Title:           Horrors! 15 - Picnic Under the Sky
Author:          Mr_Sympathy
Pastebin link:   http://pastebin.com/5ThqnhCr
First Edit:      Wednesday 9th of September 2015 03:21:56 AM CDT
Last Edit:       Last edit on: Wednesday 9th of September 2015 03:35:29 AM CDT

Picnic Under the Sky
by Greg Van Eekhout
 
We lie on the shimmering grass and watch clouds sail across the endless blue.
"They're so beautiful," she says, her hand in mine. "So big and white."
"Cumulus," I say. "What do you see?"
I'm pleased when she doesn't utter something stupid, like I see cotton candy, or I see a big, puffy, rolling castle. As if a castle could be puffy.
"I see a ship cutting through the waves," she says.
The clouds don't anything at all like that to me. But that's okay. She's a person who can see her way to her own truths. She's wrong about the cloud, of course, but at least her interpretation is plausible.
"Your turn," she says.
I close my eyes to clear my mind, then, once prepared, gaze at the sky. At first there's something that might be a horse, the stormy sort with flames shooting through flared nostrils and lightning playing through its wild mane. But the image dissipates before fully resolving. It would have been too easy anyway, a false vision designed to placate and distract from actuality.
My father operated a candy store in Pasadena. The store earned him a modest living. It was never robbed. It never caught fire or got flooded by a broken pipe. No one ever broke the windows, spray-painted graffiti on the old red bricks, or drove a car through the front entrance. Only once did a famous person walk through the door, way back in the sixties, and it was just some actor from a sitcom whom my father recognized, but whose name he could never remember.
My father's father was a bookeeper at a feed company, and his father before him sold shoe polish wholesale.
All the men in my family are cloud readers.
I look more closley at the sky. I think it's trying to hide something, so I probe deeper, patient and unblinking.
I see a comet streaking through the dark.
I see men and women with telescopes and computers and pages upon pages of numbers.
I see a man in an oval room with beautiful wood furniture surrounded by dozens of people in suits and military uniforms.
I see rockets lifting majestically off the ground, leaving behind great plumes of flame as men and women watch and calculate and pray.
And I see those men and women pale as ghosts, some crying, some unable to speak, some even laughing, but all of them deathly white as the rockets explode far away from their intended target.
Then I see a great flash and nothing more.
"Well?" she says. "Aren't you going to tell me?"
I look at her, and she's beautiful, and I don't love her, but later, I will tell her I do, because I know it will make her very happy.
"I see a big, rolling puffy castle."
She's disappointed with my answer, and I have to laugh.