It was July when I first noticed them.
It was the kind of day where your energy seems to match that of the summer sun: a rising, energizing feeling throughout the morning, with noon’s climax hanging in the air before the summer heat melts you into a puddle, like the ice cream dripping onto my new shoes. I was a little girl, sitting on the stoop outside my early childhood home, enjoying the last of the sun’s rays and the heat relief that came with it. I had never felt such peace. Eventually, I laid on my back, blissfully unaware of my ruined clothes, and stared at the sky: now fading into shades of crimson, tangerine, gold, and cream. It wasn’t the sunset itself that caught my attention, but rather how it painted the clouds: shading the puffy edges the colors of the sky, the dying light forming beams that seemed to harken the angels home after a long day’s work. That night was the last happy memory of my all-too-brief childhood.
Nephophilia: an obsessive love of clouds. My second-to-last therapist says it was brought on by me clinging onto my last happy childhood memory: staring up at the clouds and falling asleep. While I didn’t like him very much, I suppose he was right about that. Little did I know at the time that the next day, my life would be as overturned as the car that took my parents’ lives.
I didn’t have family that would take me in: my only aunt and her husband lived across the world in Singapore, and my parents were estranged from their parents, due to reasons I never found out. So, I was shipped off to foster care: into abusive home after abusive home. I was never adopted, so I just kept getting shifted around until I eventually aged out of the system. Throughout the rest of my childhood, I was alternatively controlled and monitored beyond belief, and then neglected for days on end, depending on which family I was staying with at the time. The only constant thing in my life, my only reprise, was being able to gaze at the clouds.
In the various schools I attended, I made sure to take out as many books on clouds as possible, so I could learn their names and study them. The ones I saw that day were the developing cumulus clouds: the ones that develop into cumulonimbus clouds that bring the promise of afternoon thunderstorms. Those are still my favorite: the low-lying clouds that tower high into the sky like great tufts of cotton, for rain to be released and wash away the world. But I liked any clouds: the high cirro- clouds that look like thin wisps of hair, made of winter’s ice; the altostratus clouds that predate a warm front, with their stretched-out layers; the puffy tufts of both altocumulus and cirrocumulus clouds; and of course, the rain-producing -nimbus clouds. Any. They were my sense of stability: you can always rely on seeing at least one cloud a day. And when I inevitably got into arguments with my foster parents, especially the ones that would leave me outside as punishment, I would gaze up at the clouds and try to identify as many types as possible, and then try to see what shapes I could find in the clouds, what stories I could make up.
It was from one of these homes that I was told that the clouds themselves were the cities of angels, and were placed very specifically around the world each day by God Himself. I never believed that… until the past week.
Obviously, I am no longer a child: I had been living with my partner, Derrick, for several years now, but things took a bad turn. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time outside after arguments gazing up at the clouds again and began to notice something… odd. It was about a week or two ago— I can’t recall exactly when— but it was around the anniversary of my parents’ deaths. Derrick had called me a name again for crying about it— although in retrospect I guess he was kind of right. However, instead of listening to him, I fell back into old habits and took a breather outside. It felt so much like that day when I was a little girl: the western sky streaked with its warm hues, the humid air immediately sticking to my sweat-soaked clothes, and a slight breeze driving the endless march of the clouds. And the clouds themselves! Wonders of nature, they looked just like the cumulus congestus clouds of that fateful, last day. I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore, and I began to sob, my tears dripping onto my shoes like the melted ice cream all those years ago.
By the time I looked up, the sky had faded to a soft indigo, the clouds taking on that grayish hue of just after dusk. The first stars began to blink on in the darker, eastern sky. And there, floating over my house, was a small, cumulus cloud that resembled a knife.
I have no idea how to describe that to you. A knife, floating over my house, after an argument with my partner? I would’ve dismissed it as some sort of… interpretation, based on my frame of mind at the time, when it happened again the next day. Another knife-shaped cloud, a little smaller, but still over my house. I began seeing them everywhere, no matter the cloud type, no matter how unlikely it seemed. All day, every day, no matter where I was. It was terrifying at first; I felt like I was being chosen, no, being threatened by some higher power. They seemed to be most prevalent when I was alone and vulnerable seemed to confirm my theory. How wrong I was…
Then, my parents’ anniversary came. I went out to the cemetery to see them, but came back a little later than expected. I was feeling pretty frazzled from the past week, and Derrick knew this. He still wasn’t happy, and began to accuse me of seeing other men, which he claimed was why I was so nervous around him. I tried to remind him that it was my parents’ anniversary, which I thought he would remember, and that I had been feeling off the past week in general. He accused me of using that as a cover-up, saying that of course he would remember what day that was, and that I was the one mistaken. He told me that I was hoping he wouldn’t notice or care, and of course he cared. I was a terrible person for using my parents in that way and trying to manipulate him. He left me in our kitchen, crying, as distant thunder began to sound. I looked out the window, and forming on the horizon were large cumulonimbus clouds, gray and foreboding. However, on the edge of them, I saw that dreadful knife again, placed next to a broken heart.
At that moment, I finally pieced together that everything in my life had led up to this… this realization: my love for clouds was a final gift from my parents, and I was now going to put that to use. I knew what I had to do.
I dried my tears, and went out once again to buy some cotton balls. I still wasn’t sure what I as doing, and I was more scared than I had ever been, but also more determined. On my way back, the rain came down in a deluge, but I didn’t care. I never would have cared. It was a purging, cleansing rain that I so desperately needed. I came home, completely drenched, and started to formulate a plan. Derrick, of course, wasn’t fond of the fact that I spent so much money on cotton balls, and made me sleep on the couch. That solidified my decision.
Our kitchen was adjacent to my living room exile, so after I could differentiate Derrick’s snores from the rumbling thunder, I shakily tip-toed into the kitchen. I knew where Derrick hid the knives— he usually kept them locked away from me, even though I didn’t have a history of violent tendencies— and began the slow, trepidation-filled crawl to his room.
Sprawled out on his back, he was fast asleep. I began to hesitate— is this really what God had in store for me?— but a simple movement of his arm in his dead sleep made me flinch. I feared he had woken up from the sound of my pounding heart, and was going to drag me out of his room, out of our room. That made me realize it had to be done— why else would I have been seeing all those knives? Why else would I have been told about the role of the clouds? Why else would I have developed nephophilia? Why else would I have put up with Derrick for the past four years? It all came to this. I was just a cog in the machine, an avatar for God’s plan. A petrified, humble one, but one nonetheless.
It was a struggle, but it was done. He lay, bleeding out on what was supposed to be our marital bed. I watched the life drain out of him, until it stained our beautiful, white cotton sheets crimson. But I wasn’t done. I had to thank the clouds for their role in this, thank God for His role in this. I went back to the bathroom, grabbed the six bags of cotton balls, and sliced him open. In a frenzy, possessed by the demons of years of torment, I stuffed him until he looked like my beloved cumulus clouds, the bottom tufts of cotton reminding me of the scarlet-shaded edges of the clouds around sunset. It was fitting. So fucking fitting. Seeing my work, I began to laugh, overtaken by fear, and beyond the event horizon of rationality. After calming down enough to think, I hastily dumped him on the side of the road, after the cleansing rain of a thunderstorm.
But it’s been a week, and the guilt is catching up to me. I keep seeing signs of death in the clouds. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t believe what I’ve done to my beloved partner. He was a horrible man, but he was also charming and kind when he wanted to be. And after all, it seems the clouds aren’t finished with me, their puppet. The sunbeams want to harken me home after I’ve done their bidding. Right now, I’ve returned to the site of my childhood home: no one currently lives there. I’m watching the sunset, the same as it ever was, but with no clouds on the western horizon. The only question on my mind right now is whether to go out like my parents or go out like my late lover. And, after scanning the sky, I think I’ve made a decision.
If anyone is reading this, I may have killed Derrick, but it had to be that way. I’m sorry.