Limited, Inc.

  Balloon love goes through three stages. First there is the curious rubber minnow, with the strange mouth. Your mom or dad blows it up, because though you try and try, you just seem to end up with spit all over the minnow. There’s a resistance in the balloon’s embryonic form. When your mom or dad blows the balloon up, they too visibly pause after the first exhale. The embryonic state, midway between minnow and blimp, is an important part of the natural history of the balloon. Professionals – who work in malls – seem to have mastered the smoothest of transitions between minnow and blimp. They don’t visibly pause. Of course, these professionals treat the balloon like it is a fluid substance, twisting it into animal shapes. In the evolutionary history of balloons, these animal shapes correspond, on might hypothesize, to when animals first came out onto land, developed lungs and locomotion. The difference is that the animals flourished and diversified, whereas the balloon’s larger destiny