and now off over the expanse of farmland and pasture and crops (boundless seas of corn and soy and wheat) — that no one had been ready to respond nor was there any clear means of rescue to take, not until the castle’s shadow fell across the drought-brown fields of Kansas, at which point a multistate effort was mobilized, with a caravan trailing after and below the bouncy castle — which had shifted course to the southwest — as well as two single-engine rescue planes and a First Response Helpicopter™ pursuing the inflated beagle (whose oversized bouncy ears were believed to be exacerbating the problem by getting caught in the wind and elevating the drifting birthday-or-other-occasion play structure), and a bevy of news crews, national and local, tracking the castle with aerial cameras and ground-to-air footage that began to be broadcast live shortly after the castle (having gained in altitude another three or four thousand feet) crossed over Kansas into Oklahoma’s No Man’s Land, then over the Texas Panhandle near Amarillo — this was several hours after the first tragedy had struck the birthday party, and the bouncy beagle showed no signs of slowing — and the news coverage was live and unbroken, though mostly filled with speculation and urgent updates on no-news-yet and images of the bright red beagle hanging impossibly in air, no indication through its inflated openings of any movement, any passengers, though of course we hoped and prayed those kids were still in there, hanging on to something (we had no idea whether there were grippable surfaces within the beagle’s bouncy belly), other than those unfortunates whose bodies we’d seen falling out — the one over downtown, and there were images from the first film crew to locate the bouncy castle high above the barren heartland that seemed to show a slim figure dancing above a smaller, squatter shape, the two connected it seemed by the smaller hanging onto the foot of the higher, taller child — but by the time the beagle made it to New Mexico the rescue planes and Helpicopter had been grounded and the Air Force had sent jets to try bringing the bouncy castle down by flying close to the castle and executing complicated maneuvers, the beautifully distraught newscaster explained, designed to alter the wind