Both Sides Now

Airborne again. At this altitude, the clouds are their own landscape, a wilderness of white stretching away to the horizon. To the cursory glance the cloud surface looks flat, but closer inspection will show it to be a mass of swirling dunes, a desert of windswept mist. Its edges singed to gold by the sun.

This is how the angels die. Abandoned in these badlands they stumble for hours under the blinding sun, thirsting, bewildered, not knowing which direction to travel, searching for that elusive patch of blue sky that they will fall through and be lost forever. This is why heaven, above the shape-shifting pre-occupations of the clouds, above their unheeding, reluctant bureaucracy, is a blank space.

Categories: Whimsy