Paper Sky

The river didn’t even touch her knees.

She lay in the cold for a while, pretending to be dead, because it felt worse to explain. The dog barked from the shoreline. The boy, maybe sixteen, shouted something that didn’t matter. When the EMTs lifted her onto the gurney, she finally spoke. She asked for her notebook.

They didn’t bring it. The pages must have floated downstream, pulped into something unreadable.

She was dry by the time they reached the hospital.

Later, a counselor asked why she chose that spot.

Andi looked at her hands and said, “It was close.” The counselor nodded like that was good enough.

Now she lived in the old real estate office across from the post office. The fax machine still worked, but only sent blank pages. A pair of expired lockboxes hung from the back door like medals no one wanted. She kept her notebooks in the fridge.

It had been eighty-nine days since she wrote anything poetic. She counted like it was sobriety. Literal language was safe. Grocery lists, recipe cards, short sentences in pencil. No metaphors, no substitutions.

She wrote “eggs” and eggs stayed eggs.

But sometimes her hands forgot. Sometimes her mind coiled itself into comparisons like it was trying to slip past a locked door. That morning she’d written, without thinking, “The sky collapsed like wet paper.”

By afternoon, the rain started in hard thin sheets. Not uncommon for July. But it didn’t stop. It thickened, warped, darkened like ink. Around six, a nearby church called in to report the air above their steeple had buckled. It wasn't lightening, but something like folding.

By nine, Corey called her.

“You seeing this?”

She said nothing.

“I’m not accusing you. But if I read that phrase one more time, I’m gonna lose it. It’s everywhere.”

“I didn’t publish anything.”

“You don’t have to. You know that.”

“I haven’t written in months.”

“That’s a lie.”

Andi pressed her thumb into the lip of the sink until the skin blanched. The rain fell like broken glass across the window.

Corey said, “I need you to come outside.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“I just need to know what kind of paper.”

“What?”

“You wrote ‘wet paper.’ Is it notebook paper? Newsprint? Cardstock?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Because it matters. People are describing the rain as torn receipts. Milk carton flaps. A woman in Maine says it smells like her childhood lunch notes. You have to be more specific.”

Andi hung up.

She sat on the floor of the kitchen and wrote nothing for hours.

That night, she dreamed in simile. Her phalanges bent like piano keys mid-collapse, striking chords no one intended. The walls of the house melted like butter across a skillet. She woke up with her pillow soaked, but the ceiling dry.

By morning, the local news had started calling it the “Paper Sky

Weather anchors read viewer poems, but Corey refused, sticking only to reporting humidity.

Andi opened her fridge, where seven numbered notebooks sat. She grabbed the latest and began reading. Each entry started with "Note to self" but never concluded.

She tried to find the moment things shifted. The first metaphor that stuck.

She found it on page twenty-eight. A careless line. “Her sorrow was a lake without a bottom.”

She’d written it in March. That same week, a sinkhole swallowed the east end of town. A boy went missing. They never found him.

Andi shut the fridge and locked it.

She boiled water for coffee and burned her fingertip on the kettle.

It felt good to hurt without magic.

The notebook burned fast.

She lit it in the sink, watching the pages curl and blacken into petal-like ash, which drifted slowly into the drain. She coughed once, despite breathing through her nose, and let her trembling hands be.

Burning the metaphor changed nothing. The rain still fell like guilty handwriting. Children folded origami boats. Roofs lost shingles resembling torn pages. Somewhere, Corey likely filmed it all from a weather tower, despising every moment.

She pulled her coat on and went to the library.

Gretta worked Tuesdays, shelving returns by feel with her eyes closed, her cart trailing behind like a leashed creature. Without looking up as Andi entered, she remarked, “It’s all minor thirds today. F-sharp and ruin.”

Andi said, “You hear them again?”

“They’re louder.”

“I burned the notebook.”

Gretta paused, eyes wide, and said, “It doesn’t erase the echo.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Andi replied.

Gretta parked the cart in the poetry aisle. “Intent doesn’t matter. You write it, it happens. That’s the tempo.”

Andi touched her uneven hair, regrown after the hospital. “I haven’t published anything. Not even online.”

“That’s not how it works anymore.”

Gretta pulled a tiny recorder from her sweater pocket and handed it over. "It's yours. I’ve been cataloging by sound, not words. That last one, the paper sky? It's in C minor. Rain never comes in C minor."

Andi held the recorder and felt its weight, light and wrong. “You want me to what? Compose the weather?”

“Name it. Properly. Give it boundaries.”

“I can’t.”

"You have to. You left the metaphor open. No one knows where it ends."

A child dashed by toward the computer station, leaving a trail of soft white pulp from his shoes.

Gretta handed her a worn book from the cart, The Poetics of Space. Andi smiled wryly.

“Not everything is Bachelard.”

“Sure. But he understood that walls are fragile.”

Andi took the book, the recorder, and left.

The rain slowed, each drop lingering before falling. A man across the street laughed, saying, "It's finally slowing down."

She ignored Corey's call on her way home. The voicemail transcribed as, "You said the sky collapsed like wet paper, but now it's quoted as rice paper. It's snowing in Miami. You're not the only one writing anymore."

She deleted the message.

That night, Andi sat on her bedroom floor with a blank page, attempting to write clinical phrases like "atmospheric anomaly" and "unpredictable weather," but nothing resonated.

She closed her eyes and whispered, “The rain hums when it falls. Like a child reading aloud.”

The sound arrived in seconds. The rain stopped by morning.

What followed wasn't sunshine, but a deliberate hush, like the quiet after finishing a good book. Andi stepped outside with her coffee, holding it for warmth to feel grounded. The street shimmered, and the trees seemed more like illustrations than wood.

She wasn't sure if it was new. The notebook lay open on the kitchen table with last night's whispered line in smudged ink: "The rain hums when it falls. Like a child reading aloud." She didn't remember writing it. Perhaps intention was enough now, or maybe the house had heard her.

She flipped the page and drew a line across it, preferring a border to a blank slate inviting anything. She stared until the line lost meaning. Around noon, Claude arrived.

He stood on the porch with a folder tucked under his arm and a look that dared her to slam the door.

“You’ve aged,” he said.

“You haven’t.”

“I moisturize.”

She let him in, finding silence easier than arguing. He wiped his shoes theatrically and sat without asking. His presence seemed to shrink the house, as if careless words could unravel language itself.

“I’ve studied the phrasing patterns,” he said. “Not just yours. Others, too. All derivative. You started it.”

“I stopped writing.”

“Maybe. But you didn’t stop existing.”

She sat across from him, folded her arms, and waited.

Claude pulled out a sheaf of printed headlines and laid them on the table.

“‘The wind is a whisper from the past.’ That one’s yours, right?”

Andi stared.

“Don’t bother denying it. I remember your thesis draft. That line was the title of your final section.”

She said nothing.

“Someone plagiarized it last week in a tweet. That city got winds up to seventy miles an hour. Sirens sounded like lullabies. Two hospitals lost power. One of them still hasn’t fixed their backup grid.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is provenance. You wrote it first. You gave it breadth.”

“I’m not a prophet. I’m a failed poet with a burned notebook.”

Claude’s mouth twitched. “Same thing, these days.”

He pushed the last paper toward her. It was a transcript from a podcast.

A child’s voice reciting her lines.

It wasn't staged. She played the attached audio file. The child's rhythm was halting and careful, as if reading something precious. The words mirrored her old poem exactly.

She said, “Where did he get this?”

“No one knows. His family says he started muttering them in his sleep.”

“I never published that poem.”

Claude stood. “Then it’s loose. And someone’s amplifying it.”

She followed him to the door. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you better start writing again. Because right now, the whole country is quoting ghosts.”

He left without a goodbye.

Andi sat on the warm kitchen floor, whispering, "My house remembers what I forget." The ceiling lights flickered, and a notebook in the fridge thudded shut. The next morning, "remember" appeared in steam on her mirror.

She hadn’t showered.

With her toothbrush poised and heart steady, she wiped the glass, creating a smear like breath and ink. Ignoring the fridge, she pocketed the recorder Gretta gave her and headed to the library through fog-filled streets. The town felt paused, tense, as if words might soon fill the space between streetlamps and puddles. Inside, Gretta hummed tunelessly, scanning barcodes with closed eyes. She paused when Andi arrived and nodded toward the back.

“Archives.”

Andi followed.

In the quiet basement, Gretta gave her a worn binder, sun-bleached and dog-eared, as if from an endless summer. Andi opened it to find transcripts of overheard phrases that caused changes, all annotated and cataloged. The earliest entry, from 2003, read “She was lighter than air” on a high school sidewalk, and that week, two students floated three inches during gym.

Gretta leaned against the desk and said, “We’ve always had it. In pieces, folk stories, prayers, curses. But now it’s fast. Now everyone thinks they’re a poet.”

Andi traced her finger down the margin of a page. “You knew this was coming.”

“I didn’t know it would be you.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I don’t think that matters.”

Gretta handed her a pen.

Andi backed away. “I can’t.”

“You can. You just haven’t set the rules yet.”

She pulled the recorder from her pocket.

Gretta nodded. “Better. Speak first. Let the ink follow.”

Andi pressed the record button. Her thumb trembled. She closed her eyes.

“The water is rising. But not the ocean. Memory. It laps at the steps, it seeps through the doorframe. It smells like laundry, like iodine, like newsprint.”

She stopped. The silence that followed felt sculpted, like something built instead of left behind.

Gretta said, “Keep going.”

“I can’t stop it with reason. I can’t stop it with fear. I have to write a dam. A holding place.”

She opened her eyes. Gretta was crying.

“You’ve always had the gift,” she said.

“I never wanted it.”

“That’s what makes you safe.”

They left the archives without another word. Upstairs, the windows rattled. Rain had started again, but this time it fell in single drops, perfectly spaced, like notes. Andi thought of sheet music, of rainfall transcribed into sound, of how thunder had begun to echo with a beat.

That night she sat in the middle of her floor, three open notebooks spread around her for damage, for memory, and for repair.

She picked up the middle one first.

She wrote, “The past is a book with no spine. It holds its pages anyway. Time can be rewritten, but only if no one is watching. There is a word that undoes. I have not found it yet.”

She looked up. The lights no longer flickered. The room breathed around her. In the fridge, nothing moved. She closed the notebook and went to bed. Outside, the rain began to hum again like a lullaby remembered too late.

Corey showed up the next day with a grocery bag and an expression she couldn’t read.

“I brought coffee. And those crackers you like,” he said.

“I haven’t had those in years.”

“They still made the list.”

She let him in. He placed the bag on the table like he was offering tribute. His jacket dripped quietly onto the mat, rain-softened and heavy.

“I saw the broadcast last night,” Andi said.

Corey didn’t look at her. “It wasn’t a forecast.”

“It never is, anymore.”

He pulled a paper from his pocket and unfolded it slowly. A printed email, edges worn from folding. “I got this two days ago. A viewer sent it anonymously. No subject line. Just this.”

Andi took it.

The message read, “She speaks the weather into being. You repeat her voice. We only listen to echo.”

Beneath it was a final line. "Her grief was a map no one could fold."

She read it three times, then set it down.

“I wrote that in grad school,” she said. “I never submitted it.”

“I know.”

“How’d they get it?”

Corey didn’t answer right away. He paced the kitchen, running a finger across the dusty counters. “People have started trading phrases. Like relics. Some of them come true. Others just hurt. The sky over Phoenix turned sepia last week. Someone whispered about old photographs.”

Andi leaned against the counter. “Claude said I lit the fuse.”

“He’s wrong. You didn’t light it. You are it.”

She looked up. “You think I wanted this?”

“I think you can’t ignore it.”

Andi opened the fridge, took out the three notebooks, and laid them on the table.

“I’ve started sorting them,” she said. “One for damage. One for memory. One for repair.”

Corey picked up the one marked ‘repair’ and flipped through. The handwriting was neater. The lines shorter. He paused on a page and read aloud.

“‘Not every wound bleeds. Some bloom.’”

He looked at her. “That one worked. You know that, right?”

She nodded. “The hospital called this morning. The boy who went missing in the March sinkhole was found alive. They pulled him out of a drain tunnel six miles away. He said he followed the flowers.”

Corey sat down hard. His hands shook.

“I’m scared, Andi.”

“So am I.”

He reached across the table and touched her wrist.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“Try not to break anything else,” she said.

He closed the notebook and handed it back.

Outside, a gust of wind pushed a trail of loose leaves across the street. They moved like words forming a sentence. Andi watched them without reading.

“There’s a pattern,” Corey said. “In the new weather systems. It’s not random anymore. It’s recursive.”

“I know what it means.”

“Right. Of course.”

Andi stood. “I need you to leave.”

Corey didn’t argue.

He packed the groceries back into the bag and walked out without another word. She waited until she heard the car start before she turned back to the notebooks.

She picked up the one labeled memory.

She wrote, “I never meant to be read. I meant to be erased gently, like chalk.”

She paused, then wrote again. “But someone is copying me in permanent ink.”

She didn’t sign her name.

She let the words close the page behind her.

It began with a classroom.

Not hers, but close. The footage aired on the evening news. A substitute teacher in Ohio asked the children to write metaphors about the sky. One child wrote, “The clouds are old bones waiting to be buried.”

The clouds over three states turned gray and rigid. The weather refused to move. Planes rerouted. Livestock lay down and would not rise.

Andi sat on her couch and watched the story unfold with a mug going cold in her lap. No one mentioned her name. They wouldn’t need to. The language itself had her fingerprints.

Gretta called just after midnight.

“You have to write an anchor.”

Andi closed her eyes. “I’ve tried.”

“You wrote containment. That’s not the same.”

“Then what is?”

“A sentence that ends.”

Outside, a wind started and stopped like breath caught in the throat of the world.

Andi didn’t sleep. She pulled the notebooks into her lap and opened the one marked repair. Each page felt like a decision. Not a line. A choice. She reread her own language until it started to bleed between meanings.

Around four in the morning, the fridge began to hum. Not mechanical. Musical. A low steady C, the pitch of water held still.

She took a pen and pressed it to the page.

“Let this be the last metaphor.”

She paused.

Then wrote, “Let language return to silence when spoken from grief.”

She waited. Nothing changed. Not at first. Then the house exhaled.

The lights brightened, not by electricity but something else. The rain outside shifted from music to quiet. The fridge stopped humming.

Andi stood.

She opened the front door and stepped outside. The air felt ordinary. The sky held no shape.

In the distance, birds moved like punctuation across the light.

A single page had blown onto her front step. She picked it up. It was blank. Her handwriting, faint and faded, had almost disappeared into the paper. She turned it over.

Nothing on the back.

She folded it in half, then quarters, then eighths.

It folded clean.

She went back inside and placed it in the repair notebook.

She wrote one more line.

“I am not a prophet. I am a poet. I am not a storm. I am the silence after.”

She closed the book and stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame.

Behind her, the house remained.

The windows stayed clear. The notebooks did not move.

Somewhere, someone would speak another metaphor. But not from her.