Hey, how’s it going. Yeah, uh, Goose and tonic, two wedges.
Thanks, man. Hey, did I tell you about this thing yet? If I did, stop me, alright?
You got time, right? Only two other people here, neither one looks like they’re throwing it down like it was lemonade, know what I mean. So, here’s the story in a nutshell. By the time I’m done, you may think I’m the nut within the shell. Kiddin’.
So, I wake up Tuesday a week ago - funny, ever since then I keep wondering what “Tuesday” means - but I’ll get to that. Coulda been any day really, in the aftermath. But on that day, the neat and orderly ‘realities’ that made up the template of my daily existence were demonstrated to be one big hilarious joke, seen from the standpoint I managed to inhabit for … well, how long? That I’m not sure about. To you, if it was Tuesday a week ago, that’s eight days. I no longer recognize any such linearity in my existence. Which is why, although I feel compelled to tell this story, the necessity of moving from air quotes ‘reality’ to where I’m at now is disorienting, and inhibits a lucid and linear recounting of my experience.
Yeah, another Goose. Proportions are good. No, I mean it. I don’t feel like I’m about to get shanghaied onto a tramp steamer bound for who knows where. Know what I mean. I like your style. I would lose that grocery store tonic water though. This place ought to have nothing but Schweppes. Hey, but no sweat.
Confusion to our enemies. Ah, so satisfying!
So anyway, Tuesday a week ago. You probably remember it was a sunny, delightful morning. Breeze coming off Lake Piloh about as fresh as laundry off a clothesline. Sky was a blue you couldn’t create if you had infinite paint and infinite time. Not a cloud on the horizon.
And yet, there was a cloud in my yard.
You know my place, right? No, okay. So I have a beautiful 2.7 acres on the south side of the lake. Bonnie Bluff. My ex named the place, right? And no, her name’s not ‘Bonnie’. My house sits on the back corner of the lot, up a long white pebbled drive that goes down to Piloh Dam Road. You can see about three miles of lake shoreline from my veranda.
So, Tuesday (?) I’m up about seven-ish, not terribly late by anyone’s standards, I think you would have to agree. Throw on shorts, polo shirt, sandals. Make a pot of coffee - strong, black. Aroma like Juan Valdez’s secret premium stash. With mug in hand, I’m wandering past the living room, taking in the rich azure immensity of an undisturbed vista, when something catches my eye. Toward the eastern end of my parcel between the main house and the loblolly pines, I saw it. Well, ‘saw’ is a word that will have to do for now, because.
Because I’m not sure my eyes registered anything solid or real. But nonetheless, here was this cloud, sitting on my meadow.
See if you can stick with me on this, ‘cause the story gets a little hinky at this point. Yeah, one more Goose, then everything after that is straight tonic with two wedges, capisce? Scout’s honor? Good. Yeah, the Costco tonic; I know.
Naturally, I’m going out to see just what the hell is going on, and just what the hell this cloud is all about. So, I slip on my crocs and walk out through the meadow to where I am standing near this cloud. Near enough to - I don’t know - find out why it’s here and it’s not moving like real, regular clouds do.
First thing - I’m not sure my sense of sight is involved in this encounter, as I said. It’s like this scene is completely bypassing my eyes and yet existing in my brain. Seriously. How do I know this and how do I explain it? There’s the mystery. Not a dream though, I’m sure of that.
In three dimensions - which will not be enough to tell the story - my sense is that this cloud is about as tall as a circus big top, and stretches from the pines to my driveway, which makes it, let’s say a hundred yards or so across?
I’m beginning to wonder if this apparition - and that’s not even close to an accurate word for the experience - is some kind of man-made something-or-other. It’s cloud-like in all describable dimensions, but … could it be an alien craft covered with some kind of new stealth masking technology that confuses enemy tracking and actually disguises it as something completely different? My thoughts, in such close proximity to this anomaly, begin to seek out millions of neural pathways heretofore undiscovered in the span of my life thus far.
See, this is why I’m going teetotal from this point on. After one more Goose.
No, you’re right. You took the Scout oath so, … Good job, man. I like it. Stalwart and shit.
Okay, so without any foreknowledge or communication or telepathic connection to anyone or anything, I’m now aware that there is some entity inside the cloud, and that it is ordained by some higher power or some law of nature that I will find transit from my vantage point near the cloud to another dimension inside the nimbus.
At this point you might be thinking I should hesitate before I act on some crazy otherworldly motivation to explore this enigma. Yes, and just strictly thinking with my brain in real time, I don’t doubt that I might have come to the same conclusion.
But, as I said, this isn’t real time. It’s Cloud time.
Once inside the cloud - where I find myself all of a sudden, sort of while I wasn’t paying attention - my poor brain is scrambling to find any familiar visual landmark. This is just not the place - or maybe the dimension is a better way to put it - in which my search will pay off. Everything, every atom, every invisible point in space and time is non- whatever it was in 3D. Any vacant space not occupied by a person or thing is a grey absence of data, well just a grey absence. Ya dig?
No, I didn’t think so. But the story goes on nonetheless.
I know I am within - rather than inside? - this cloud illusion. So, I figure I came in for some purpose. Maybe a quest? By the way, in your line of work, have you ever felt you were being sent on a quest in support of some deep moral principle? Okay, that was kind of off the wall. Anyways.
I think to myself: why am I here, inside this cloud at the moment? Quite sure I already know why and it’s all coming back to me. No; more like it’s all absorbed into my being like a drug instantaneously.
And there she is. Suddenly all around. Inhabiting every scintilla that surrounds my consciousness. She is all.
She is my Mother.
Okay, background here. I was a kid when my mom died. Still impressionable, just on the edge of the big adult world, peering in with wondering widening eyes. So you can probably figure that was thirty years ago. I’ve lived twice as long with her memory as I lived within her sheltering arms.
Back to the cloud environment, where I am once again in the presence of my mother. And she is IN my presence. How to begin? Who will begin? Ah, but inside the cloud, there the concept of “begin” is a bit too linear and static to come into play. Our spirits naturally assume quiet postures of repose. We understand each other completely.
Now, I’m worrying about what all information Mom has access to in the afterlife, vis-a-vis the every tawdry detail of my checkered life. Hey, if she knows, she knows, right? I don’t sense any righteous anger from my dear departed mother, not even a mild disgust. Rather, a mantle of serenity over all that she may know about how I fared in the years since she died. She may know nothing - ignorance is bliss - and she may know all, including how her wayward son’s lifetime of behavior compares to all living things past, present and future. Whatever the case may be - and which I can’t begin to fathom - my mother held me in a trance so like an embrace that I sighed out loud.
Whatever my mother knows or doesn’t know about my past life, she enlightened me as to her expectations of the now me. My mom is happy that I love her and have not forgotten her over these decades of separation. She knows that I know that she loved me. She loved me like only a mom with seven children could love. No one got to be the center of attention for long, but every one of us was her life’s treasure. What was obscured in my childhood years is manifestly apparent now, without the first word of explanation from either of us.
‘Seeing’ a ‘vision’ of my mother in this mysterious encounter seemed almost beside the point. Her power seemed to satisfy my every need for our communion. I wanted my mother to know all the pure and inspiring things she said and did that have shown up in my life after she was gone. And she understood and cherished her achievements as a mother times seven.
If somehow in the afterlife, Mom has access to the projection of the rest of my life and eventual death, her spirit did not share the details with me. Good thing. Can you imagine that? Another tall tonic, my man.
How did this situation resolve itself, I bet you’re wondering.
Oh, the usual way.
Just kidding.
In this void inside a cloud or some facsimile thereof, I followed my spiritual self into yet one more embrace with my mother. What a life-changing experience. This was no dream. Every particle of the experience was right and true and right there where I could feel it, luxuriate in it. I was everything. Mom was everything.
What did it mean and why did it happen?
Years from now, I hope I still yearn to more fully understand the meaning of my time (?) inside the cloud, so revelatory as to completely transform me as a man, and as a son.
As for why it happened? No mystery. It was Mother’s Day.
Yeah, I did say this happened on a Tuesday. Yeah, you are correct; “Mother’s Day” is celebrated on a Sunday.
Here’s what I experienced in that cloud: the lifting of my heart, and a last embrace to hold my spirit - was for me the only Mother’s Day that will ever matter to me for the rest of my life.
Will fifty cover it? Keep the change, amigo.
Love your mom. Ciao!
About the author
Doug Stoiber lives in East Tennessee and is a member of Mossy Creek Writers. Nine of his short stories and a dozen of his poems have been published in literary journals.
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