine a metallic scratching and Dirk’s a loose rattle of links sometimes catching awkwardly in his sprockets. We got off our bikes as we got closer to the lot and hid them in the corn. I felt a bubbling dread, like a broken lava lamp in my chest.
When we got close enough to the hangar, we could see the precise detail of the plane’s paint job. I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the day’s fading light but the plane really did look covered in feathers. I reached up and ran two of my fingers from the tip of the right wing to the belly of the hawk. Dirk grabbed my hand away and said something about my “goddamn fingerprints.” He pulled two pairs of gloves out of his pocket. They were white, like the kind a magician would wear. Then he took off his backpack and fished out a pair of binoculars. I was impressed by my brother’s preparation.
He fixed his magnified gaze on the woman’s house and I waited for his instructions. I listened for any sounds out there—music, animals, a television, the ticking of hot engines—but could hear only Dirk’s mouth breathing.
“Hmm,” Dirk finally said. “I don’t detect her in there. Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”
“Is she taking a shower?” I said, and quickly realized it was a question he couldn’t answer.
We stood near the front of the plane and I turned to look at the serious face of the hawk. The narrow eyes watched me intently, with the propeller centered between them, its blades sharp as talons. I felt myself cower for a moment, as if it was really watching us. “That bird is so creepy,” Dirk whispered. For some reason, he took a rock out of his backpack and threw it down the long runway in front of us. It was the size of a potato and it bounced across the cracked concrete and rolled to a stop. We both looked at the rock, sitting there, like a grenade waiting to explode or a futuristic listening device or a secret camera.
A hawk screeched somewhere above us and I thought for a moment that it was the plane coming alive. Then the sound of rustling cornstalks and we turned to see the blond woman emerge from the field, riding Dirk’s bike and holding a brown grocery bag. She saw us immediately and swerved over to us. “I was wondering whose bike this was,” she said.
Dirk and I felt stuck to the ground, like the soles of our shoes had melted into the concrete. “We just wanted to look at your cool airplane,” said Dirk.
“She is cool, isn’t she?” the woman said, dropping Dirk’s bike to the ground without even looking for the kickstand. Dirk looked at his bike as if someone just rubbed poop all over it. I looked shyly at the woman and realized that she was even prettier than everyone said. It looked like she was wearing field clothes—a short-sleeve denim shirt, blue jeans, dusty boots. Her hair was pulled back tight, making her eyes pierce us more directly. Her face was soft and sharp at the same time. All I could think of was that she was like a weather lady on TV, wearing farmer clothes.
“How fast does it go?” I asked. It was a weird question, but I was nervous and I’ve never actually known how fast airplanes went.
“Fast enough,” she said. “What’s your name?”
I looked at Dirk, trying to figure out what to say. An uncomfortable pause. “Walt,” I said. Grandfather’s name. “Walter. But friends call me Jojo.” I didn’t know what I was saying. I was confusing myself and on the verge of gibberish.
“Okay, Walter,” she said. “And you, Binoculars? What’s your name?”
“D-D-David,” Dirk stammered.
The woman opened her brown bag and reached inside for something. The crinkling of the bag was so loud, it made my spine freeze.
“What’s your name?” Dirk bravely asked.
The woman stopped her reaching around in the bag and stared him down as if he interrupted something important. “My name is Margaret. And that’s the truth,” she said. Her hand came out of the bag and she was holding a fistful of candy bars in silver wrappers. “Want a 3 Musketeers bar?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she held a candy bar out to Dirk, and then me. We all unwrapped the candy the same way: wrapper peeled like a banana, halfway down.
We ate our candy bars silently. Dirk and I were waiting for Margaret to ask us more questions, but she didn’t seem like she was in a hurry to. Finally, she gazed over to her house with a squint, as if there was something wrong with it. She pointed her right hand at it like a gun. “You guys want to come over?” she said.
We all walked down the concrete strip toward her house. My knees felt wobbly. Margaret walked slowly and I tried to walk with small steps like her but it kind of hurt to move that slowly. She stopped at where the rock was and picked it up. I thought she was going to throw it in the fields, but she smelled it and then carried it with her into the house.
Her home was decorated with a strange mix of hard and soft objects—rusty saws and hammers hanging on the walls, tables and counters covered with lace and velvet, a mounted coyote head over a brick fireplace, a whole wall of bookshelves that were so full they looked on the verge of tumbling over, and a row of different helmets on a shelf by the door. A couple of large old-fashioned-looking lamps gave the place a golden wash of light. I didn’t know what to say or what to look at. Finally, she asked us, “Do Walter and David like poetry?” She asked this as if Walter and David were other people entirely, and I guess they kind of were.
“I like Robert Frost,” Dirk said. This was news to me, but I was glad that he knew how to answer the question. Margaret held her hand up in the air, as if trying to remember something. She said a few lines of poetry, her voice changing into something fancy and younger. I can’t remember the words but it was something about the woods and a trail and it made me think of scary life things. For some reason, this was the first time I noticed she was taller than either of us. Reciting the poem made her seem like a superhero in that moment. David clapped when she was done and I felt like throwing up.
The next morning was a Sunday and Grandfather called to tell us he wanted to take the blimp out. He said it would help with the shrinkage to keep it in the air more regularly. There were some days when the blimp was only as big as a midsize U-Haul truck. I felt fearful and light-headed whenever the thing lifted into the sky.
Dirk and I didn’t say anything to anyone about meeting Margaret the day before. We had stayed there until the sun started to lower over the horizon of the cornfield and we figured we had to get home for dinner. Dirk was acting funny on the way home, like he was in deep thought.
“She seems like she could be a crazy person,” I said, as we rode our bikes out of the bumpy cornfield.
“I thought she was really cool actually,” he said.
“I didn’t know you liked poetry,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m starting to,” he said. “But I guess you wouldn’t know that.”
We usually played video games together before we went to bed, but we didn’t on this night. He stayed in his room and listened to some kind of orchestra music on low volume, and didn’t even say good night.
As we watched Grandfather steer his blimp over the churches, Dirk put on a pair of sunglasses I hadn’t seen before and said, “In the sky nothing touches me. Even birds think I am some kind of magic.”
I looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant. “Where did you get those glasses?” I asked him.
“Margaret gave them to me. She had many styles. They wouldn’t fit you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt a little hurt, or left out of something.
“When you went to the bathroom,” Dirk said. “She gave them to me and also a copy of a poem she wrote.” He pulled a folded-up wad of papers out of his pocket and held it out. “It’s twelve pages long.”
My first impulse was to grab the paper and tear it up, as if it were a curse that had to be vanquished. I’m not sure why that was my first impulse.
“Is it good?” I asked, not sure what the barometer of good poetry was. “I mean, do you like it?”
“Yes, it is, and yes, I do,” he answered.
I wondered why she didn’t give me anything. Was I really in the bathroom that long? I guess she did give me a candy bar, but I felt sad that I didn’t have anything to keep.
He unfolded it and read aloud, “I look into the eyes of stars that no one else can see. I am closer to them than you are. I am farther away from you every day because of my wings. You hated my wings. You hated the stars.”
He folded it back up and put it back in his pocket. Over our heads, we heard the distinct buzz of Margaret’s plane. It cruised high above us and we saw that there was a banner trailing behind it this time. We’d seen these before, on other planes. Usually they were advertisements or special messages about birthdays or graduations. This one said: morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
“Emily Dickinson,” said Dirk. He shook his head, as if amazed.
“Who’s that?” I said.
He looked at me and winced behind his glasses. The glasses made him look older for some reason. “She was a poet, and a recluse,” he said.
I couldn’t remember what recluse meant, but figured it had something to do with reckless behavior, like flying planes and writing poetry.
For the next few weeks, people in town began speculating more about Margaret and the messages attached to her plane. But so much of this talk was wrong. Most people didn’t even know her name. And Dirk told me they didn’t understand poetry either. School had started back up and he was doing all his book reports on poetry in his AP English class.
Everyone assumed that the messages were intended for her ex-husband, but no one knew who that was. Maybe it was someone who didn’t even live in the same state, or maybe he was dead. Some thought she was trying to send messages to heaven. Dirk started to think some of the words were meant for him. Although we only went to spy on her that one time, I got the feeling that he was possibly visiting her on his own. When she flew over our house one day, her banner stating, i know i am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year, Dirk started crying.
In the meantime, Grandfather was growing more tired and looked sickly. He refused to see a doctor until one day he had a hard time breathing and we took him to the hospital. They told him he had emphysema and gave him an inhaler. He was sixty years old and they said he probably had two years to live. Upon receiving this news, Grandfather smiled and said, “Well, it’s not forever, but close enough.”
Grandfather started receiving get-well cards from people in the town. He would open them and stack them on top of each other, right next to his pile of monthly bills. I’d look at them whenever I was there on his blimp-flying days. It was nice to know that so many people were thinking of him. One day, I saw a card from Margaret in the bundle. It said, I know that you fly to keep love alive. When you are not in the sky, I will be. I’ll know what it feels like for you. I will continue.
I took it and showed it to Dirk and then asked Mom what it meant. She took us out to Dairy Queen that night, which usually meant she was going to tell us something serious. I liked Dairy Queen but also had bad memories of it from when our first cat died. I had a conflicting psychological relationship with Peanut Buster Parfaits.
“Do you know why Grandfather started flying his blimp?” she asked us, a candy sprinkle sliding down her chin.
Dirk and I had our stock answers, but we said them this time like they were questions.
“Because it makes people happy?”
“Because it’s relaxing?”
“Because he’s the only one in town with a blimp license and everyone else is too afraid to learn?”
She looked at us like we were a pair of cute but dumb puppies. “Boys,” she said, “you never knew your grandmother—your dad’s mother—and we don’t talk about her much because it’s painful—and don’t tell your grandfather I told you this—but he flies the blimp in memory of her. She was just thirty-nine when she died. And she didn’t die of the plague like we told you but she was killed in a motorcycle accident.”
Dirk and I looked at each other quickly, and then back at our mother. We had no words to say. We buried our plastic spoons into our blobs of ice cream and let them stand straight up like surrender flags in front of our shocked faces.
“She was wild in her life,” Mom said. “Your grandfather tried to settle her down but he just couldn’t. She hung out with . . .” She paused and looked around cautiously before lowering her voice. “People thought she was in a motorcycle gang. Men with long hair and dirty jeans and . . . tattoos. She even had tattoos herself. Your father was teased a lot about this. One of her tattoos had a bad word in it.”
“What did it say?” Dirk asked. I wanted to know too. My imagination was really going, but if it was the F-word I didn’t want to hear Mom say it.
“I don’t think I should say. It’s not appropriate in a family establishment,” she said.
“Will you tell us in the car?” Dirk asked.
“Oh, hush,” Mom said. “Let me finish the story.”
Dirk and I grabbed our red spoons and started shoveling our melting desserts into our mouths.
“So, Grandma—Aretha was her name—had just bought her own Harley and Grandfather was not happy about it. They had a big fight and she took off, angry as a buzzard. She didn’t come home that night and the next day the police came and told Grandfather that she was in a bad crash on the highway. He went to be by her side at the hospital, but she couldn’t speak. The doctors said she must have been going eighty miles an hour when she hit something in the road. She was barely alive for the next two days in the hospital but Grandfather never left the room. And then when your father visited on the third day, she finally started to stir. They called out for the doctor and then leaned close to her, trying to coax her awake. As the doctor came in the room, she let out a low moan and said some words so quietly they had to get right up to her lips. She said, ‘Faster faster faster.’ And then she died. Grandfather was just a shell of himself after that and wrestled with thoughts in his head—about their fight, about how she may have crashed, about how scary that must have been. He wondered what she thought about in that flash of flying through the air or when her body skidded down the pavement. He wanted everything to slow down. He never remarried and everyone worried about him. About seven years after that, he decided he wanted a blimp. We all thought it was strange, but we were just glad he wanted something.”
Mom looked over at the metal napkin holder on the table and seemed shocked to see her reflection there. She squinted at it, turning her head and watching it distort. Then she looked up, gazed through the window, noticed the dimming world outside, and swallowed some of her ice cream. “He once said he likes flying the blimp because he can see everything and because it’s slow and just floats around like a god or guardian angel. It makes him feel close to her.”
The next day, Dirk and I were walking to the library and we saw Margaret zip her plane above us. Her banner read, remember me in the sky witnessing love in vast directions. Dirk looked away, like it was the sun blinding his sight. I focused on each fluttering word, trying to unlock their meanings.
Inside the library, we read magazines and comic books for a long time and then chose books to check out. I picked a book called Brian’s Song, about a dying football player. Dirk found an anthology called English Romantic Poetry and a book about a famous woman who flew airplanes in the 1920s and ’30s before she disappeared. I looked through the book of poems because I thought there might be some dirty parts but Dirk said, “Romantic poetry isn’t really about romance. It’s not sexy.”
As we were leaving, someone whistled at us from down the sidewalk and we turned to see Margaret. Her arms were full of books and her hair looked longer and bigger than before, like a golden halo. She was wearing lipstick, which most women in our town didn’t do, but on her it looked natural. Maybe more serious. “Some back-to-school reading?” she asked us. She saw the poetry anthology. “Focus on the Keats and skip the Lord Byron chapter.”
Dirk stuttered, “I like W-W-W-William Wordsworth.”
“Oh yeah?” said Margaret. “He was kind of a bore. His sister is more interesting, I’ll have you know.”
I had no idea what this conversation was about and suddenly blurted out, “I saw the card you sent to our grandfather.”
She smiled gently at me. “He has a poet’s heart,” she said. “I’m sorry for his struggle.”
“What do you know about his struggle?” I said. I felt protective of Grandfather and this deeper life of his I was still processing. I felt tears starting to form.
“I knew about him before moving here actually. I saw an old newspaper story about him at a library in Ohio, on microfiche.” She looked at Dirk, saw that he was tensing up, shifting his weight from left to right.
“We never knew our grandmother,” Dirk said.
“I wish I knew what to say,” Margaret said.
A few days later, I was walking to Grandfather’s by myself. Mom sent me there to pick raspberries for a pie she was going to bake. In the field next to his house, I saw Grandfather looking at his blimp, which had shrunk significantly. I walked over and Grandfather took a hit off his inhaler and wiped at his eyes. “Am I seeing this right?” he asked me. The blimp barely looked bigger than a Volkswagen Bug. Even the cabin, where he sat to fly it, looked smaller somehow. The door could only open halfway. “Is this some kind of joke?” Grandfather said, and I turned to see him yelling up at the clouds. He waved his fist toward the sun. “I’m not ready for this!” he shouted.
“Grandfather, please don’t yell,” I said. “It’s not good for you.”
He looked at me, his breathing heavy and sweat dripping from his hair. He noticed my arm wedged into the door, prying it open little by little. “Keep going,” he said, his eyes brightening. “See if you can get in.” He grabbed the door, too, pulling as hard as he could. I got stuck for a moment, neck twisted, with one leg in and one leg out. I turned my head and then my shoulders were in. I could smell the waft of musty sun-baked leather. My other leg finally slid in with me, though my shoe fell off. Grandfather leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, smiling and then giving me the thumbs up. I wasn’t sure how he could have ever fit in there. I looked at all the buttons and switches and tried to spot something that would indicate why the blimp was shrinking. Grandfather held my shoe in one hand and his inhaler in the other. I waited for him to give me instructions but the door of the cabin clicked closed between us. He started to tell me something through the small window but began coughing. It felt like some kind of wall was pressing on my back and I sensed the space around me getting tighter and I couldn’t move. Grandfather backed away from the blimp, coughing and fumbling with his inhaler. I remembered the time I asked him what was inside a blimp. This was my first time in the blimp. It was like the blimp was trying to eat me. He dropped my shoe on the ground and waved his hands around. I tried to push my way out of the blimp. I couldn’t. I watched Grandfather, hoping he would find his strength and save me. He wouldn’t.
When Grandfather’s obituary appeared in the newspaper, it included a black-and-white photo of him with his wife. They were so young and happy in the picture. She looked beautiful and tough, with a smirk that conveyed an unpredictable personality, like she could play a joke on him at any moment. Grandfather had his arm around her and I could see his right hand holding on to her waist tightly. The look on his face was one of surprise and below the photo it said, Walt and Aretha.
They had to have the funeral service at the high school football stadium so they could fit everyone in. Even people from other towns came to give their regards. A lot of folks who had moved away but heard about Grandfather’s death returned by the busloads.
Dad tried to play a song on his trumpet to start things off, but was too upset to make it to the final note. Mom spoke after that and several old friends took turns telling stories about Grandfather. Some of the stories didn’t seem real. Some were sad or funny. Dirk read a poem that he wrote called “Into the Mouth of Clouds.” He had to stop halfway through so he wouldn’t start crying. Everyone waited patiently and it became a moment of silence before Dirk felt strong enough to finish the last lines.
Margaret was there, too, but she sat by herself and didn’t speak to anyone. I glanced at her a couple of times but she was wearing sunglasses and it was hard to tell what she was feeling. I thought maybe she was crying a little. At the reception afterward, in the cafeteria, she hugged us and kissed our foreheads. She said hello to Mom and Dad and gave them a poem in a gilded frame. There was meatloaf and corn and pie. All over the walls were photographs of the blimp taken by various people of the town. You could see the sky—blue or gray or white—behind it. You could see Grandfather’s heroic hand waving. In a couple of the photos, you could see his face, blurry and smiling.
At dusk that night, Margaret flew her plane back and forth over the town. The banner said, faster faster faster. Dirk and I watched her until it was too dark to see her.
The giant purple hawk. The poet. The stars turned up bright like flickering candles. We never saw her again after that.
I finally did get a chance to look inside the belly of the blimp. But it had shrunk so small after Grandfather died. It was the size of a pillowcase, almost nothing. It was just air really. But I still believed that when it was up in the sky, it was more than simply air. It could have been anything. 
Kevin Sampsell’s writing has appeared in Paper Darts, Longreads, Salon, Fairy Tale Review, Joyland, Hobart, and elsewhere. His books include the memoir A Common Pornography, the novel This Is Between Us, and a forthcoming book of collage art and poems, I Made an Accident. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs the small press Future Tense Books.
