Polly Flies the Balloon

On her last morning the field was still dark when she arrived. The pilot crouched down and held out the string of the little helium balloon. "You know the ritual by now," he said. Polly took it, and let it go, and the two of them stood side by side and watched it drift away toward the east, exactly as she had watched him do on her second morning here.

In the basket, the pilot lifted her up close to the burner handle. "Now you," he said. Polly pressed down on it together with him. One breath of fire, two, three. The great balloon came up off the ground, and the passengers laughed aloud with the sheer pleasure of it.

The sun rose, and with it more than a hundred balloons all around them, gold and red and blue at every height the sky had to offer. Below, the fairy chimneys began to glow, and the pigeons woke in their small carved houses in the cliffs. Polly looked at the whole of it for a long time and did not say anything, because there was nothing that needed saying.

High above the valley she said her goodbyes to the pilot and to the crew who had been up before dawn every morning of her stay. Then she lifted off from the edge of the basket and flew east on the morning wind, the same wind the little balloon had gone up to find at the start of every single day.