Little Boy Blue and His Striped Balloon

“Lilia. You’ve gotta think. Where did you see Thomas last?”

Lilia sighed heavily, staring blankly down at her palms. “We went to the museum.”.

“What … museum?” 

“In the woods. Oh, ma. I’m sorry. I really really am.” Lilia scrunched her face and sat weeping in her chair. 

“Officer Rick”

“It’s pronounced Rick-ee, ma’am”

“Officer Ricky, You’ve gotta believe I had NO idea about Lilia and her friend sneaking off into the woods like this. I wouldn’t have allowed it. We’ll talk about this later young lady, but you need to give us more information. We need to figure out what happened to your friend. Oh, I can’t imagine how his parents are feeling right now …” 

The officer shifted in his seat. “Now, Lilia. Tell me about this museum, here, that you and your friend would visit. Maybe it will give us some answers and we can get to the bottom of this. I pray that boy’s alright.”

Thomas always joked that Lilia would be the one sitting across from a police officer in an interrogation room. He was right, though it wasn’t because of anything she had done wrong. She hadn’t toilet-papered the neighbor’s house or set fire to an abandoned junkyard car. No, she was sitting across from this police officer because her best friend had gone missing. Thomas said that she was the adventurous one; the one most likely to discover a cure for cancer or unveil the ninth Wonder of the World. She felt like Thomas was the adventurous one because he was the one who discovered the abandoned art museum in the woods. He even noticed strange things about the place; things he’d tell her that were hard to believe and that he, alone, would see when he’d go by himself to visit the bones of the art-filled casket. Things moving, shifting, turning, and changing about the paintings and one painting in particular. 

The museum had stained glass as fire mixed with water; each diamond-shaped window bleeding into the one next to it in a sea of color. Imagine standing along the sands of a beach and witnessing the tides pulling in and out, but every single time a different color emerges from the water. The tide pulls in blue, then pulls out purple, the tide pulls in orange, then pulls out red. The museum was a memorial for those beautiful works of art which once lived inside of it. It was desecrated, but beautiful. Much like the paintings in that museum. 

It wasn’t, however, the exterior of the museum that was most beautiful but the painting that sat within it. There were many paintings within the museum left to rot away but one particular painting stood preserved. The painting was of a large, green meadow that stretched into a huddle of trees. A little boy sat with his father against the grass as each one of them stared up into the sky at a hot air balloon ascending into the clouds. The air balloon was striped like a zebra, but colorful like a peacock with gold, purple, green, orange, red, and yellow filling each stripe. A brown basket dangled from the large balloon inviting onlookers to take a ride. While Lilia always felt happy staring at the painting, Thomas said that he would often feel a sense of longing; as if the father and the boy longed to jump aboard that brown basket and ride off into the wind away from the seemingly lush land. Thomas would tell her strange things about the painting, too. He said that, one night, he was looking at the painting and the little boy turned his head to look back at Thomas. The boy was, according to Thomas, sad. Then one day, Thomas said that he noticed the green grass turned to grey ash as if a volcano had recently erupted. The boy was on the father’s shoulders as the father reached out waving his free hand toward the balloon; someone was in the balloon this time. When Thomas would tell Lilia these things she wouldn’t know what to think. All she could do was ask him questions and wait as he told her the same thing every single time: “Lilia, you have to believe me. I’m not making this stuff up. As weird as it is, there’s something wrong with this painting. Could those people be real? What if they’re in trouble?” She’d tell him she believed him time after time only to find that doubt resided where belief in her friend should. Thomas spent countless hours talking about the painting and especially the little boy; who he believed to be in grave danger. He said that the boy and his father would visit him in his dreams and that, one time, he thought he saw two pale figures that resembled them across the street as they walked along the sidewalk after school. He yelled toward the crowd as people eyed him curiously; looking around and wondering who Thomas was yelling at. Lilia could faintly see two people, a small-ish child and a grown adult, briskly walking away from the scene though she never understood who those people could be. But, Thomas did. He believed it was the boy and the father in the painting with all his heart. 

Then Thomas went missing. Thomas’s parents called the police, Lilia’s mom, and the school principal to put out flyers. They were all scared and Lilia was having a difficult time focusing on her school work. One day, she ran away to the abandoned museum to clear her head and cradled her knees, sobbing. A strange wind lifted her chin and forced her to look toward a broken glass window. She stared through the broken window and looked at the familiar painting only to find something very peculiar and unfamiliar about it. The little boy held his father’s hand and, with his free-hand- a paintbrush with black paint dripping onto the grass. In black paint the words ``save Thomas' ' were written in the top left corner of the painting. The boy’s head was turned and faced toward Lilia as she thought she saw a teardrop from the little boy’s pale blue eyes.