balloon factory
My mother is a sixty-two-year-old woman with brown, stringy hair who works in a factory. There are one-hundred workers at the factory, including the foreman. They make two hundred thousand balloons every day. The lights on the factory ceiling are sickly and fluorescent. Mosquitoes and moths go blind, running into glass tubes and each other, and their stringy, limp bodies fall into stinking vats of coagulant below. My mother uses a strainer to collect the casualties. For my last birthday, she gave me my own strainer. At home, I use it to make black tea with cardamom. At the factory, I use it to collect sticky insect parts. I want to be just like my mother.
The balloon-making process begins at 8am each morning when Worker No. 1 pours dye into a drum of latex. Worker No. 2 pressure-washes molds, Worker No. 3 dips the molds in coagulant, Worker No. 4 dips them in latex. The balloons are dried and soaked in hot water until they’re vulcanized. Workers No. 10 and 11 wash the balloons. The balloons are inflated and inspected. Worker No. 14 checks for lumps, Worker No. 15 checks for bumps, Worker No. 16 checks for lacerations.
Worker No. 99 uses a strainer to collect stringy, limp bodies from stinking vats of coagulant.
I was fifteen minutes late to school this morning, so I stayed late for an extra twenty. I had left my lunch at home. I had packed two packets of dried seaweed and a bowl of lentil soup. A girl in my class offered me a box of raisins and I took it. I sit next to her every day, either on the left or right. She looks beautiful from the left, and I often wonder how I would feel if I looked like her.
There are twenty-four children at the factory, including me. Twelve of the children are large, and twelve are small. Five of them have long hair. One is bald. Sometimes the other children ask me why I don’t speak, why I don’t remember their names. I don’t know. I like holding their hands and stepping on their toes. I like patting the bald one’s head. Every September, the twenty-four children line up in a row along the crumbling sidewalk behind the factory. The factory wall, the security camera, the sidewalk, the children, the gravel, the ten-foot tall fence, the steep hill. We line up in order from biggest to smallest. I am the second-smallest. I live near the butcher, so I bring eight cooked sausages wrapped in butcher’s paper. I unwrap them and give them to the biggest one. The biggest one changes every year—someone has a growth spurt and outgrows the old biggest, or the old biggest stops coming to the factory after school. I have been the second-smallest for four years.
The biggest takes the sausages from me and procures a pocketknife from his belt. He slices the casings open, and eats the sausages. We keep the casings in a bucket and he eats until he looks sick. He isn’t allowed to throw up, or it would all be ruined. We do this every day until October. I buy or steal two-hundred-forty sausages and he eats them all. By October, the bucket we use to store the sausage casings is full. The sausage-eater is even bigger now, and has a round belly. It’s important that his belly is round, or it would all be ruined.
Our balloon-making process begins on October 1st at 8 am. We skip school and tell our teachers we’re ill. The fumes at the factory have given us indigestion. We’re attending a funeral. I’d finally fallen down the steep hill behind the factory. I haul out the bucket with the sausage casings in it, and someone pours in three packets of gelatin. Someone gets a large wooden spoon, someone else puts the bucket on a small camping stove someone left behind the factory a few years ago. We mix the sausage casings with gelatin and water and cook it down until it looks like the slime snails leave behind, like the coagulant in the balloon factory.
Twenty minutes pass and the mixture is pleasantly warm.
The biggest one takes off his shirt and lies on his back. His belly is round and plump—it wouldn’t move if you slapped it. I give the wooden spoon to the smallest child, who smears the slimy, coagulated paste over the biggest one’s stomach. We wait until it’s cooled and then we add a second layer, making sure it appropriately adheres to the first. The smallest one leans over the rotund belly, finds the navel, takes a deep breath in and blows as hard as she can. The cooled and cured slime inflates. It smells like gelatin and rotting sausage.
The balloon is bigger than me. I run inside the factory, knowing I don’t have much time. There’s a filing cabinet in the foreman’s office where I secretly keep plastic bags filled with the limp bodies of the mosquitoes and moths I collect with my mother. I try to keep them intact, but the coagulant melts their wings and some of their legs fall off over time. I apologize to the bodies and hurry outside. I find the end of the balloon still attached to the biggest one’s stomach and I tie it into a knot. I give my plastic bag to one of the older children, who ties it to the balloon with string.
We release the balloon and it floats over the fence. We watch until it disappears from view. I don’t think it will ever pop.