Did you know a single cloud can weigh as much as a jumbo jet? Fucking crazy, right? I didn’t believe it myself until I looked it up, but Pa still has a hard time believing such a thing. Says you can’t trust what you read on the internet these days, and that if clouds are so damn heavy then they’d never be able to float like they do. I told him he believes most everything he sees on the television, but he says that’s different. Folks on television got fancy degrees and whatnot. Folks on the internet just got opinions. It’s pointless arguing with him. Some people are too stuck in their ways. 

I remember the day the cloud came to us; I locked myself out again and Pa was already four hours asleep when I came stumbling home. I figured it was best not to wake him, otherwise we’d have to have that conversation again about how I should be looking for a job and a place of my own, and stop waking him up every time I came home drunk. Not worth it. No sir. Better to sleep on the porch than that. But that was the night the drought finally broke and it rained harder than any time I remember. Looked like God was tryna compensate for all those dry months. I couldn’t sleep on the porch that night, not unless I wanted to wake up downstream, or at the very least with a fever that might kill me. Then it really would be time to have that talk with Pa. I decided to sleep under the porch instead. Not ideal with all the shit crawling about under there, but dry at least and better than nothing. I woke up about five hours later with my head feeling like it was full of bees. I knew Pa would be awake by then though, and I could at least get a few more hours of snoozin’ inside. So I stumbled out, and if there’d been a storm the night before it was a distant memory by now. It was hot and dry, and we had a guest. There above that old house of ours, was a single cloud, as white and fluffy as a kid’s drawing. A cloud that didn’t move, hovering like a UFO above the rooftop. Hell, you’d probably be able to touch it with the right kind of ladder. I’d never seen anything like it. I still haven’t, truth be told. It was the only cloud in the whole damn sky, and for some reason it had decided to stay. Maybe all his friends left him behind. I stood in the yard for nearly half an hour before Pa finally came out to see what I was gawking at so early in the day. 

‘Boy, whatchu starin’ at?’ he said to me, ‘You taken summin? Summin you shouldn’t, eh?’

‘No Pa, come look at this, won’t ya?’ 

I can see him now, shuffling down them steps like an ol’ house cat, shaking his head at me. But when he saw what I was looking at, he was just as stunned as me. We stood in the yard a while longer, just waiting for the cloud to move. But it never did.

‘You slip summin in my coffee boy?’

‘No sir, that there’s a miracle if I ever did see one.’ 

Days went by, and every morning we’d wake up expecting the cloud to be gone, but it never was. It never moved an inch. Pa tried to call the local services, but they thought he was hoaxing ‘em. By the time he finally got someone out, they was just as stumped as we were. Didn’t know what to make of it. Even brought in one of them fancy-pants scientists from outta town, and he didn’t know what to make of it. He was the one who told me that clouds are actually heavy, and Pa wouldn’t entertain it. 

‘If it’s so damn heavy then how come it floats, huh?’ 

Before long, it was clear that science wasn’t gonna do us any good, so Pa called a priest instead. Funny how people tend to go that way, ain’t it? My Pa was what you might call a “Sunday Christian”, which meant he went to church, but not much more than that. Still, I think that cloud did something weird to my Pa. He started talking funny. Felt like God was sending him a message, and that message wasn’t good. And so the priest came, and he wasn’t too sure, but he was pretty confident this wasn’t the work of the devil. Then he told us what a lot of god-fearing folks say when they ain’t so sure, that it was a miracle. That God works in mysterious ways, but for some reason or another he had sent the cloud to show us something. Something we might be missing. Pa said it was because we weren’t living our lives the way God wanted us to, but if you ask me, I think God was telling us to make some motherfucking money!

So we turned it into an attraction; come and see the cloud that never moves! Word spread around the town, and pretty soon there were people coming from all over just to look at it. Not just the next town over, but even some from different countries when the news started reporting on it. Luckily, our house was surrounded by trees so people couldn’t see it without paying. Every morning there was a crowd outside our property. Pa made them queue up before we let em in, but every day that line got bigger and bigger, and pretty soon we had to take on a couple guys from the saw mill to help us control the crowds. I said we should’ve charged more, but Pa said that was greedy talk and that two dollars was more than enough. He was probably right. We made so much that we were able to fix the place up a bit, and I even put some of them fancy fairy lights up on top of the house so the cloud would look more pretty at night, and it looked better than I ever thought it would.

Around this time, me and Dianne started going steady. Pa says she was only with me for the cloud money, but I told him that was BS, and to mind his own. For a while, me and Pa had a good little thang going with that cloud of ours, even convinced him to put the admission fee up a little bit. But then, what always happens when people start seeing others doing just a little bit too well for themselves, happened. They got jealous, greedy even. Some of the folk in town started saying they should get a piece of the pie, what with the amount of outsiders there was now. Said they brought a lotta business at first, but now they was just a drain on resources. I didn’t wanna pay, and Dianne agreed with me, but Pa said we should probably give something back. 

So we started giving a little back to the town, even though it wasn’t theirs, and it seemed to keep them happy for a while. But then they wanted a little more, and then a little bit more than that. Dianne said they’d never be happy, and that we’d do well to take the rest of the money and leave this greedy little town. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave Pa, and I couldn’t leave my cloud. Not when it chose me. Instead, I hiked the admission fee up a little more to help with costs, and I thought that would fix things. Boy was I wrong.

In the years that went by, the cloud remained, but people seemed to lose interest in it. We still had visitors, but nothing like the numbers we had seen before. I guess once people see something they get sick of it pretty fast, whether that be the internet, or the human brain, or even magic fucking clouds. People just get sick of things. And of course, the people in town still wanted their cut, so I had to hike that fee up again. Every time I did we lost more customers, and I hadn’t needed any help from the boys at the saw mill in a while. 

I guess Dianne also started to notice that the business wasn’t booming anymore, cos I got home from the store one day to find that she had gone. Took almost all my cash too, and Pa said ‘I told you so’. But anything I lost, I was sure that I could make back again.

Then Pa died, years after the cloud came to us, during the worst winter our town has ever seen. That one hurt a lot, and the snows meant people couldn’t get into town no more. Business all but stopped, and I was left alone with my cloud. 

That year, I promised myself I’d have the best damn summer ever, and make back all that money so I could finally pack up and ship out to better things. Someone would probably pay good money for a house with their very own cloud, and I could finally do all the things Pa wanted me to. It was the first week of June when a storm rolled in over town, and that was the first time I saw my cloud actually do something. It rained. Like a little cloud above a cartoon man, it rained. I couldn’t believe it. It rained throughout the night, washing over the house like a hot shower. I watched until the sun came up, and the rain stopped, but by then the cloud had shrunken to roughly a third of its original size. By nightfall it was gone. My cloud was gone. Disappeared without so much as a goodbye. 

Now it’s just me inside this old house, hoping maybe my cloud might come back to me some day. I don’t know why it came or what made it go away. All I know is that this house of mine is awful lonely. Could it be that I stayed here too long?

Maybe we all got clouds in our lives, ones that keep us where we are, or away from where we should be. Maybe we all need a little rain from time to time.