They seemed like perfectly ordinary storm clouds at first, rolling across the sky that morning like plumes of ink in water. It was when they covered the sky and blotted out the sun that we realized they were something different.

By midday, it was dark as midnight. People sat out on their porches looking up at the clouds and wondering what they were. That was when we could still see each other by artificial light, though.

The clouds were closing in from above, great sleeping beasts that sucked the light from the air and made the atmosphere thick and sludgy. People in tall buildings could reach out their windows and touch the clouds. It was like touching a fleshy sponge, they said, wet and clammy and soft.

Like touching the dead, one woman said.

The clouds interfered with satellite and radio signals. Cell phones, radios and televisions were all useless. Even cable signals were deadened by the clouds, once they reached the tops of the telephone poles. Electricity went out soon after. We were enveloped in quiet, empty darkness. The clouds were obliterating everything that ever had been, and all that would ever be.

That was when the fires broke out.

I remember seeing a man, stripped naked to the waist, carrying a torch and screaming as he ran down the street. Sweat glistened on his body, making his hair sticky. His eyes looked crazed, desperate.

Not long after that, perhaps five in the afternoon, the clouds reached street level.

Don’t breathe, they said. Government trucks showed up with gas masks and respirators so no one would have to breathe the contaminated air, but there weren’t enough to go around. Or maybe they didn’t get to us in time, I don’t remember—all I can remember from that point was getting my first gasp of the clouds and realizing it was soft and light and sweet-smelling, and laughing and laughing at how silly we had ever been to fear the clouds in the first place…

And then we all woke up.

Everyone awoke in their own beds, starting the day just as they would any other. I know I did. They looked and acted the same as they had when they awoke the previous morning, in perfect condition, except…

Nobody remembered the clouds. No one but me.

And when the clouds arrived again that morning, I was the only one who was unafraid.

Copyright 2005 Amy Frushour Kelly. All rights reserved.
Reproduction by any means prohibited without prior written consent.