I’d never seen a blimp before we had to kill one, “kill” being the word they were using around the hangar. It already felt like we were ants under a cup in there, but then they opened the great door and here it came, like a child’s shoe: a pale, faceless thing blotting out the sun. As it made its slow approach the blimp seemed impossibly full, near-bursting. I thought it might explode at a pinprick.

I guess that’s why it was being deflated—there’d just been another accident. Fiery pictures were in the paper. Lives had been lost. So as we tugged on the thick ropes, dragging it further down, the whole thing felt like corporal punishment. I was reminded of a book my mom once read to me about a giant who wakes to find himself tied down by little men. Only he wasn’t actually giant. The men were just incredibly small. I remembered that he broke free from his ropes with ease; all he had to do was sit up. But the blimp wasn’t fighting back. In fact, as we tied the ropes to the floor, it had a kind of noble resignation, pointing its proud nose straight ahead. When we’d thoroughly trapped it I went a little distance away to get one last look. Everyone in the hangar was staring at it, tutting or whistling with their hands on their hips. Some walked up just to place a hand on it, then backed away to stare again—I understood, then, what the moon does to the ocean.

There was a pop, and the blimp scrunched its nose, recoiling, forming wrinkles at the bottom. Then a second pop, and the tail end began to droop. Then a softer, constant sound like a thousand men exhaling. I watched as it melted into something new: a cowardly, slug-like creature, bowing to us, heaving into itself. In a few minutes all the remaining gas was in the middle, fighting weakly towards expansion. Eventually there was nothing but a crumpled, exhausted heap, and everything was quiet. “Well,” said the guy next to me, shaking his head. “What’re you gonna do?” He turned and walked off into the hangar, boots echoing on the concrete.

I came home and there were the shiny red balloons from my son’s birthday, huddled in the corner of the ceiling, content just to float and to be red. I let them be. But of course they wrinkled, and in a few days their tails hung too close to the ground. While my back was turned my son reached up and snatched one, mangling it in his little hands until it burst. I held him after, when he wouldn’t stop screaming. Later, I found a pencil and took the whole bunch to the backyard, all of them guilty by association. As I emptied them, I found myself wishing I’d let them go while they were still lighter than air. I would’ve watched them disappear into the sky, little reds in all that blue.