Jynx heard soft music playing as she crossed the back lawn. Faintly at first, she could make out guitar of some sort. It sounded like Spanish guitar, like Spain Spanish, not Mexican Spanish. She slipped along the hedges that ran the fence line, not really trying to be sneaky, but she didn’t want to draw any attention if Mr. Englehorn had company with him.
Mr. Englehorn sat alone on his back porch. The evening air was so calm that she could hear the ice tinkling around in his glass when he took a sip and set it back on the table. He stared out towards the nighttime desert. She caught a brief glimmer through the ponderosa branches and followed Mr. Englehorn’s gaze. A paper lantern, glowing with a warm golden light, rose gently from Mr. Englehorn’s back patio, drifting tentatively out over the edge of the cliffside. The desert, cast in the last twilight, faded from the muted dust color to a soft, pale, monochromatic blue and the lantern hung in the sky like an amber amulet. Jynx hunkered down to watch it silently drift out across the highway and over the dry lakebed.
Mr. Englehorn leaned back in his chair and took a sip from his cocktail. Satisfied with the quality of his work, apparently, he refilled his glass from a crystal decanter on the table and leaned forward, busying himself with something on the table in front of him. Humming and swaying to the guitar music, he unfolded a sheet of tissue paper and smoothed it out on the table before him. Jynx watched him pick up a thin wooden skewer, run a trail of glue along it, and set the thin piece to the paper. As he held it in place, he glanced around, scowling. He couldn’t possibly have heard her; she didn’t make a noise. He looked over his shoulder towards her yard, but he didn’t seem to see her, squatting behind the bushes beside the toolshed. He turned back to his work, placing glue dots on the tips of a few pieces and holding them together for half a minute.
Jynx wanted to watch the paper lanterns but didn’t want to disturb Mr. Englehorn. She felt bad for watching him but didn’t want to bother him, either. The longer she hid, the more she worried that she might disturb him, and if she snuck off to the clubhouse hatch, he would hear her.
Mr. Englehorn sat upright in his chair, glancing around the yard again. He lifted his nose to the evening air like a desert bird reading the scent of an evening breeze. “Baker?” he hung his arm over the back of the chair and peered in her general direction, his bad eye mostly squinted shut.
Jynx shifted and her sneaker sole snapped a twig finally. “Hey, Mr. Englehorn.” She stood up slowly, slightly ashamed.
“Well come on over here if you want to, Baker, I won’t bite ya.” He leaned over the table again, returning to his lantern project.
Jynx dusted the leaves off her knees and walked to the end of the short chain link fence that divided their yards. Swinging around the end of the fence she looked out over the desert floor, the paper lantern still rising and floating east towards the distant hills. She skirted the cliffside front edge of what Mr. Englehorn called his “mad scientist laboratory.” It was just a couple of big green houses that were so old the plastic windows had all gone foggy. Low hedges lined the walls at waist height, and the ponderosa branches hung low and heavy on the side overhanging the cliff. She slipped under the ponderosa branches, purposely kicking needle piles to make some noise, and joined Mr. Englehorn at the glass table where he sat tacking a corner on his next lantern. “Sorry, Mr. Englehorn. I saw the lantern. I just wanted to watch for a while.”
He nodded and shrugged and took a sip of his tumbler. “Well, you don’t have to be hiding in the shrubs.” He smiled in a disturbingly pleasant manner that Jynx had never seen before, raising his glass at her. “Just make a little noise, would you? I’m not a big fan of people sneaking up behind me.” Jynx took a seat and set her pack on the patio beside her. She watched as Mr. Englehorn tacked a bit of string all around the base on the inside of the lantern, trailing it up to the center of the crossed struts.
“My daughter and I used to build these together, a long time ago.” Mr. Englehorn finished placing a spot of glue on the tiny paper tab and pinched the tab around the little post, counting under his breath as the glue set. “Of course, we used to make them out of plastic bags and plastic straws and stuff, but we can’t do that anymore.” He raised his glass to the empty sunsetting desert floor as if offering a toast. “The Bureau of Land Management frowns upon that sort of behavior now.”
Nobody had ever mentioned a daughter to Jynx, and she didn’t want to ask any questions. It was clear that it had happened years before, and that he was going to tell her anyway. He contemplated the bottom of his beverage for a moment, like reading tea leaves or consulting a crystal ball as he went into a trance. “She would have been about Miss Cooper’s age.” He set his tumbler back on the table and inspected the completed paper lantern. “And nights like this, when there’s a nice calm breeze heading in a general east-northeast direction, we made little hot air balloons.” He held the crude rectangular crepe paper model out for display, gently motioning for her to take it and inspect it.
Jynx lightly pinched the flimsy wood center cross at the base of the lantern. It was impossibly light, the wood being balsa, and the paper super thin. If she let it go, even the slightest breeze might carry it over the edge of the cliff where It would be torn apart by the creosote branches and dry sage. “So,” Jynx considered, “if a hot air balloon doesn’t have a wing or propellers, how does it fly?” she asked, handing his delicate paper sculpture back to him.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Mr. Englehorn swayed slightly, considering his next, latest masterpiece. “Well, it’s the most poetic form of air travel,” he said, and held the paper lantern before him, entirely lacking an apparent propulsion system. “Without boring you with a bunch of scientific stuff,” he picked a candle up off a small pile on the table and placed a spot of putty at the base. “When the air starts to warm up, the molecules get excited. They start bouncing against each other to make a little elbow room.” He gently placed the candle onto one of the struts, pinching the little dab of putty as he squinted off towards the first lantern, barely a glimmering star in the distance, but still going. “As the molecules speed up, they start to collide, and the air starts to expand with all that extra space. As the density of the warm air decreases, it gets lighter than the cold air around it, causing it to rise.” He plucked another tiny candle off the pile, applied a dab of putty, and affixed it to one of the struts. He leaned in toward Jynx, glancing in either direction as if someone might be listening, and spoke in almost a whisper. “This, incidentally, is also how big desert birds like the condors and eagles manage to stay aloft all day, riding thermals.” She knew he was trying to be engaging or whatever, making his science seem scandalous to keep her interested. It was the same trick Mrs. Fellows pulled in English class, sneaking kids “banned” books just so that they would read something. Most of the books were on the reading list anyway but telling the kids that the books were banned just made them seem cooler.
Mr. Englehorn clicked the trigger on a long-stemmed lighter and waggled his eyebrows mischievously. “Feel like a test flight, Baker?”
Even if his sneaky rebel mind game was a little played out, she couldn’t help but watch, fascinated. His rocket experiments had been loud and frightening, and although she liked chasing the second stage, she didn’t like the launch. Paper lanterns, on the other hand, seemed so benign that most people probably wouldn’t even notice them. Truckers and tourists passing by below could never imagine such a simple machine drifting overhead.
He lit the candles, carefully avoiding the wicking running along the bottom edge of the paper covering, and then held the finished balloon upright to display its warm golden glow. With the Spanish guitar playing, something about the tiny flickering candlelight through the tissue paper did seem poetic to Jynx. It reminded her of the other wood and paper models he built, of the first gliders, with lots of bits of twine holding bird-like wings in place. Even with the plastic party store wrapping sitting there beside them, cast in candlelight, it seemed very old to her somehow.
He held the paper lantern over the candle burning at the center of the table. “Just gonna give it a little boost.” He winked at her with his milky left eye. The wink made her feel like adding a little extra hot air was secretly getting away with something sneaky. He passed the positively buoyant paper model to Jynx so that she could feel the gentle tug of the expanded air attempting to rise. It was such a gentle force that she could have easily ignored it, but Mr. Englehorn let it go so slowly that she didn’t notice until he picked up his tumbler and leaned back. She felt the pressure increasing and the warm air escaping against her fingertips. “Should I count down?” she asked, thinking of his rocketry experiments.
Mr. Englehorn quietly sipped his drink and watched. “Nah,” he shook his head. “It’s better if you just let it go,” he said.
Jynx released her light grip and the lantern lifted quickly, catching the breeze above the roofline and gently skirting the dry ponderosa pine branches. Carried on an invisible current it drifted out over the edge of the cliff face, still rising on a higher trajectory than the one before which glimmered, just a trick of the light, out over the softly luminescent desert floor.
“How long do they burn?” Jynx wondered aloud, watching the flickering lanterns continue to rise and silently float away.
“Well,” Mr. Englehorn smirked, “it so happens that I have built in a self-destruct mechanism.” He reached across the table and picked up a big pair of binoculars with leather straps and a big heavy case. He squinted his bad eye shut to check his watch and lifted the binoculars to watch the first lantern hanging over the distant hills now and barely visible to the naked eye. Wondering why Mr. Englehorn even bothered with the second eyepiece, she imagined him with an eye patch and a pirate’s telescope, and it made her smile to herself. He adjusted a knob in the center and smiled. “Ayup,” he said. “If you keep an eye on that first little guy out there, it should probably do its thing any minute now,” he said, passing her the binoculars. “This is actually the fun part.” He chuckled softly to himself and refilled his glass.
Jynx lifted the heavy binoculars up to take a look, and after just a few moments of wobbling around the distant horizon, spotted the lantern, as big as if it were right above the lawn. She could see it suspended in the last pale pastel colors of the evening sunset, a lone flickering anomaly, invisible to the world below. It felt lonely somehow, hovering in empty space, a lone voyager.
“Just keep your eye on it,” Mr. Englehorn said, leaning forward slightly, squinting through his one good eye.
As she watched, the light sputtered slightly and suddenly flared, a brilliant blue flame that wrapped around the base of the lantern and then caught the paper cowl, becoming a bright dancing flame that tumbled silently from the sky, breaking to burning scraps that smoldered as they fluttered towards the earth.
“Pretty, huh?” Mr. Englehorn seemed elaborately pleased with himself. “I mixed a little magnesium into the gunpowder for that pretty blue.” He lifted the small coil of twine, to indicate his homemade wicking for the vanishing sequence. “Learned that from a magician friend.” He pulled another large sheet of tissue paper from the stack in front of him. “Now if I could just find large sheets of flash paper without risking an inadvertent Hindenburg incident,” he seemed to be muttering to himself as he absentmindedly took a sip from his glass and prepared his supplies. “I know I’m a bit in my cups, so to speak, but you, uh, want to help me build another?” He inserted his finger in his mouth and held it aloft to check the wind. “That Northeastern seems to be fairly steady.”
Jynx smiled and pulled off her hoodie. Mr. Englehorn separated a sheet of paper for her own lantern and set his drink and decanter on the floor to make a little more room for them both to work. “So,” she said, just to get Mr. Englehorn talking again, “what were you saying about birds and thermals?”