The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg

Homer rises up into the sky; below, Fleabottom and the others look like ants. A sudden wind gust tilts the balloon and Homer nearly falls out of the basket. Things settle down, and Homer shivers with the cold of high altitude. He peeks over the basket to see the world curving away beneath him, its cornfields like quilt patches, the railroad tracks like sutures in the land. Homer senses he’s not just a small boy but a part of something much bigger. A tear in the balloon’s silk fabric lets gas out, and the balloon begins to sink back toward the Earth: “We’re falling from the sky like a bird with a broken wing” (163).

The balloon soars over a battlefield. Homer watches as horsemen wave swords and fire guns. A sudden explosion makes many of them disappear “in a flash of blood-stained lightning” (164). The balloon catches fire, and Homer jumps from the basket into a frog pond.

He’s pulled out by a man in a gray uniform who hands him to a group of gray-clad soldiers. They talk with a lilt but Homer can understand them. The men decide Homer fell from the nearby flaming balloon and that he might be a Union spy.