Shards Of a Cloud

[Robert Crisman]

I stood coned in silence that served as a prelude to all the dramas that one can imagine, the ones where wolves howl, and looked across that broad lawn, and I saw the girl of my dreams, the love of my life as a matter of fact, whose name laughed at me on the tip of my tongue, perhaps because I had never known she existed.

She was one of a number of servers ghosting past tables and dropping off drinks to the guests who sat like wax dummies, backdrops to certain historical moments and dead to all rhythm, in short, the respectable folks of the town who'd flocked to the lawn because soirees like this one airbrushed the miserly cut of their lives and let them believe their investments would lead them to storied erections and death to all rabble in time.

Black sky fell upon them, bled through them, erased their every last vestige, and now the wolves sang...

I sat at a table out toward the edge, and she passed and glanced my way once, but the smile that she wore was a fasten-on job, de rigeur at soirees and meant not for me but for history yet to be written.

Alicia--that was her name!--had smiled at me once on some other world, or perhaps only here in a Limbo of loves that had never come to fruition, yet nonetheless that smile had taken me into her eyes and there I'd found home and I loved her, and I stood up to take her there on the lawn or fall at her feet and beg her to give back my life.

She turned to me, and her smile, oh my God, and her luminous eyes, and she opened her arms and I felt her soft breath on my lips--and she passed right through me, and so help me God, the last things I saw were her eyes, hollow eyes, and she razored through me, shards of a cloud leaving nerve ends for dead, and then she dispersed and was gone... 

[Mike Handley]

Airbrushing got me. Very nice.

[Angela]

So much to love in this, Robert.  The coned silence, the laughing name, the ghosting movement, the fasten-on smile.  The notion of the love of your life existing as one of millions of possibilities, that you only see once, was heartbreaking.  Makes one wonder.