The Cloudists

On days when the sky was absent of clouds, a certain man felt ill at ease. To alleviate this, he netted a stray, low-hanging cloud, and squeezed it inside a jar, tightly screwing the lid down. So on days when the clouds were scarce or absent, he held the jar above his head, and cheerfully went about his routines. Because of this, some folk nicknamed him Mr Cloud, and some even believed he possessed celestial powers, and they trailed his shadow while chanting cloud shanties. When he tried to shoo them away, telling them they were following the wrong Messiah, it only made them more determined in their devotion, and they camped out on his front lawn, and danced circles with glass jars of all varieties above their heads. After a while he realised that confining a cloud to a jar for his own peace of mind, was selfish and wrong. He was preventing the cloud from being a cloud, while isolating it from its familiars. With some reluctance, he unscrewed the jar’s lid, told the cloud it could leave, and that he was sorry for kidnapping and imprisoning it. But it wouldn’t budge. He turned the jar upside down and gave it a jolly good shake. It still wouldn’t budge. It seemed to have become too comfortable inside its transparent space, forgetting how to float overhead, slouch across mountain ranges. He had little choice but to keep the jar by his bed, on a pot plant stand, the lid always off, except when it snored like thunder.  His ex-devotees found someone else to follow, a man with an albatross perched on his head. When the albatross migrated, they turned and tailed a woman clutching a wrinkled balloon. Such fickle folk.  

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Andy McKenzie lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.  His non-fiction, poetry, and fiction have appeared in Reality, JAAM, takahē, and Landfall.