par Bill Tiepelman
Crimson Balloons and Broken Souls
On the stone we sat, back-to-back, as though the world had split us in half and forced the two pieces to lean against one another to keep from collapsing altogether. The stone was not kind; it pressed into the spine like judgment, cold and ancient, the sort of surface that had known more silence than prayer. Above us, the fog carried a dampness that clung to the skin like fingers tracing scars, each droplet a reminder of where we had been undone. In my hand, the string of a crimson balloon bit into my palm. The latex heart swayed above me as if mocking the idea of hope, straining toward a heaven neither of us believed in. It was too bright, too red, against the gray wash of the dreamscape—an accusation masquerading as innocence. Her body pressed against mine from behind, not tender but necessary, like the brace that keeps a wound from reopening. I could feel the architecture of her hat against my shoulder, roses and skulls stitched together in a grotesque crown. It was as if she wore her mourning like others wore silk—deliberately, beautifully, and with intent to wound. My own body was less adorned, though no less scarred. The threads pulling at my lips held a parody of a smile, cruel stitches that made every tremor of emotion feel like being ripped open again. And yet I smiled. That was the trick of it. That was how the world liked me: a doll stitched to grin, a marionette caught in an endless theatre of grief. She whispered then, though her lips barely moved: “If we don’t turn around, we might survive what we are.” Her voice was a lament dressed as advice, a hymn for the broken masquerading as wisdom. Her words sank into the stone between us, seeped into the marrow of my bones. My stitched smile widened at the thought of survival, not because I believed it, but because the cruelty of hope was its own dark joke. What would survival mean to women like us? To dolls held together by thread and memory, to sisters or lovers—what were we?—in the carnival of shadows. Would survival not just be another word for silence? A sound wound through the fog: the faint screech of a calliope, the dying lungs of some circus beast. Each note bent into the night like a bone snapping in the dark, and the melody carried with it the scent of rust and abandonment. The fairground had not been alive for decades, but its corpse still sang. Paper hearts, ragged and bleeding red, drifted down like snow, catching on the strings of our balloons, catching in my hair. I reached up to brush one away and felt the stitches of my arm strain and tug, the skin too thin, the thread too old. I wondered if tonight would be the night I unraveled entirely. I wondered if she would sew me back, or simply collect the pieces and carry them like relics. The fog grew heavier, a velvet curtain closing in on us. Her breathing steadied against my spine, slow and deliberate, as though she was teaching me how to live inside silence. I wanted to turn, to see her face, to know whether the darkness in her eyes matched my own, but fear bound me. Fear of the mirror her gaze would become. Fear of remembering the needle, the scalpel, the vow that had bound us in flesh and shadow. I held the balloon tighter, the string carving a shallow wound into my palm. The blood smeared the red latex heart when it bobbed low, and I thought: so now it truly belongs to me. Love, I realized, is not soft. Love is not candlelight or the warmth of arms. Love is the slow tearing of stitches, the ache of wounds reopened again and again because the body cannot bear to forget. Love is what made us sit here, unmoving, while our hearts threatened to float away. Her shoulder pressed harder into mine. Neither of us spoke again, but everything was said. Survival was not silence—it was scar. And scars are stories you carry when words are too costly to speak aloud. The fog thickened as though it wanted to erase us, to unmake the accident of our survival. Its hands reached into every hollow of the abandoned fairground, smothering the old bones of rusted rides, cracked mirrors, and toppled stalls. And still we did not move, back-to-back, bound by our refusal. The crimson balloons swayed above like sentinels—mocking, fragile, yet impossibly persistent. I imagined if the strings snapped, they would carry the story of our ruin into the sky, rising higher and higher until heaven itself was forced to read it. Perhaps that was why we clung to them, not out of hope, but to keep our misery from becoming eternal scripture. Her shoulder pressed into mine again, sharper this time. It was not affection but reminder: she was here, I was here, and together we were still breathing. Breathing—what a cruel gift. Every inhale tasted of metal, like blood that had soured into memory. I wanted to speak, to confess something terrible, but my stitched smile mocked me. The thread across my lips had grown tighter, as though sensing what I might reveal. The needle that had sealed me was still lodged somewhere in my body; I could feel its phantom sting whenever I thought of freedom. She, too, was sewn—though in different ways. I knew the scars that curved along her arms, the hidden latticework across her thighs. She wore her agony beneath black lace and bones, while mine was paraded for all to see. From the fog came sound again, louder this time. The calliope wheezed into a tune that might once have been joyful, but now limped with decay. It drew nearer, though I knew the machine was nothing but ruin. Perhaps it was memory itself approaching us, dragging its rusted weight across the stone floor of the world. The music carried something with it—a rhythm that stirred the old ache between us. She shifted behind me, and I felt her spine arch, her body pulling away from mine as though she longed to rise. I pressed back, subtly, anchoring her with my presence. She stilled, but the silence that followed was no longer companionable. It was electric, charged with everything we had not said. At last she whispered: “Do you remember the vow?” Her voice cracked on the word, and it splintered through me like glass. The vow. Yes, I remembered, though I wished I did not. It had been made in a room lined with mirrors, where the scalpel gleamed like silver scripture and the surgeon’s hands trembled from both devotion and cruelty. We had promised each other eternity, but eternity has teeth. It devours. What had once been romance had been carved into us, quite literally—stitched into skin, sutured into bone. We had become the covenant itself. To break apart would be to tear open every seam, to bleed the vow into the earth until nothing was left of either of us. “I remember,” I said, though the words bled out between the threads, muffled and broken. She shivered, whether from my voice or the memory I couldn’t tell. I wanted to turn, to rest my stitched lips against her throat, to taste whether she still carried that vow inside her pulse. But I didn’t move. Neither of us did. Stillness was the only thing holding us together. To turn would be to break, and breaking meant the end. Something stirred in the distance: the creak of a carousel, the groan of horses whose painted eyes had dulled into despair. Shapes shifted in the fog—figures not alive, not dead, specters of children clutching candy floss that dissolved in their mouths like ash. They circled us silently, their balloons black instead of crimson, their laughter stolen by the mist. My balloon jerked in my hand, pulled as though yearning to join them, but I tightened my grip until the string cut deeper into my palm. Blood welled and slipped down the cord, staining the air. The balloon dipped low, brushed against my face, and for one wild moment I thought it whispered my name. Her breath hitched at the same time. “Don’t let go,” she hissed. And I knew she wasn’t speaking of the balloon. She was speaking of herself. Of us. Of the thread that bound us, invisible and brutal. Don’t let go. I pressed harder against her back, as though to stitch myself into her spine. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t let go even if I tried, that the vow had locked us together more tightly than chains. But I said nothing. My silence was enough. My silence was proof. The fog thickened still, and the music grew shriller, bending into notes that sliced the air. The children—those pale phantoms—pressed closer, circling tighter, their empty eyes reflecting our stillness. For a moment I thought they might tear the balloons from our hands, drag us into their orbit. But then one by one they vanished, as though the fog had consumed them whole. Only the carousel creaked in the distance, spinning without riders, its horses frozen mid-gallop, mouths open in endless screams. And we remained on the stone, back-to-back, two broken saints in a cathedral of mist. Her voice came again, softer this time, almost tender: “If love is the wound, then we are its altar.” The words pressed into me like knives, and I realized she was right. We were not lovers, nor sisters, nor companions. We were the wound itself, the shrine where devotion and ruin became indistinguishable. Our scars were our scripture. Our stitched lips and stitched skin the liturgy. The crimson balloons, rising and trembling above us, the only hymns we could offer the empty sky. I closed my eyes, and for the first time, I allowed the thought to surface: perhaps we had already died, and this endless sitting was not life, but the punishment of eternity. To love forever is to suffer forever. And we had promised both. The night thickened until even memory seemed muffled by fog. The world around us no longer felt like stone, carnival, or ruin—it felt like a womb of shadows where time had stopped its cruel spinning. We remained back-to-back, stitched together by absence, yet pulled apart by the violence of what we once called love. My balloon strained against its string like a beast desperate for escape, dragging at my bleeding hand. Every tremor sent a ripple into my bones, as though it carried the heartbeat I had long since lost. I wondered if hers beat still, or if she too had traded hers away for stitches and silence. Her voice, low and deliberate, broke the void. “Do you ever wonder,” she said, “whether they made us to be kept… or to be broken?” The question pierced like a nail hammered into my skull. I did wonder. I had wondered every day since the vow. We were crafted, reshaped, bound by a surgeon-priest whose trembling hands believed he was building beauty out of ruin. Yet beauty was not what had survived—only ruin with prettier scars. Were we meant to endure, or to fall apart spectacularly, like glass shattering under the weight of a hymn? I wanted to tell her my thoughts, but the stitches held fast across my lips. My silence was her answer. The fog began to move—not drifting but crawling, like something alive. It slid across the stones in tendrils, coiling around our ankles, our wrists, the strings of our balloons. It was not mere weather but hunger itself, patient and endless. From within it came whispers, soft and multitudinous, voices that were not ours. They spoke in fragments, syllables that slid across the skin like cold hands: stay, vow, bleed, forever. The voices pressed at the thin wall of my skull, and I felt madness rising like a tide. Her back stiffened against mine; she heard them too. Without speaking, we clutched our balloons tighter, as though these fragile tokens were talismans against the encroaching dark. And then—something new. A memory surfaced, unbidden, dragged up by the whispering fog. The night of the vow. The mirrors. The needle. She and I kneeling opposite each other, our reflections infinite, bleeding into one another until we could no longer tell where she ended and I began. The surgeon’s voice trembling as he read the words: “What you destroy, you keep. What you bind, you cannot cut. What you vow, you bleed.” His hand had been steady enough when the needle pierced flesh, when the first stitch pulled skin to skin, lip to lip, scar to scar. We had not screamed, not then. Pain had been devotion, devotion had been ecstasy. Our tears had mixed on the floor like holy water. That was the first night the balloons appeared—crimson, impossible, floating in the mirrored room as though summoned by our wound. They had followed us ever since, loyal ghosts tethered to grief. I opened my eyes and the fog recoiled, as though it knew it had revealed too much. The carousel groaned again, closer now, though I knew it had never moved. The horses’ shadows stretched long across the mist, their painted faces warped into grimaces that were no longer pretend. One by one, their mouths opened and closed, chewing the air like jaws. I smelled rot and sugar, the scent of carnival sweetness rotting into the stench of corpses. My balloon trembled violently. Hers did too—I could feel the vibration of the string through her spine pressed into mine. Together we sat as the carousel of phantoms turned, riderless yet watching. She shifted then, and her movement startled me. For the first time she leaned forward, away from me, and I felt the sudden void of her back leaving mine. Panic surged—cold, immediate, unbearable. My stitched smile tore slightly as I gasped. I reached blindly behind me, desperate for her touch, her weight, her presence. My fingers clawed only air. The fog thickened between us like a wall. “Don’t—” I tried to speak, but the word caught on the thread of my mouth, breaking into a strangled hiss. Her voice, from the fog: “If love is an altar, then it demands a sacrifice.” The words trembled but were resolute. I twisted, stitches ripping at the corners of my lips as I forced myself to turn. Pain seared through my mouth, blood spilling into the fog. When I finally saw her, she was standing—her balloon clutched tight, her body swaying under the weight of her own decision. Her eyes burned, not with fire but with a hollow conviction that chilled me more than any flame. She lifted her balloon slowly, raising it above her head as though it were an offering to the void. “No,” I tried to say, but the blood and stitches made it into a guttural moan. My hand stretched forward, trembling, clawing at the air between us. The fog seemed to laugh as it swallowed her shape, leaving me with only flashes: the skulls of her hat glinting, the crimson balloon straining against its string, the faint trace of her stitched mouth trembling between silence and scream. And then—she let go. The balloon ripped free, rising into the fog. Higher and higher, until the red vanished into the gray ceiling of eternity. She fell to her knees as if her body had collapsed without its tether, as though the balloon had been holding her up all along. I crawled to her, threads tearing, blood marking the stones. When I reached her, she was cold. Her body was still there, yes, but something had gone with the balloon. Something vital. Her lips were parted, not stitched shut but broken, torn by her own will. She had freed herself, but freedom had devoured her. I pressed my forehead to hers, smearing my blood into her hollow skin, and whispered through the torn seam of my smile: “I won’t let go. Not now. Not ever.” Above us, the fog stirred. The whispers grew louder, no longer fragments but chorus. They welcomed her balloon into their unseen mouths. They swallowed it whole, as they would one day swallow mine. But not tonight. Tonight, I clutched my own crimson balloon tighter, string cutting to bone, knowing that I would never release it—not even when it begged. Love, I understood now, was not the wound. Love was the refusal to heal. And so we remained: she, hollow on the stone, her balloon surrendered; I, bleeding and torn, holding mine with a grip that would outlast death itself. Together, we were the story the fog could never erase: two broken souls bound by vow, by scar, by crimson tether. Eternity would gnaw at us, but we would not yield. Not yet. Not ever. Bring "Crimson Balloons and Broken Souls" into Your World Let this haunting vision of gothic romance, broken souls, and crimson devotion live beyond the page. Whether you wish to adorn your walls with shadowed elegance or carry a piece of its story with you, our collection offers striking ways to embody the artwork’s power. Framed Print — A centerpiece of dark beauty, perfect for setting a tone of eerie elegance in your home. Acrylic Print — Vivid depth and clarity that make every shadow and scar leap into haunting focus. Metal Print — A sleek, modern take that fuses industrial edge with gothic melancholy. Tote Bag — Carry the story with you, a portable shrine of devotion stitched in shadow and scarlet. Each piece is crafted to preserve the haunting atmosphere and emotional depth of the original image. Whichever form you choose, you’ll carry with you the eternal vow embodied in Crimson Balloons and Broken Souls.
