by Joe Meno
At that moment, Emily Dot, a third grader, is sitting on her front porch, waiting to be punished. She is in trouble, serious trouble. It is the first day of summer and her final report card has just arrived. It seems Emily has not done so well this year. Her teacher’s comments claim that Emily was quite unruly and refused to stop interrupting class. Apparently, she once even yelled, “There cannot be a God! If there is a God, why are there no dinosaurs anywhere in the Bible?” Emily Dot has been known to misbehave like this ever since her mother went back to work. What does her mother do? She is a stewardess. Her days and nights away from home have had some unhappy consequences for Emily. For instance, in religion class, Emily Dot’s teacher warned her to please keep her comments to herself, but it was of no use. Emily is very, very sad. Like the zookeeper’s, like the world’s, Emily’s heart has been broken a little bit too.
Mr. Dot, her father, tall and handsome, takes off his tie and sits on the porch beside her. He is in sales, a project manager. He has been known to manage a project or two in his time, you better believe it. “What are we going to do about this report card, young lady?” Mr. Dot asks seriously.
“I refuse to be talked to like a child,” Emily says. “I know there is no such thing as God and I won’t be forced to think there is.”
“No, certainly not, dear. No one can make you think something you don’t want to think.”
“I tried to be polite and ask questions, but Mrs. Shields only got angry whenever I spoke.”
“I imagine you must have tried her patience quite a bit.”
“Mom always answers whatever questions I have. She never loses her patience with me.”
“Yes, she’s very kind and very patient.”
“She never talks to me like a child.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
Emily Dot and her father, Mr. Dot, look up just then and see an amazing sight: It is a beautifully massive, ivory-horned rhinoceros, quietly hurrying down the middle of their street. It slows to a halt, seeing them, then huffs through its great gray nostrils. It looks from daughter to father, blinking its enormous black eyes, then continues on its way, lumbering behind a small yellow house on the corner, disappearing from their sight. In a moment, an African red deer and a spotty-orange tiger follow, then a silvery crocodile, one after the other like a very strange parade, the animals making their way aimlessly down the street. Several lovely white reindeer pause a moment to taste the Dots’ hedge, then sprint past, scraping their great antlers along the elms that line a neighbor’s small blue house.
“We ought to phone the police,” Mr. Dot says, and scurries inside the house. Curious, Emily Dot climbs down off her porch and hides behind the great green hedge, watching as a massively round hippopotamus strolls toward her, lolling its heavy tongue over its pearly teeth. It takes a large chomp out of their azalea bush, ignoring the small girl, who curls into a shadow at its feet. In a moment, the hippo is wailing. Two cheetahs have sprung from nowhere and are making short work of this, an enormous meal, pouncing upon the hippo’s great, wide back, snapping its preposterously large vertebrae. Emily Dot stares up into the twin mewling jaws of certain death, stunned, until her father pulls her to her feet and up onto the safety of the porch. The cheetahs ignore the father and child, however, quite content with the shambling feast breathing its last breath before them.
“We’ll be safest up there,” Mr. Dot says, and they hurry up the rose trellis to the second story. From their slanting shingled roof, Mr. Dot and his daughter watch the animals maraud their tiny neighborhood: The Fosters’ duplex becomes a temporary snake house as their prized poodles become strange bulges in the digestive tracts of several anacondas; the Hamiltons’ front lawn becomes a makeshift savannah as ibex and zebra gracefully feed on their magnolias; two camels wander into the Halloways’ backyard and demolish their luau, tipping over a tikki torch which ignites a series of fireworks; worse still, Dickey Peterson, the neighborhood bully, is accosted by several gorillas, who carry him up into the dense shadows of his family’s maple trees.
“There’s a little gray monkey on the corner there!” Mr. Dot exclaims, pointing.
“That’s a bush baby,” Emily says. “We read about them in science class.”
“Oh, yes. A bush baby,” he says. “Where do they come from?”
“The rain forest.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
They both observe the tiny, furry animal preening itself, as it hangs nimbly from a street sign. They are quiet for a while, the unfamiliar chatter and prattle of jungle creatures reverberating in the twilight.
“I am sorry for shouting at school,” Emily says.
Mr. Dot nods and replies: “Yes, you’ll have to stop doing that.”
Emily huffs and then looks down. “I really miss Mom,” she mumbles. “I think about her all day.”
“I miss her too, pumpkin. I miss her too.”
Emily itches her nose and sighs, then says what she has been thinking for quite a long time: “Nothing’s been right since Mom’s been gone.”
“Yes,” her father says, taking off his glasses. “You’re exactly right.”
illustration by
Nick Butcher
People are becoming clouds nowadays. Each time John goes to kiss his wife, Eleanor simply laughs politely into the palm of her hand and immediately turns into a puff of soft white vapor. The vapor is quite odorless and can assume various sizes and shapes. It can still understand when it is being spoken to, the vapor. It can understand whenever John begins wordlessly crying. One time, while holding hands at the airport, John, without thinking, kissed Eleanor’s soft cheek and immediately she turned into a puff of charming whiteness that resembled a young pony leaping over a fence post. It seemed that the pony was neighing from the way its long neck was stretched and raised. Someone took a picture of the cloud and it ended up on the second page of the next day’s newspaper. Eleanor’s parents called right away. Her father was quite unhappy while her mother seemed quite pleased.
* * *
As a cloud of vapor, Eleanor will remain transparent for upwards of an hour or more. Her appearance may vary greatly, depending on various strange, unknowable factors such as the weather, what she has eaten that day, what she happens to be wearing, etc. When she is not a cloud of white smoke, Eleanor is a first grade schoolteacher who is greatly loved by her students as well as almost everybody else, including strangers who pass her on the street. She is that type of striking young woman. She has short red hair and bright eyes like a pixie. She laughs the way you imagine a toy dog laughing. It should be noted that Eleanor had never turned into a cloud before the couple was married and this unplanned development has been a source of silent frustration for John.
A partial list of the strange shapes Eleanor has taken as a cloud of vapor: a dove with enormous wings blowing a large trumpet, an intricate snowflake with castles for feet, a swan with an impossibly long neck sewing a blanket, a fairly accurate representation of an angel with rings of spoons for a halo, and a gigantic apple being swallowed by a ghostly white tiger.
Eleanor claims that turning into a cloud is totally beyond her control. John does not entirely believe this. Right before she transforms, she seems to be laughing, and her laughter is what leaves John unconvinced. But he refuses to argue about it. He loves her and he thinks she loves him and he believes it’s just one of those things that will have to work itself out. Couples go through these kind of things, he thinks.
John and Eleanor will still sometimes try to be intimate. They will turn off the lights and put on some soft music, it will maybe be jazz music, sometimes not. John will lay there in their white bed and close his eyes and wait for his wife to touch his body, and when she does he will try to stop himself from running his fingers through her hair and he will be able to resist her for a little while, but if she is wearing the pink-and-brown nightgown, he will eventually grope at her, and within moments she will be drifting high above him. He will lay in bed then and
stare up at her, a white cloud of happiness, condensing and expanding. He will reach his hands up to grab her but he will be unable to. He will try to breathe her in, to take her into his lungs, but his face will only become red until, finally, he gives in. He will turn on his stomach and want to cry into the pillow but he will not. He will be too embarrassed to cry. When he finally turns over, he will see Eleanor has become a snowy-white falcon eating a peach or a series of lovely hills decorated with a miniature cloud town. He will wait, laying there in bed, and fumble with her discarded nightgown until she drifts back down.
John will sometimes call Eleanor from his office, where he works as an accounts representative for an aluminum company, and he will ask her, “Are you a cloud right now?”
“No,” she’ll say, laughing. “Of course not, honey.”
“What about now?”
“Um, no.”
“What about now?”
“Nope.”
Other times, John will go on business trips to sad places like St. Louis and Cleveland and he will call Eleanor from his motel room and they will try and talk dirty, like they are only dating.
“I am climbing in the window and sneaking up on you,” John will say. “I am dressed like an old-time bandit with a striped shirt and a mask.”
“Okay. What am I doing?” she will ask.
“You are doing the dishes. You are wearing a white frilly apron, like a maid.”
“How about I’m wearing the apron but I’m not a maid?”
“Okay, that’s good. You’re doing the dishes in your apron and I am sneaking behind you and touching your shoulders and arms and the backs of your legs.”
“Then what?” she will ask.
“I dunno. Um … I am carrying you off into my jet and we are flying away now. I have kidnapped you maybe.”
“You’re a bandit with your own airplane?”
“Yes, I’m independently wealthy. I chose a life of crime to relieve my boredom.”
“I see,” she will laugh. “What are you doing to me now?”
“I am …” Someone will be listening to the television too loudly in the motel room next to his and John will whisper into the phone softly, “I am blindfolding you. I am blindfolding you and feeding you a lot of frosting and candy.”
There will be a pause where John will be unsure if his wife has hung up or is still listening, and after some time he will whisper, “Are you a cloud now?” and then there will be silence, there will only be the sound of air, which is no sound at all, which means yes, she is a cloud now, and John will imagine kissing his wife right then and he knows he will be unable to, so instead he will kiss the phone, and it will be the closest he can get to the actual thing, the kissing of his wife, and then he will say goodnight and place the receiver back in the small plastic cradle before closing his eyes and fighting to go to sleep.
The couple finds a weather/relationship specialist in the phone book and makes an appointment to go see him. He has glassy blue eyes and a white beard and holds Eleanor’s hand. He has many charts and maps and graphs marking cold and warm fronts overlaid with sketches from an anatomy book. He blows his nose with a white handkerchief and asks the couple very personal questions like, “How frequently do you each masturbate?” and, “Do you still find your mate sexually attractive?” John holds his hands over his eyes as he answers, feeling the heat of his embarrassment glowing along his eyelids. When, toward the end of the session, the specialist asks Eleanor her favorite shape when she is a cloud and she responds, “I like just being a general kind of cloud the best,” the old man nods and sets down his pen as if he has found the answer to something. He asks for a check for seventy-five dollars and tells the couple to come back next week. They do not. They go to the movies instead. During the film, John boldly reaches for Eleanor’s bare leg, kissing her with wild abandon, until suddenly she is an enormous black cloud, her gold earrings now strips of zig-zag lightning. An usher sees the cloud and shines his flashlight at it and John imagines the lightning flashing back is her smiling.
At work, John finds himself searching the Internet for clues, hints, suggestions, stories of similar weather-related problems happening to other normal, red-blooded men, but no, there is nothing. There are only endless pictures of girls in wet T-shirt contests and site after site of affordable radar-tracking devices which give three-dimensional depictions of storm clouds hovering above far-off cities. He comes across a photograph of a gulf-stream hurricane tearing the roof off a small white house and thinks he recognizes Eleanor as one of the clouds drifting in the nearby gray sky. He stares at the photo for a long, long time.
Often, when Eleanor is a cloud, she will make a strange sound like this: Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Eleanor sometimes phones John at work. Sometimes they talk while John is busy sorting through his files.
“I want you to know that it’s okay to be angry with me,” Eleanor says. “I would be if it was the other way around.”
“I’m not angry with you,” he replies, typing something boring.
“I know, but sometimes I wish you were. Sometimes I wish you would shout at me and tell me you hated me or something.”
John holds the telephone receiver against his chest. He feels as though he has fallen from a great height and is clutching at the air around him, only to find that the air is laughing spitefully. He stands up and watches the zipping rattle of the office around him and begins shouting: “I can’t fucking stand this anymore! I can’t fucking stand this!” He holds the phone above his head and howls and then places it against his ear and says, “Eleanor?” breathing heavily.
“Yes?” she whispers.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled like that.”
“Do you feel any better?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. “I guess I do.”
“Well, then good. I’ll see you when you get home.”
“Okay,” he says.
On the bus ride home, John fantasizes about the lips of various nondescript strange women. He imagines what he would do with a pair of hot lips if given a chance. He stares across the aisle and a question forms from nothing in the vessel of his mind. Would I still love my wife so badly if she wasn’t so impossible to claim? Would I still want her if I could have her whenever I wanted? He does not know. He isn’t sure. He does not think so, suddenly. But maybe kissing her might be worth all the boredom in the world as well.
When John arrives home from work, he finds Eleanor has become a large sparkling building. She is as tall as a skyscraper and is made entirely of a strange silvery material, like a cloud, both precious and transparent. The building is standing in the yard, rising high and mighty into the infinity of the evening sky like a futuristic needle. John sets his briefcase down and sighs, then takes off his jacket, folding it over his arm. “Great,” he says, looking up. “This is just great.” He finds the entrance to the large silver building, spins in through the revolving door, takes an elevator up to the highest floor, and stands staring out at the stars glowing above the rest of the world.
The horizon is so big and dark and sad that John can barely lift his head. In the silence of that very great height, he can hear the echo of his own breathing.
“Eleanor?” he asks, and then leans against the silver railing. Somehow he knows his wife is listening. He loosens his tie, taps once on the railing, and says, “It looks like you had a bad day.”
illustration by
Jon Resh
The airport was eerie—it was almost entirely empty. Billy looked the ticket agent in the eye, took a deep breath, and tried to explain once again that the girl he was with was having a really serious nervous breakdown of some kind. It was the reason they
were late and the reason they really ought to be let aboard the plane, did she understand any of this? No, it did not look like she did. He tried to say all of it slowly, in his most informal, most over-enunciated English, but the small Belizean woman behind the counter only nodded and shrugged, then pointed to her watch, which was already a half hour past their original departure time.
“This girl is totally f-ing unstable,” Billy argued. Nicole only shrugged, yawned, then covered her mouth with her hand. She blinked twice dumbly and Billy looked at her hair, which she had cut yesterday in a fit of madness—it was long on one side, while the rest was dangerously short. Her forehead was still red with small scissor marks. “This girl is seriously losing her marbles and we need to be out of your country as soon as f-ing possible.”
The ticket agent’s reply was this: They would have to wait until the next available flight, the earliest of which would be the following morning.
