Trembling With Fear 5-11-25

The Angel, by Jim Larsen

To vanish completely—that was Mary’s dream. To erase her existence as if she had never been. No trace, no sign, no evidence left behind. She imagined being carried away by the wind, high above, to the wilderness where nothing of her would remain, devoured by the wild. The remnants of her life—a broken-down truck, a decaying house, and a dog scavenging for scraps—would be all that was left to suggest she had ever been.

There was a guy by the name of Larry Walters. Mary read about him. In 1982, he tied 45 weather balloons to a lawn chair, got comfortable, untethered the chair, and away he went—off into the Heavens, floating blissfully among the clouds. This idea consumed her. In her frail, ghostly state, she calculated that 30 balloons would be enough to lift her away. Weather balloons, she discovered, were easily purchased online, and helium? She could find that at the party supply store in town.

She knew 100 percent nothing about tying a noose, but she was not going to screw this up. She could have tied any old knot and hoped for the best, but if it didn’t hold, then what? The balloons drift away without her? She has to scrape the money together to buy more and wait for them to show up to give it another try? No. Enough was enough. A dead husband, a foreclosed farm, crushing debt, and a miscarried child buried in the yard—enough. There were noose-tying videos on YouTube. She figured it out.

With the balloons inflated and secured, Mary tied the noose and slipped it around her neck. Just like that—no hesitation. She tightened the rope. Would anyone notice she was gone? Would anyone care? If she had answers to those questions, she wouldn’t be doing this. But there were no answers. With a final breath, she whispered, “Enough,” and released the tether. The only witness to her ascent was her starving dog.

Her body shot upward, the noose tightening instantly. Her neck snapped with a sickening crack, her eyes bulging grotesquely, her tongue swelling and turning a deep, unnatural purple. Her frail, lifeless form, clad in a pale blue dress, spun wildly like a gruesome marionette, dangling from the sky. A murder of crows, disturbed by the unnatural sight, cawed and circled as she trespassed through their airspace.

Mary’s lifeless body floated over the treetops, the hills, the fields, and valleys—drifting far from the rural life she knew into the unknown world of suburbia. The wind carried her for miles, until, at nearly 15,800 feet, the helium in the balloons began to lose its battle against gravity, and her rigor-mortised corpse started its slow descent.

By some dark twist of fate, Mary’s body didn’t get tangled in power lines or trees. Instead, she drifted down into the backyard of 8119 Pine Street, where a little girl named Kayla and her friends were playing, celebrating her eighth birthday. Kayla’s mother had planned the surprise party to bring some joy back into her daughter’s life. It had been a hard month—Kayla’s father had died just four weeks earlier, and she was still struggling to understand.

“An angel came down from the sky and took your dad back to Heaven,” her mother had told her. But this angel was not what she expected. The pictures she had seen of angels showed them as beautiful, radiant beings. But this…this angel was hideous. Something was terribly wrong. Twisted. Grotesque. Wrong. But wasn’t she supposed to love all of God’s creatures? Even the ugly ones? This angel must be here for her, she thought.

Kayla’s mother, hearing the children’s screams, rushed outside to find her daughter clinging to the dead woman from the sky, sobbing into her tattered blue dress, “I want my dad!” she cried, her small hands gripping the lifeless form that had descended into their yard.