There was always a cloud over her house, and it was always the same cloud. It was a beautiful cloud: shot through with pink and dusky purple and splashes of cherry red and orange. Not like those other clouds that hovered over other peoples’ houses sometimes, all gray and smothering. She felt sorry for all those other people, because none of them had clouds as beautiful as hers, and so they had to make do with those little, stuffy gray things.
Whenever she had friends over at her house, none of them ever complimented her on her beautiful cloud. They only complained about not being able to play outside because of the fog her cloud made in the afternoon. She pitied her friends. They didn’t know how nice it was to have a cloud that loved you so much that it wrapped itself around you to keep you safe. She loved her cloud.
One day, while she was at school, the teacher got a phone call. The teacher was very serious and didn’t say very much. He just said a lot of uh-huh’s, I-see’s, and, at the very end of the phone call, “Well then I’ll tell her.”
The girl wondered who the ‘her’ was. She stopped wondering when the teacher walked over to her desk and bent down on one knee. The teacher said, “Honey, your parents were in a car crash. They didn’t make it out. You’re going to be staying with your grandma until your parents’ lawyers can work something more permanent out.”
The little girl didn’t say anything. She just fetched her backpack from her locker, and followed the teacher out of the classroom, and to a bus stop. The teacher said that her belongings from her house would be sent to her later.
All throughout the hot and stuffy drive to Connecticut, the girl sat stiffly in the back of the bus. She would not cry. She was too big for that. So she pressed her lips together and scrunched her eyes so that she could hold back the tears. She missed her cloud.
When the bus finally arrived at the bus stop at Connecticut, the girl ignored her grandmother’s tears and hugs, and shut herself up in the spare room as soon as they got to the house. Her house.
Here, she finally succumbed to the urges to cry, but, this time, the tears wouldn’t come. So she instead put herself to bed, dry-eyed and tight lipped. She wanted to cry so badly after holding them in all afternoon, but the tears were stuck in her eyes. Her heart hurt.
So she did the only thing that she could do. She snuggled into her blankets, and fell asleep. And when her grandmother came in to kiss the girl goodnight, somewhere, in the deep bowels of her slumber, the girl dreamed of her cloud. And she smiled.