Weight of the Clouds
by Nick Farriella
On the morning of the day she promised to make the five o’clock news, she watches her boy lie in the grass from the window above the kitchen sink where her hand shakes holding the knife under the suds in the greased pan with hard webs of scrambled eggs, tomato skins, and chives scraping against her knuckles as she revels in the fact that she had raised a child who can spend time in his own mind and doesn’t need media to distract him, which seems to be a rarity now––she knows from having met a few of his classmates who all depend on a screen to relate to one another, but not hers, who spends afternoons gazing upward––which now that she thinks about it, adjusting the faucet away from the scolding heat, maybe that’s not a good thing at all, that maybe he is––like she was at his age––inclined to ruminate, which she knows is a way of disconnecting, and that maybe one only looks skyward when one feels trapped in one’s head, the way you would find the light if stuck in a well; and now there’s a sudden fear creeping in that she had not expected, that if she had a sensitive little cloud-watcher already, there is no telling what would happen to the boy if she goes through with what she is about to go through with, knife still in hand, telling herself that there would be no bottom to the depths of despair in which her son would descend to, but then again, maybe not really, maybe it would cause a counteraction where the boy is propelled through life with the stubbornness of his father and achieves great things and looks back at today as the day where it all really happened for him, that if it wasn’t for his mother and all that she went through, he wouldn’t be who he is, but now that she is saying all this in her mind, the more ridiculous it feels and the more she wants to carry out the plan anyway––if you could call it that, it’s really an impulse if anything, like if she could strip away the layers of years of pain, through the piled-on suffering, beneath all this, she swears she would find only a simple urge, an itch that has been there beneath the skin all along, festering like a cancer cell she had inherited––but there is an innocence in the way the boy’s high-top sneaker hangs loose over his knee that is pushing her further away from that space, despite the weight of the knife as a reminder and the pan now overflowing with murky water as the sneaker bobs like a lonely leaf on a single branch, dangling there for plucking, his arms folded behind his wispy head as he squints, making shapes in his mind of the passing clouds, completely entranced by the way in which one can feel like the only motionless thing on earth, despite knowing the truth that it’s all in constant chaos, knowing that everything is in flux, on a timeline of growth and decay, so, she wonders, in the time it takes for her to wring out the sponge and set the knife, how one continues to lie still and watch the unfolding without batting an eye, and how is it even possible to lie there knowing that the average cumulus cloud weighs roughly 1.1 million pounds and not cower from the fear of being crushed, but stare back in awe, and not look away, not even for a second, how, how, how, h
Nick Farriella’s work has appeared in places such as McSweeney's, Joyland, New World Writing, Hobart, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. He has stories forthcoming from Bridge Eight Press and BULL Magazine.