belly

[Jeremy Hight]

Their bellies dig across the rooftops here.  Some to graze, some to further engorge, some to die.  They bloat across the shops and schools , they hang heavy atop the mansion on the hill with an unspoken sense of malaise and age like the rot in its wood, the wear in the once glorious stained glass.  The church spire sometimes seems to pierce them briefly, the radio tower shooting them full of talk radio , morning drive blather and the organs, blood and skin of commercials for pills, mortuaries and new soda flavors.  

These clouds may bring big rains, they may bring meek impotent gnat storms of drizzle,  they may bring shade and no falling water at all.  In this aging foothill town the clouds sometimes die away,  break, dissipate ,  rupture, gently fade, burn away in summer heat and sun.  The behavior is not unlike the jellyfish balls of lightning said to emerge in thunderstorms from televisions, from windows, some layered inside like a complex organism, some simple aglow ;  some die quietly and violently rip apart in their end.  

The wifi is down again.   

[Jeremy Hight]

they hang heavy atop the mansion on the hill with an unspoken sense of malaise and age like the rot in its wood, the wear in the once glorious stained glass.  The church spire sometimes seems to pierce them briefly, the radio tower shooting them full of talk radio , morning drive blather and the organs, blood and skin of commercials for pills, mortuaries and new soda flavors.  

 clouds may bring big rains, they may bring meek impotent gnat storms of drizzle,  they may bring shade and no falling water at all.  In this aging foothill town the clouds sometimes die away,  break, dissipate ,  rupture, gently fade, burn away in summer heat and sun.  The behavior is not unlike the jellyfish balls of lightning said to emerge in thunderstorms from televisions, from windows, some layered inside like a complex organism, some simple aglow ;  some die quietly and violently rip apart in their end.  

The wifi is down.  A small death of sorts. There is no grave for lost signal.   No funeral songs make aural fog for lost chatting in the space of a day.  The crows do not hang low on trees when that email waits.    The sun sheds fire as it always has.  Night awaits.  There will be another dawn.

[Rob Wittig]

The volume of video evidence is irrefutable. Meteorologists have zero explanation.

A cloud dissipates, as clouds do.

Then from all points of the compass, other clouds navigate toward the point of disappearance, traveling in straight lines, regardless of wind currents. Which never happens. Never ever ever. At least never before.

The clouds then belly up to form a circle around the vanishing point and remain geostationary for 30-50 minutes.

What Alex Mitchell blurted out the first time he saw one is as good an explanation as any. "It's a cloud funeral!"

[Alex Mitchell]

We gathered around the point of disappearance, silent, solemn, phones held up as if in search of a signal, in memory of the lost cloud. High above, the mourning clouds hung stationary, belly-up, as the wind whipped around us. For a moment I thought I saw one bar, maybe even two bars, but it was a fleeting moment, and I may have been imagining it.

We didn't speak, but after some time we all simultaneously lowered our phones and, just as silently, we shuffled back to our parched, wifi-less homes. Soon this would be a story I would tell around the campfire, but for now it was the closest I had come to feeling that I was part of a community since the last time I had managed to check in on Facebook, all those long days ago before the internet went down.

[Jeremy Hight]

Rob and Alex watched the last rain fall.  The high summer storm had once surely raged on some mountain peak, flash floods on campgrounds,  cocoa washed to ruin with sticks and sediment, but it came to us high based , peeled by currents from the mountain yet still fairly intact, rains like charcoal drawing smears , lightning blue lizard thin at times as it neared.   The rains seemed to hit hardest a whole hour in as the massive storm complex stalled over us at the gas station next to the mall with the mac genius store.  The day neared evening and the rains lightened then had some burst of late life inertia and ballast and became a decent moderate with the lightning one last tiny fork then silent visually an aurally above. 

We chatted under a small metal awning about words and signal, the semiotics of silence,  death and grave within sentences and pauses.  

The cloud began to visibly shrink.  First it was to the east, death an almost visible marker and measure moving also from those rocky dry mountains.  Soon it was in all horizons, a sort of evening from day erasure closing in.       

The last scrap of cloud above was meek and thin,  a napkin of water high above in form, a last body of this once massive pulse of energy shot sun skyward into turrets.We gathered around the point of disappearance, silent, solemn, phones held up as if in search of a signal, in memory of the lost cloud. High above, the mourning clouds hung stationary, belly-up, as the wind whipped around us.Alex Mitchell blurted out the first time he saw one is as good an explanation as any. "It's a cloud funeral!"

Rain fell for a moment from clear sky as it evaporated completely 8 thousand feet above our gas station moment together.  Then night ripped stars clean from day's corpse  as it does.  We held our phones up  to catch photos that were never to catch what we actually saw, that thing that drove Ansel Adams to the darkroom, the great nothing that is the gaps of a grand canyon, the sublime as humans once named it.  

We parted ways to drive contently (for once)  to our homes  and later sleep and another night to warm to day.

[Rob Wittig]

"Clouds are droplets," the cloud told me breathlessly, "and droplets refract light, correct? Well, then, millions of droplets, organized, form a lens."

I nodded and tried to relax. Clouds don't like people when they're anxious. Relaxation was somewhat challenging, however, since I was dangling from a chest harness hooked to a half-kilometer-long cable hooked in turn to a soaring blimp. I tumbled and swayed and swung in the foggy heart of cloud B56883NA1. And listened.

"So we just use these lenses to direct light -- sunlight, moonlight, starlight -- and that's how we communicate. The same thing bees do. You know about bees, don't you?"

"Yeees," I replied, the word tremulous and melodious as I bounced around at the end of my rope.

"You should really respect bees."cloud B56 murmured.

"We do, we do!" I lied. "So when you gather in circles at a cloud funeral you're talking?"

"Telling stories."

"What kinds of stories?" I managed to ask.

"We tell stories . . .  we tell stories about human beings."

A giant gust buffeted me and I spun upside down for a moment. "Like what?" I squeaked.

"Well. Back at the butte gathering I just told a story about" I hoped to god the recorder was working "I told a story about a Man named Jeremy and a Man named Alex and a Man named Rob who decide to attend a cloud funeral. A sadness in their bellies impels them to gather and offer us their most prized possessions, their souls, that little rectangular soul they carry in their pockets and look at constantly, that soul without which they don't exist. The three sad men held their souls high and offered them to us as tribute to the vanished one you call cloud N58397NA1."

[Alex Mitchell]

When Rob stopped the recording we all looked around at each other in silence. I wished more than anything to be able to take out my phone and fiddle with it aimlessly, to check my email or see if there were any new tweets, any excuse not to meet another human being's gaze, but of course there was still no signal. Because we all knew that the cloud was right. But what the cloud didn't realise was that what we were holding aloft, those prized possessions that we carried with us always, wherever we went, were nothing more than dead, hollow shells, the empty carcasses of our souls. And it wasn't cloud N58397NA1 we were mourning. What we were mourning was ourselves.