This is a short story beginning I wrote for my last year as president of the Bridgewater State Fiction Writers' Club. Originally it was to be passed around and added onto by other members, but it kind of fell through; you know, everyone's in college, no one has the time. So I added on a bit myself, and I feel it's coming out well. I'd like you all to enjoy. I give you the tentatively entitled "Dance, Clouds, Dance". 

One day, in the gloom of the woods, a child played where he wasn’t supposed to. This was unusual, because he was the type of child who usually listened to what his parents said, and then went and did it. He was no wild child, no problem kid, no rebel. His parents could be hard on him, but not enough to spur revolution.

One thing his parents absolutely forbid was, of course, wandering into the woods by himself. There were wild animals and swamps and thorns and unscrupulous people and darker, more shadowy things wrought from the same stuff as screaming nightmare out there, all just clamoring to lay grubby hands upon an unsuspecting eight-year-old and ruin what amounted to eight years of hard work, expenditure, and angrily-bought stain removal fluid on the part of they, his parents.

But today he was compelled. Things were not so well at home. Certainly no one had ever attempted to hurt him, personally, but he just couldn’t go home. The yelling and the spitting and the fighting…it was too much for his happy-go-lucky eight year old psyche to stomach. He didn’t even understand what had caused it. Father had done something, which had angered Mother, who told Father so, thus angering him in turn, and so on and so forth; a raging, careening spiral of oaths and screams and projectile pottery, corkscrewing down into a fiery hell which the boy, who had never been in any kind of relationship beyond the one in the second grade where Susie Melville had declared him her boyfriend until he stole her building blocks later that afternoon, could scarcely comprehend.

The boy’s name was Brian.

He was running away.

He made friends along the way. He’d named a caterpillar he’d found while parading through some old rotting gorse bushes. It had been hanging around in a silky web when he found it, and must have been sleeping because it didn’t move when he called its name out. Its name was Walter.

He also named a rabbit he saw scampering into the undergrowth. It seemed like more a girl, for some reason he could not quantify, than Walter had been, and so he named it Louise, after Gramma’s fake name (her real name, of course, having been Gramma).

He realized, of course, that there was little point to this, because he doubted he’d see his animal friends again, and even then they did not seem to show acknowledgement of their new titles. When Harold the squirrel screamed when it saw the boy and shimmied lightning-fast up the nearest birch tree and refused to come down in spite of champion coaxing on Brian’s part, the boy decided it was probably time to stop making friends and go find something more constructive to do.

So as the sun crested past midday and the shadows began incrementally to lengthen, Brian skipped flat rocks across the surface of a dark, muddy pond he’d found.

He was getting very good at skipping them, too.

He toyed with the idea of naming one of the frogs, something like Josephine, but everything he named either seemed to ignore him or run away, and he liked frogs, and didn’t want them to leave him, not like his father had said he was going to do.

He toyed with the thought of going home, though not on purpose; it crept up upon him reflexively, without regard for his stringent adamancy over not EVER going back, nope, not for a billion gazillion years.

He toyed with a rock at the lakeside (he had at this point decided to name the pond Lake Brian, under the relative certainty that naming a body of water posed no threat because even if it wanted to run away, he rather doubted it could), feeling it in his untoughened juvenile fingers, making sure it was of proper texture and shape, kneading it as though he could iron out what miniscule defects he could detect. Yeah, could probably get like five skips out of that.

            It was getting colder, now. It was late spring, early summer, so it was still relatively warm, but damp. His mud-caked white sneakers squelched in the stagnant leaf-litter at LakeBrian’s edge. There would have to be some kind of shelter in his future, he knew in the same dim, childish way that he knew there would have to be food, eventually, and clean water. As wonderful and marvelous as his great LakeBrian – no, the BrianSea! – as his great Brian Sea was, the water looked more like chocolate milk than the water they got out of the kitchen tap at home.

            Brian loved chocolate milk. He’d even been allowed to make it himself back home, stirring the spoon so that brown swirled all up and down the glass. Water that looked like chocolate milk…here he was less certain. He decided it was probably no good for drinking, or even swimming.

            Home. It was warm. There was chocolate milk, and water that looked like actual water. There was even Homer, who never ran away when he called him, but came up and licked his face, sometimes so hard that he fell to the ground and pitched a maniacal giggle-fit.

            The silly things we force ourselves to in youth are seldom long-lasting. It did not take much more reflection for Brian to decide. He would go home, and hope that his parents had made up and everything would be a big, awesome, happy eternity of happy awesomeness. But most importantly he would be warm. And there would be chocolate milk. And Homer.

            Brian nodded and bid farewell to the BrianSea, and tossed his final rock, which had been resting relatively forgotten in his left hand for some time now. With a deceptively deft twist of his wrist it flew like a small silicon Frisbee and pelted off the surface of the water once, twice, three times.

            And then -- and this he didn’t notice because he was walking away in childish reverie, no longer considering the adventures he was to have but how much he couldn’t wait to be snug at home again/was dreading to the fibers of his woolly socks the act of getting home – the rock kept skipping, off into the distance. And this was odd because it had, by this time, run out of pond to skip on. The leafy floor began to ripple and shimmer like someone had made water of all the wrong materials.

            The Woods all around, not the trees or the dirt or the bugs or the little animals or the big animals or the rotting leaves or the bushes or the rocks or the creepers or the thorns or the lichens or mosses or fungi but everything that these went together to create – the remainder you’d get if you subtracted the sum of the parts from the whole – reared up as though preparing to sneeze.

            Brian had run into a snag, he realized. He’d never considered that the woods by his house were quite so large, quite so difficult to navigate. He tried looking at the sun, which is what his older cousin told him they taught in Scouts. You found the sun and it could tell you which direction you wanted to go in, and Brian could only assume this was because it was up so high it could see everything there was to see.

            He found a spot where the sun’s orange light jetted through the trees in a last brilliance before full dusk, dancing among the little puddles and swamps that were making his socks quite soggy indeed right now. It didn’t tell him where to go, not at all, no matter how hard he listened.

            When he looked back down, there was fog, covering the floor of his woods. This was weird, he knew, because there wasn’t any a moment ago.

            Mom used to say that fog was just a cloud on the ground, when he used to ask. She never could tell him how it would have gotten to the ground. Brian suspected she didn’t want to tell him because it was a grown-up thing to know, because thinking that she just didn’t know how fog was made opened up an unpleasant world for him where adults didn’t know everything and the world was all made up as it went along.

            He decided this cloud must be lost He decided to name it. Maybe then it would go away and he could see his feet again. It seemed logical to him. He named it Morton.

            He said ‘hello’ to Morton.

            And Morton said ‘hello’ back.

            Brian’s first instinct was to feel that this was odd. But, he corrected himself with painstaking logic, he’d never met a fog before, not personally. He’d been out in the fog before, once or twice, driving in the car or walking to the store with Mom, but that didn’t mean anything. They passed a lot of people, too, on those days, and they’d never really said much to him. So why should the fog?

            Still, the boy thought, fogs don’t got mouths.

            Morton had a nice voice. It didn’t really sound like a voice at all, but it made noises and those noises made words. Brian guessed that’s basically all a voice needed to be, so yes, Morton had a nice voice. It made Brian feel warm inside, like cocoa after a snowball fight.

            Brian asked Morton who he was, really.

            A cloud that’s lost its way…

            Maybe everything you know is wrong, Morton said, in that voice that wasn’t a voice but what Nature itself might use to make itself heard: the mumble of the water over the rocks, the hissing of the breeze in the trees, the crunch of footfall on snow, the squelch of footfall in the mire, all functioning together in total as a breathy collection of syllables heard with the soul and not the eardrums. Maybe the clouds aren’t small masses of condensing water vapor, but vast oceans of untamed magic and love floating ten thousand feet above your head. Maybe the sun isn’t a burning mass of hydrogen a hundred million miles away but the flaming eye of some creature even the staunchest of gothic surrealists would hesitate to define. Maybe there are no stars but moth-holes in the curtain of night exposing, by very small degrees, the true nature of the universe behind it, that it shelters the world from: burning with holy fire. Maybe the trees have minds and hearts and love as you do; maybe no one in the entire world really exists and it’s just you sitting, day in and day out, imagining things like life, hope, good, evil, dreams, aspirations, goals…

            And may you always consider the possibility that everything you’ve been taught, every preconception you have, every prejudice you make, every observation, every comment, no matter how logical, is the wrongest thing you’ve yet encountered. And watch the glowing clouds dance across the blue surface of the sky, and know that you’ll never be complete, the emptiness you sometimes feel when the night and the rain and the thunder are closing in like wolves upon a kill will never be filled, and that that’s what makes you human, and therefore beautiful.

            Remember the dance of the clouds.