Picnics and Cloudgazing

“Hurry up, Gwen!”

Lucia is waiting for her outside, leaning on the white-picket fence, her ankles crossed. The warm sun is shining down on her, and her golden-blonde hair almost seems to glow in the light. 

Gwen has to squint her eyes when she looks at her, because she doesn’t fancy going blind, thank-you-very-much.

“Give me a second,” she chides.

“But you’re so slow!”

Gwen rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t say anything — some things shouldn’t be dignified with a response, after all — and instead opts to put on her shoes and jacket so she can join her friend outside.

“Want me to carry anything?” Lucia asks, as she hops back up.

“No need,” she says. She pushes the door closed with her hips as her hands are occupied; the basket is just a little bit too heavy to carry with one hand, but she should be fine like this.

Besides, if she lets Lucia carry it, the chances of her dropping it are pretty much one-hundred percent.

“Let’s go, then!”

Lucia is a few steps ahead of her, as she often is, skipping down the path and humming a song that Gwen doesn’t recognize. It’s spring, and the flowers in the field are in bloom again, gently swaying in the wind.

Lucia bows over the fence, reaching out to pick one of the dandelions; the biggest, fluffiest one that she can find. She twirls it between her fingers with a smile, before she holds it out to Gwen, with a grin.

“Make a wish!”

Gwen looks surprised for just a second, before she smiles fondly. Then she blows as hard as she can and watches the seeds drift away in the wind, carried across the field, far enough that Gwen can’t see where they land.

Lucia bumps her shoulder against Gwen’s. “So? What did you wish for?”

“It’s a secret,” Gwen says, with a taunting edge to her voice. Despite the way her friend elbows her in the side and asks her again, slightly whinier this time, Gwen only laughs. “It won’t come true if I say it out loud.”

Lucia pouts, making her best puppy-dog eyes. “Whisper it in my ear then! C’mon, tell me!”

Gwen pretends to be annoyed and she huffs, before leaning in closer to Lucia’s ear and whispering something to her. “I’m not telling,” she sings, nudging her friend in the side with a laugh.

“You’re so mean!”

Gwen laughs, raising an eyebrow. “Am I really? Answer carefully,” she says, gently swinging the picnic-basket in her hands, shooting Lucia a smug look.

“Don’t try to persuade me with food!”

“Oh? You don’t want any, then?”

Lucia hesitates for just a moment, looking at the picnic-basket, eyes slightly wider. “Are you threatening me?” She asks, her eyes shooting back up to Gwen’s face, one eyebrow raised.

Gwen shrugged, trying to hide her smile behind a poorly-executed poker face. “Depends. Do you feel threatened?”

Lucia thinks about it for a moment, before she eventually seems to realize that her friend is harmless, and then she sticks out her tongue. “Not even a little bit!”

She runs ahead down the path, kicking up sand with every step. When she gets to the part where the topmost plank of the fence has broken down, she hops over it, with much less grace —and a lot more rambunctiousness— than a proper lady should have; Gwen doesn’t expect any different from her, though, and she sighs fondly as her friend runs through the field, hands above her head as she cheers.

Gwen steps over the fence herself, breaking out into a slow jog, unable to run as fast as her friend due to the basket she carries. 

Lucia turns to laugh at her, and almost trips over her own feet, barely able to catch herself in time. The smile doesn’t fade, not even a little bit, and the expression makes Gwen’s stomach feel all warm and fuzzy.

Lucia plants herself underneath the willow-tree and calls for Gwen to join her. The latter is slightly out of breath when she sets the basket down next to her friend, leaning her hands on her knees as she tries to catch her breath. “Did you have to go so fast?”

Lucia laughs as she spreads the gingham picnic-blanket out across the grass, carefully flattening it with her hands, smoothing out any creases. She sits down with a sigh and turns up her face to bask in the sunlight, eyes closed and expression content.

“I wished it wouldn’t rain,” Gwen says, as she sits down on the blanket next to Lucia. “Happy, now that I’ve jinxed it?”

Lucia smiles. “Very,” she says, before she lets herself fall down onto her back and lays her head down in Gwen’s lap. She looks up at the sky. “Still, I think that your wish worked. I don’t think it’ll rain anytime soon.”

“Wanna bet?” Gwen asks, jokingly, but Lucia is not one to back down from a challenge. She holds her pinky and, almost thoughtlessly, Gwen links her own into it.

“Ten dollars for the winner?”

Gwen nods. “You’re gonna lose, y’know.”

“What, you got a sixth sense?”

Gwen shrugs, a little smile tugging at her lips, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead she reaches over to start unpacking the basket, which is made a little more difficult, with how Lucia has positioned herself, but Gwen doesn’t care enough to tell her to move.

“You packed way too much, Gwen!”

Gwen scoffs, poking the other in the stomach. “You say that, as if your stomach isn’t a bottomless pit.”

Lucia gasps, pretending to be offended. “I don’t eat that much!”

“Sure,” Gwen says, with a laugh. “You only eat your weight in pastries,” she teased her friend, who pouted but didn’t seem to actually be offended. “So, I figure you’ll be happy to know I packed plenty of those.”

“Oh, I’m delighted.”

Once Gwen has unpacked everything, she mindlessly holds out a cherry for Lucia, who doesn’t hesitate before she opens her mouth.

Gwen leans back against the willow-tree, and then it’s silent again for a while — the kind of comfortable, soft silence that fills the void in just the right way.

“I think I might win the bet,” Gwen says, as she points to the clouds that are slowly rolling in — they’re as white as snow and look to be as soft as cotton. 

Lucia scoffs, shaking her head. “No way,” she says. “Those are good clouds, not rainclouds.” 

“That one looks like a raindrop.”

“What does that matter?” Lucia asks, but she follows Gwen’s finger with her eyes either way. The cloud really does look like a raindrop — a little bit blobby and misshapen, sure, but a raindrop for sure. “That one looks like a rabbit,” she says, pointing to another one, “does that mean a rabbit’s gonna fall from the sky?”

It doesn’t quite fall from the sky, but from the corner of her eyes, Lucia sees a rabbit race across the field. She looks up at Gwen, and they’re quiet for a second before they both burst out laughing.

They laugh so hard that Lucia can feel tears welling up in the corners of her eyes, and she has to sit up, clutching her stomach.

Gwen nudges her, once she’s done laughing, pointing to another cloud. “That one looks like an elephant.”

“Gwen, if an elephant comes out of nowhere, I swear—” Lucia cuts herself off with a laugh, shaking her head as she looks up at the cloud. “And besides, it’s obviously a butterfly. That one looks more like an elephant.”

Gwen scoffs. “Obviously not! Do you need glasses, or something? That one’s an elephant, and that one’s a cat.”

Lucia shakes her head. “How is that a cat?”

“How is it an elephant?”

After they’ve bickered for a while, they come to the conclusion that it is a cat, and they move on to the next cloud. The sky is full of them now, and the more densely they pack together, the harder it becomes to spot different shapes.

Gwen is good at this though, and she effortlessly rattles off shape after shape. “That one looks like a flower,” she says, reaching over to pick one of the violets in the field to compare it to the shape of the cloud. “Look. Similar, right?”

Lucia smiles, with a nod, before she points to another cloud. “And that one?”

“A donut,” Gwen says, as she tucks the violet behind Lucia’s ear, to which the blonde laughs.

“And that one?”

Gwen hums, chewing on a chocolate-chip cookie as she thinks about it. “An octopus, maybe?” she says, but this time she doesn’t sound too sure of herself. “Or maybe another flower.”

They go on like that for a while, eating as they look up at the clouds — and they laugh too, because Lucia always has a way to make Gwen laugh, so much that her cheeks flush and the muscles of her face hurt.

Gwen is about to point out another cloud when it happens — a thick droplet of rain falls down from the sky and bursts apart on the crown of her head. 

She barely has time to react before the clouds seem to split open. It’s as if within a second, the weather decided to shift, and thick droplets begin to rain down from the sky, showing no remorse from the two girls in the field.

Laughing, Gwen looks down at Lucia. “You owe me ten dollars,” she says, with a grin.

“Seriously? That’s what you think about?” Lucia pretends to sound annoyed, but Gwen can see the tug of a grin on her face, one that the blonde tries her hardest to hide.

“C’mon, help me pack,” Gwen says, as she nudges her friend lightly to get her off her lap. 

Lucia begrudgingly gets up and does as instructed, and haphazardly begins tossing things into the basket, with very little care for tidiness. “Maybe we can use the blanket as an umbrella,” she suggests.

Gwen nods, with a grin. “If we both hold one handle of the basket, and one corner of the blanket, we can try to run back,” she says, getting up and dusting off her dress.

With a nod, Lucia does as her friend instructed, and then the two of them take off running as fast as they can, through the field and down the path, through shallow puddles and wet sand, and they laugh all the way home.