Dan spends a lot of time thinking about helium tanks. It’s hard not to; half his job is refilling them. Watch the empties come back in. Hook them up to compression. Watch them go back out.
It’s not that he has any particular affinity for the work – or for the gas itself. What brings his mind back to helium is a tiny zap, a romantic notion rattling around between neurons underneath a shining scalp attempting to exorcise its last vestiges of hair. It’s sad something so light inside should be so weighed down.
On his walks home, watching a shadow self trudge through storefronts flooded with sunset Kool-Aid, he thinks up a life for that darker him. A firebrand preacher – or a charismatic cult leader, maybe – taking in the beaten and downtrodden, filling them with hope and sending them back into a world that beats it out of them, until the file back in just as empty. The seeds of a smile settle in the corners of his mouth.
*****
Stay tuned for part two.
4 Comments
Typo: 2nd line from the bottom, “the”.
Other than that, I like it and am interested to see how this story is going to live up to its title.
Helium? Like an early David Lynch story. Very pulp. …have my attention.
I see a John Wayne Gacy type of future here. For you, that is. Not the character.
That’s a little disturbing, Jon:
John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer.
Between the years 1972 and 1978, when he was arrested, convicted, and later executed, Gacy raped and murdered thirty three young boys. Although some of his victims’ bodies were found in the Des Plaines River, he buried 29 of them in the small crawl space underneath the basement of his home.He became known as “Killer Clown” because of the popular block parties he would throw for his friends and neighbors, entertaining children in a clown suit and makeup, under the alias “Pogo the Clown”.
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