Bryce stood from his bicycle’s seat and pumped power into his brakes. He yanked at the handlebars, and he was satisfied by the way his braking back tire tossed so many of the fine rocks found at the edge of the roadway into the air.
“Hey, Chad! Check it out! Up there over the trees!”
Chad’s mountain bike slammed to a stop alongside Bryce’s bicycle. Chad ripped off the helmet his mother forced him to wear whenever he took to the suburban neighborhood’s streets with his best friend Bryce so that his view was not impeded as he gazed into the sky where his friend pointed. There, drifting in the slight breeze and descending slowly towards them, floated a strange balloon of quilted colors and red, white and blue streamers.
“What do you think it is, Chad?”
Chad shrugged. “What does it look like? It’s a balloon.”
“I’ve never seen a balloon that big without a basket attached to it,” Bryce responded. “Where do you think it came from?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
Bryce pointed as the balloon just cleared a set of power lines and phone cables.
“It kinda looks like a jellyfish.”
“Or an octopus,” Chad added. “Come on. The wind’s bringing it right to us.”
Both boys were standing over their bicycles a heartbeat later, pumping all the speed and power their young legs could muster into their wheels. The strange balloon continued to descend. It floated beyond the last line of trees, and there were no more branches to entangle the balloon painted in such color, with the odd, Easter egg shapes swaying from the balloon’s streamers and ropes. The boys knew the balloon would be on the ground soon. They hoped the balloon didn’t land on someone’s roof, or behind the locked fences of one of their suburban neighborhood’s gated communities. With a little luck, they hoped the balloon would land somewhere where they could reach it, where they could get a good, close look at the thing. They hoped the balloon might even land somewhere where they could grip at it, to maybe even carry it away with them should they judge the balloon a thing worthy of their keeping. They knew it was ultimately up to the wind, and so they pedaled as hard on their bikes as they ever did to give chase to that balloon coming closer and closer to the ground.