Clouds from Both Sides Now

Mary Beth likes the feeling of everything nowadays. Her head has found a home in the crux of her boyfriend’s collarbone, and her new tennis shoes are just the right size, and the sky is open and blue as a robin’s egg. A blade of grass tickles the back of her neck as she traces a finger up above.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she whispers.

“Not as beautiful as you,” Farley tells her. He moves his hand from her waist to her breast.

She is just sweet enough and just dumb enough to believe him. Mary Beth scoots her head up and looks at him. He has a blond beard with gaps at the chin and a big Irish head, one with many targets for kissing. She plants two on his jawline and one between his teeth. They’ve exchanged less than a hundred of these, and she knows this probably won’t last longer than summer, but she thinks there might be room for a home here.

“Thanks for that,” Farley says. “I hope the whole quad saw it.”

“Don’t worry.” Mary Beth repositions. “When the sun goes down, I’ll give them a whole lot more to talk about.”

He kisses her head, and it reminds her of her dad, which both horrifies and convinces her. A little bundle of cotton drifts across the wet cerulean paint at the speed of a rowboat.

“Hey,” Farley says. “Look at that.”

“Where’d it come from?” Mary Beth asks.

“Probably that lake by Saint Catherine’s. I’ve run by in the morning, and there’s usually a foot of steam fog over the basin. It goes away by noon, but I think they string it up like a cotton candy machine and just float it up and out of there.”

She laughs, imagining swamp men with big paper cones scooping threads from the water. She also thinks of Saint Catherine’s, that old, garbage pail excuse for a church. Even reentering that place in her mind puts a damper on her fun. Her giggles stop, and in a voice a little too serious, Mary Beth tells Farley that he’s stupid.

“I might be stupid,” Farley says, “but I might also be right.”

“What’s it look like to you?” Mary Beth says. “The cloud, I mean.”

Farley considers this and holds two fingers above him. They are his drafting tools- he opens and closes them and measures the white entrails that curl and spark like helium from the sun. He does this for a long time before concluding his studies and returning his hand to her body.

“I think I see a hat. Like a fedora from those Frank Sinatra films.”

Mary smiles. She knows the type- shorter brim, black or navy, with a silk ribbon along the base. They had one in her family, one her father wore at every Sunday Sermon. She remembered how sometimes he’d forget to take it off while the priest was speaking, and the priest would point it out with an audience of two hundred. “Mr. Murphy, please. No hats in God’s house, please.” Her father would raise a hand in apology, then grip the hat in his lap for the rest of the sermon. On the drive home, he’d hang the crumpled fedora on his rearview with a face that seemed spellbound by his own mistake, his stamped ticket to damnation. She always hated that hat, and all at once she began to hate this cloud, too.

“Here comes another one,” Farley says. “Your turn.”

It’s a little bigger with a harder tint than the last one- as if the threads are more concentrated, the vapor more dangerous. Mary moves her hand around the border of it and thinks of all the things it could be. A turning river, a tropical snake. Maybe a pipe from a Sherlock Holmes novel. These thoughts make her giggle, into the warm clutch of Farley’s forearm. But she’s not being truthful, is she?

There is only one thing it could actually be. The way it curves outwards in a big S towards nothing, the way it swims and twists through the sky like fumes from a gasoline can… she’d know that shape anywhere.

“It’s a blown out candle.” Mary whispers, and as she does, she sees it all over again. The red, beating tongues inside Saint Catherine’s, where patrons made donations to lost things- dying parents and children and crippling motivations to keep their body warm. She’d been observing them all, as they swelled and pushed light onto the stained glass story frames, dyeing the jagged head of Jesus into a soft maroon, when a withered nun walked towards the station. The woman held the form of a willow tree that had dropped all its branches. The woman held the form of passing winter.

She moved atop the candles, and with a breath that was audible only by the dry friction of her lips, she blew. One by one, she exterminated the lights, leaving small wisps of smoke that curled and stretched and tried to become light again. At a point, there may have been fifty of those little wisps, black as her father’s hat, black as death, and Mary believed it might be death, for these were prayers, prayers left unanswered by a God that was too busy. A God that expelled any request of him.

It took the woman only a minute to finish her task, and afterwards, the wrinkles on her face became very sharp and white in the dark. The faces of Jesus on the glass could not be made out anymore. There was a strong diesel smell in the air, and something like burnt lemongrass. Mary Beth was scared, and she had no answer as to why.

The nun turned to her, the black of her dress a tunnel meant for sleeping in, the white of her veil a pillow meant for laying upon. She took two steps towards Mary Beth, so the pair were sharing the prayer space. Her eyes were a cauterized stone, not glossy at all but sharp and volcanic. They stared at each other for a moment, until she receded to the back office where the wafers and little wicker baskets lived.

Mary Beth knew what that gaze had been about. The nun had wondered if Mary Beth had been aflame, had wondered if she was worthy of being blown out.

Farley pulls a hand tighter on Mary Beth’s flesh, finding an entryway to the pale vanilla under her pink blouse. The callouses on his palm catch against the little ridges of her body, the tips of her breast and the raised moles that run across her ribcage. “A candle,” Farley says. “That’s a nice thought. Maybe we light some candles tonight at my place.”

Mary Beth nods like her mind has been read. The grass feels spindly now, as if each blade has become harder, more angry. The two clouds are grazing close to another, stitching together into a satin tapestry. As they form, the white begins to dim.

“You’re a good girl, Mary. You really are.” Farley says it, and immediately regrets it. He’s got more poetic shit he can say- maybe that’s why he’s never been able to hold on to the good ones.

But Mary isn’t listening. There is a cold sweat that’s beginning on the back of her neck, in the spot where Farley’s collarbone is exposed. Her shoes feel tight and, despite it’s blueness, the world has become a strange liquid to Mary. Another cloud slides into the scene above her, and it holds the same descriptors as a large warship. The edges seem to cut the sky into ribbons that shower over her and Farley- not exactly rain but some type of dewiness. It’s glazed almost black, and Mary believes she can smell Saint Catherine’s again, tainting the quad like ash from a car wreck.

“We should go,” Mary says. “It’s going to thunderstorm.”

“It’s a little summer shower,” Farley says, smiling. “And it’s my turn to guess.”

Mary recedes, her mouth held tight. It’s as if the eyes of the nun are staring down at her, at the girl being undressed in University of Hartford’s most public locale. She simply nods and tries to fish Farley’s hand away from her.

“C’mon, let me keep it there,” Farley prods. Mary is ashamed that she listens- another crumpled hat to hang on her rearview. Farley puts his free hand out again and tries to measure the size of the oncoming front, but it is simply too big. His arm collapses and he closes his eyes, thinking.

“I’ve got it,” he says after a few breaths. It’s cemetery-quiet, and there’s a rumble across her face and limbs that she has trouble settling. “It’s a mountain. A big, sloping mountain, fresh from the Andes.”

A mountain. Slowly, Mary Beth’s tension slips outside of her through each blade of glass, each curious finger. A peaceful, benign mountain, she thinks, with gray rocks and a white peak meant for skiing down. That’s all it is, a mountain, competing with a pipe and an innocent cabaret hat within a canvas of blue.

The corners of her mouth relax, and she feels a smile coming back to her. Farley notices the relief on his shoulder blades, and he mounts another kiss upon her temple. Mary Beth fakes a chuckle.

“I was being dumb there, for a second.” Mary Beth whispers. “I was reading too much into things.”

“There’s nothing to read into, babe.” Farley looks back towards the clouds. “It’s a very beautiful day, like you said. And beautiful days are not capable of being meddled with.”

Mary Beth sighs. She’s beginning to love him, maybe. A fickle, necessity-based kind of love, but love all the same. His words curl mantra-like within her skull, creating a nice bed for her to sleep on. She closes her eyes and focuses on the weight of the atmosphere.

“I’ll describe it all to you.” He strokes her hair as she breathes, the warm dark behind her eyes holding a shade of cobalt. “Our mountain rides further north, floating like an iceberg might. It is strong when compared to the other clouds, who have now converged into one. They are white and fluffy, two sheep left out in a dreamed-up pasture.”

It is a lullaby. She’s both 13 and 43, young and old, apart of this life and far descended from it. Farley’s words sound stripped from someone wiser.

“The sky is bending in a big blue arc. It holds the world the way a child might, fingers blessing each part of it.” His hands grope farther down to her waistline, and Mary Beth will never protest, as long as he keeps speaking. “And now, a winged visitor from the south. Metallic, wind-fueled, one of us. It’s finding cover in the pasture.” Mary hears it, the buzz of something she imagines no bigger than a pin prick. She’s inside of that vehicle, passing over the thousand greens of summer and the brick building they found each other in, and their two bodies strewn out amongst a hundred other students that live and die at the same pace.

“The plane has moved through the cloudbank. It’s fast up there, and so free, and it’s heading straight for the mountain. It won’t be a challenge- we were invented to break these type of walls, bend them at our will.” Mary Beth believes him. Farley makes his move. Mary Beth grips her father’s hat between her thighs.

“And as it goes…” Farley says, and the next words are muted almost entirely by the sounds of flame and screaming and God’s only son. “OH, CHRIST!” Farley screams.

Mary Beth flicks her eyes open. The blue day is a tarpit. Bits of shrapnel fall to the Earth. She can hear a woman behind her throwing up as charred flesh takes a lesson in gravity. A stiletto lands eighteen feet away from Mary, the corners molten and warped. These scenes move very slowly, and yet they are instantaneous to Mary Beth. It’s in the name, she seems to understand.

Her eyes are tired, and yet she keeps them open now. It is part of the premonition. The smell is the same, and the faces are, too. The diesel and the lemongrass and the fifty deserted flames. Farley falls away from her body, and Mary Beth believes that’s fine enough.  “HOLY SHIT!” he screams, and Mary Beth knows that house she dreamed of has been burned away, too.

This has always been the conversation, and it was time to really have it. Mary Beth turns her gaze upwards, towards the mountain who is anything but, and sees the dark man she left that day at Saint Catherine’s cathedral. Mary Beth stares Jesus in the eyes, and she stares at her father, and the nun, and she wonders why she loves the feeling as she watches heaven fall above her.