The Last Cloud

The Cloud




Her eyes were open on the last day of her life. The sun had been up for hours, but she was no longer aware of the difference between night and day. Sleep was not sleep, but intertwined eons of conscious and darkness regardless of temporal pattern. Her face tilted slightly toward the window by her final bed; the honest morning light breaking over the deep grooves in her face. A nurse’s aide worked near by; cleaning the room before family members arrived.

The cloud was there too on this last day. The woman, though not conscious in a definable way, was aware of it also; she always looked for her cloud, but today it found her instead. It was a very ordinary cloud, quite small and solidly fluffy. It picked her in the first month of her life, so it was no accident that it should be here to attend her last hours.

She lay in a basket of warm sheets that summer morning. Her eyes followed the figure of her mother hanging laundry on a line in the back yard. Her infant body twitched and stretched as she experienced the slight scratchiness of the sun-dried fabric and absorbed the soft heat of the sun. Gazing up at the vast blue above her infant eyes focused briefly on the cloud. She made a sound different from her usual primordial cry of need and her mother glanced down to see if she was all right. The baby’s arms waved up toward the sky and her eyes did not automatically turn into her mother’s. The young mother worriedly cupped her child’s warm cheek and the baby immediately turned her gaze toward her reestablishing their connection again.

She felt cool hands touch her cheek briefly, followed by the warmth of a damp washcloth as the aide gently cleaned off her face. The blanket was tugged upward and smoothed; the table beside her bed neatened.

She sat on the splintery front porch of her grandparent’s home. The adults were inside, talking and eating; sitting up with the body of her grandfather. Her brother and his gang of freckled boy cousins were ignoring her and had wandered off to the barn; leaving her to amuse herself in the front yard. She stretched her toes out and observed her feet in the pretty new shoes her mother had bought her that morning. She wiped her finger through the yard dust that collected on the surface of the shiny black leather. The sun shot out from behind a cloud and she looked up startled. The familiar cloud winked at her and the sun’s light turned the dust on her new shoes to gold sparkles. She was delighted and scratched up a handful of the newly minted dirt. It flowed from between her fingers and shimmered in the light. She tossed it in the air breathing in the glittering dust and letting it bathe her in riches. She brought handfuls up again and again; dusting them like talc from her bath over her skin. Her cloud laughed at her play and expanded to share her joy. Her mother, hearing her laughter, came out to the porch to check on her and gasped at the sight of her rocking with laughter at nothing while covered in dirt.

The television was turned on and loud voices pushed out the silence of the room. The vibration of sound hummed through the metal bars of the bed rhythmically. She could not hear the rumble of voices, but felt them in her skin painfully. The cloud by the window darkened briefly mirroring her discomfort.

She sat in the car beside the man boy, her hands sweating with joy and excitement. She wiped them again on her skirt and stared at the road ahead. Her cloud rode beside her window, accompanying them on their date. She smiled at the cloud and then turned her head to possessively observe the young man driving. The wind blowing in through the open windows felt like the future rushing at her. The car’s engine mimicked her heartbeat.

The machine next to her counted her last heartbeats like a metronome. Her family had requested the sound be turned off so that it did not make her anxious.

The cloud waited for her late that afternoon. It had followed her from her wedding that morning to a small hotel on Pensacola beach where she would celebrate her first night as a wife. It stayed outside the window of their room as the sun began to set. The man turned the blinds to shutter the room, but the cloud snuck in with the few thin sheets of sunlight. The woman’s face was turned toward the cloud as the man covered her with his body.

The aide adjusted the shade in the window so the sun would not hurt the woman’s eyes. The cloud sighed to lower itself until it could be near the woman again.

She opened her eyes that morning and the cloud was waiting impatiently for her. The nurse checked on her and then brought her son in. He was so solid in her arms, his body fit in her side as if it was carved from it. She opened the front of her gown and began to feed her newborn from her own body. She tensed as the first pains stirred from her womb’s memory and relaxed when the milk flowed in a hot gush from her breasts. The cloud relaxed too and glowed at his new family.

The IV tube was cleaned and adjusted in her arm. The cool sting of alcohol chilled her briefly, followed by the heat and pressure of solution entering her slow bloodstream.

Her cloud was not with her the morning of August 23, 1966. It sat sentinel in the sky above the banks of the Mekong in Cambodia. It absorbed the dense moisture in the air and swelled to cover the sun, giving shade to the dying man on the ground below. On October 13 the cloud accompanied an officer and a chaplain to the woman’s house offering condolences and prayers. The cloud watched them drive away, and hours later it wept tears made up of the river her husband had died next to.

“Doesn’t look like we are going to have any rain today either” the aide said to the woman. “It would be nice to have a shower to cool things off some,” she continued. She always spoke to patients, whether they responded or not. She told other staff that it was disrespectful not to acknowledge them, but the truth was that the silence of the dying unnerved her.

She lay on the cool soil in her yard staring up at the cloud, but not really seeing it. She had been working in her yard when the stroke had occurred. Her last conscious thought had been of her son, she needed to call him that afternoon to remind him of something. The cloud stayed with her until the neighbors returned from church and found her. It followed the ambulance to the hospital and worried until she had been stabilized. It sat patiently with her over the weeks, hoping she would notice it one last time.

Her family arrived. Her son paced outside the room until he could find the courage to walk in. He sat beside his mother on that last day and covered her hand with his. He ran his fingers over her wedding ring and watched the sun turn the stone in it to rainbow prisms that delighted him as a small boy. The ring was loose on his mother’s finger; her hand was so small on the cover. He wished she could see him, but her eyes were facing the window. A cloud was there, a small fat cloud. When he was little his mother told him fanciful stories about a cloud that followed her, and pointed a cloud out to him that she swore was always there. He would look for it when he was a child, and show her excitedly when he would see it hovering near their home. He had forgotten about that cloud until just now.

The cloud was just outside the window, so close she could touch it. She could feel her son’s hand on hers and in her mind squeezed it as much love as she could. She slipped it out from under his and extended it toward the window. The cloud was so close; did they see it? In an instant the waiting cloud enveloped her and when she finally closed her eyes she felt every loving embrace she had ever known. It was her family, and her husband, her son, her best friend. She held on tightly and felt herself grow light and full as the cloud. She felt the sun lift her and spread her soul like glittering motes of dust through the air.