Things Had Changed

More about Things Had Changed

The balloons stayed longer than the people did.

That was the first thing the man in the red coat noticed after the town forgot how to sleep.

Every evening the sky turned the color of bruised oranges and gasoline rainbows. The houses leaned inward like tired old drinkers. Chickens wandered the stone roads without purpose. Somewhere far away, somebody kept playing a train whistle that sounded like it was trapped under water.

The man rented a room beside the empty barn with the yellow doors. Nobody asked his name anymore. Maybe they once had. Maybe he’d forgotten it himself.

Things had changed.

Once upon a time he used to believe in causes, in lovers, in revolutions, in the holiness of staying up all night talking about truth while cheap wine stained the tablecloth red. But now the truth came apart in his hands like wet newspaper.

Every morning he sat by the window staring at the floating red balloon outside his room. It never moved. Wind touched everything else in town except that balloon.

The woman in the gold dress arrived one Thursday evening carrying champagne and bad intentions. She climbed into his lap like she already knew the ending of the story. Her laugh sounded expensive. He couldn’t tell if she loved him or was studying him for a crime.

“You look like a man waiting for the last train,” she whispered.

Maybe he was.

At night he walked the stone roads under the sapphire sky, hands deep in his pockets, eyes hollow as burnt-out theaters. Sometimes he imagined the whole town hanging from invisible strings. Sometimes he imagined himself already dead and simply forgetting to fall down.

The train station smelled of coal smoke and rain. He stood there for hours beside a cracked suitcase he never opened. The train came slow through the fog like some wounded mechanical animal dragging the century behind it.

But nobody got off.

Nobody ever did.

One evening he wandered past the old gallows outside town. Crows sat on the wooden beams watching him like black-robed judges. He stared up at the dangling noose and laughed softly to himself.

Not because it was funny.

Because it felt familiar.

Then came the carnival people in masks and torn velvet clothes, dancing in the streets beneath drifting confetti. They grabbed strangers by the hands and spun them around to music that sounded like broken circus organs. Everybody smiled too hard. Everybody looked afraid.

The man danced with them anyway.

What else was there to do?

Later he found himself staring through iron bars in the jailhouse window, though he couldn’t remember being arrested. Maybe the cage had always been there. Maybe the bars were inside him all along.

Out beyond the town stood a crooked signpost pointing in every direction at once.

Hollywood.
Heaven.
Nowhere.
Yesterday.

The arrows all looked the same.