The Clouds

The clouds flew down over the fields. Well, actually, they flew up out of them, but I didn’t know that at the time. Back then, I thought that they were just special clouds. I thought they were clouds that were full of monsters. The winds would blow like they were trying to push us over, and then we would see it, a giant wall of brownish-red, hurtling towards us. We couldn’t see into them. Naturally, being a little kid, I wondered what was in the clouds. I wondered what was in the clouds that was making them so dark and move so fast. So, I decided that the clouds were full of monsters that wanted to eat us. It made sense. After the clouds were gone, we’d go outside and see dead birds lying on the ground. These were the same birds that we had watched soaring through the sky minutes before the clouds would come. I guess they couldn’t outrun the monsters. That scared me, but it also made me more curious about what really was in the clouds.

My favorite memory of the clouds was when the house went dark. Momma had us put wet rags over our faces. She said that we should be able to breathe through them when I said I didn’t want to breathe in the water. After we had put the rags over our faces, I could hear Momma and Dad putting more wet cloth, and even thick blankets, over the windows and the door. I tried to peek out from under the rag, but, as I lifted it up, everything went dark. I could hear the monsters. They were right outside of the house. The noises were my favorite part, but they were scary. The monsters were scratching, pushing, and howling against every little hole and crack in the house as they tried to get in. After a while, I could feel something gathering on me. I guess the monsters had gotten upset and started throwing dirt through the gaps in the walls. I started to choke on it a little, but the rag that Momma had me put on my face kept most of it out. Eventually, the sounds stopped. It happened all at once. There was scratching, pounding, thuds, and clunks, and then there weren’t any. There should have been light coming in from the window, but, when Dad took the cloth off of the windows, nothing changed. It was still pitch black. Luckily, Momma still had her collection of candles for when it was dark and she wanted to start sewing. I yanked the rag off of my face, but it didn’t look like a rag anymore. It looked more like a sheet of mud. Dad tried to go out the door, but, when he got it open, there was a wall of dirt half as tall as him. The monsters must have been really mad to move all of that dirt in front of our door.

Eventually, Dad had cleared away all of the dirt while Momma was clearing up the windows. Once he had the dirt out of the way, we all went outside. It was kind of like when it snows and everything gets covered in white, but it wasn’t white. It was all the color of our reddish-brown dirt. We had a pile of logs before the cloud covered everything, but now we just had a mound of dirt. I asked Momma where Mud, our dog, had gone when the cloud came, but she said that she wasn’t sure. She said that’d he probably come back on his own. I started to wander around to see what else was different, and that was when I first noticed one mound of dirt that was bigger than the others. Naturally, I started towards it to discover what was underneath. When I got to it, I started digging. It took a few minutes, but after a little bit I saw something. It looked like hair. I didn’t figure it out right away, because Momma came to see what I was doing and took me inside. She didn’t want me to know what had actually happened to Mud, but I figured it out one day when we were trying to bury a chicken that had been caught by a rattlesnake. I was older then, so Dad had me take care of it. I wish I had chosen a different spot to bury the chicken, because, as I dug deeper, I found out what was under that mound of dirt from so long ago. What I saw made me have a fear of the clouds for the rest of my time living in Oklahoma. The monsters in the cloud had gotten Mud, and he was under the mound. Momma had tried to hide him, but circumstance said otherwise. Now, I avoid the clouds like the plague. I moved as far away as I could. I went to California.