A Break in the Clouds
by Jeffrey Greene
The three-hour drive to the Shenandoah site of the Fifth Annual Festival of Celtic Music was hot, slow and infuriating, just as Matthew had predicted, though being right this time afforded him as little pleasure as his ongoing sarcasm about the whole event gave his wife, Judy. Her recent passion for all things Irish was a minor mystery to him, but he could hardly begrudge her her enthusiasm. Passion about much of anything was getting harder to come by every year, especially now that their children were nearly grown, and he had long since made peace with his fading interest in most of the popular music for which, thirty years before, he had blithely sacrificed a portion of his hearing.
They had compromised on the festival, however, as they did about most shared outings these days. He agreed to hasten the deterioration of his lower back by sitting on a camp stool for way too many hours, to abstain from voicing his shame and loathing at being surrounded by acres of wine-sipping, penny-loafered, mostly white people, to eat his cold pasta salad and fancy strawberries out of their viand-stuffed cooler and dutifully tap his foot to the jigs and reels and lilting laments sung in Gaelic and, in return, she agreed to leave a day early. One night in a yuppie tent city, he’d told her, represented the limit of his tolerance; two might put undue strain on their marriage.
After a long search, they staked their claim on the fringes of a tent-clogged field at least two hundred yards from the stage. For Matthew, the super-amplified “acoustic” music had all the charm of a honking contest in a Manhattan traffic jam, and he deeply regretted having forgotten to bring earplugs.
Judy, her face flushed with the exertion of hauling her share of the camping gear and the heat of the late afternoon sun, craned her neck and shaded her eyes, trying to catch sight of Doug and Cynthia Hightower, Washington friends whom they’d planned to meet at the entrance. Unfortunately, the couples had gotten separated.
“You realize the odds against finding them in a swarm this size,” he said, sipping his cold beer and thinking that at least they were well supplied with alcohol.
“Do you think they might still be waiting at the gate?” she asked.
“I’ll check again the next time I visit one of Gene’s Johns,” he replied. “Christ, that music is loud.”
“They want to make sure everybody hears it,” she said.
“I see, it’s a democratic gesture: universal deafness for all.”
She stared balefully at him, then turned her back and began unrolling the tent. He sighed, got to his feet and helped her erect the claustrophobically tiny pup tent, a mildewed relic from his camping heyday in the mid-Sixties. Her silence, he knew, was a warning to honor their arrangement and can the curmudgeon routine, or risk a miserable night in close quarters.
He wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that he no longer enjoyed camping, or that huge crowds, even a placid, acoustic music-loving crowd like this one, once so stimulating to his imagination, now depressed him. It was just the way things were, like his looming fiftieth birthday.
He observed a family of six seated in a circle two campsites down from theirs, clearly having more fun than he was, and whose every member, including the toddler, was either obese or verging on it. They were lustily feeding from what looked like a five-gallon bucket of fried chicken, washed down with jumbo cups of soda. All were wearing some article of green clothing, and their tent, he noted, was of necessity huge, camp meeting-sized almost. But of course their dietary habits were none of his business, were they?
It was, after all, a lovely afternoon in the mountains, where several thousand humans made peaceful by plenty had gathered for the simple pleasure of hearing live music outdoors. And, too, there were beautiful women to watch. He knew he would never stop looking at attractive women, even if middle age had inducted him into the Society of the Invisibles, at least as far as women half his age were concerned. Resigning himself to the next twenty-four hours, he began giving Judy a back rub, for which she was always receptive, no matter how peeved she might be at the moment. She always said he should have been a masseur.
“Ah, the ear-splitting strains of the Celtic twilight,” he said, pausing to stuff rolled-up balls of tissue in his ears. “How sweetly melancholy.”
She pulled away from him and got herself a beer out of the cooler. “Stop exaggerating. It’s not that loud.”
“Come again?” They laughed together for the first time that day. “Grab me another one of those, will you?” he asked, and returning his smile, she opened a beer and passed it to him. “Thanks.” They clinked bottles, silently toasting the restoration of amity.
Weather changes quickly in the mountains, and the transition from pastoral splendor to threatening storm seemed to happen in a matter of minutes. The crowd’s attention had shifted from the music to the sky, which had gone frighteningly black. The wind was rising, too, and Matthew was reminded of something he’d promised, then forgotten, to do: waterproof the tent.
“You’re gonna love this...” he began, and then was interrupted by a hard, almost horizontal rain, coming in on a stiff northwesterly wind. There was no lightning and thunder, at least not yet, and most people ducked into their tents to wait it out. Leaving the cooler outside, they folded up the camp stools and crawled into their two-child tent.
“You were about to say something?” Judy asked, raising her voice to be heard over the din of rain on the tent walls.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and then, with perfect timing, water began to drip from several places along the seams, mostly on his side of the tent. He offered a rueful shrug. “Imagine forgetting to waterproof your tent.”
She didn’t seem too upset. “It should stop soon. If it doesn’t, you get to sleep on the wet side.”
“Fair enough,” he said grimly, as he busied himself positioning plastic cups under the leaks.
Outside of a fetal position, there didn’t seem to be any comfortable way to stand, sit or lie in this canvas coffin, and when he realized he’d left his beer outside, he donned his parka and darted out to retrieve it. He found the bottle turned over and empty, so he went to the cooler for a fresh one.
He had just opened it and was taking his first sip, rather enjoying the cool, stinging rain on his face, when he noticed what seemed an unusual break in the black clouds massed overhead, through which a few dramatic shafts of the late afternoon sun threw a bleak red glow over the valley. Moving slowly across that light, though not entirely obscuring it, as if it were formed of some translucent, diaphanous substance, was what appeared to Matthew, his vision bleared by the rain on his glasses, as an immense winged being. Its transparent wings, which beat in a wildly chromatic blur, as if refracting the sunlight, made an extremely low-pitched fluttering sound — what he imagined a hummingbird’s wings might sound to a gnat — that he less heard than felt as a deep, thrumming vibration in his bones.
That it was naked and female, however, he had no doubt. It had small breasts, a slender, delicate frame, long flowing hair that was almost colorless, like spun water, and exceedingly thin arms and legs. Its great eyes were closed, as if it were dreaming on the wing, the heart-stoppingly perfect face expressing a kind of ecstatic inwardness. As he watched, a dainty, long-toed foot that must have been the size of a battleship just missed brushing the top of the highest mountain. In another second it had vanished in the clouds, the word for what it appeared to have been forming on his lips even as his mind rejected it: Fairy. God help him: a gigantic fairy.
He slowly became aware of rain coursing down his neck and seeping into his parka, then of a violent pounding in his temples. He felt his eyes stinging and realized he’d been crying — sobbing, really — as if some elemental part of him, vastly older than his civilized mind, had responded instantly and involuntarily to a beauty larger than his heart could hold, and somehow he knew that if he hadn’t cried he would have been struck dead where he stood. He looked down and saw that he’d dropped his beer.
He heard a stifled sob, turned his head, and noticed for the first time a man some years younger than himself standing a few feet away. He was wearing an expensive and now drenched pair of pleated khaki shorts, a green polo shirt, the heavy, soaked cotton clinging to his round belly, leather moccasins with no socks and, like Matthew, he was bawling like a baby.
They looked at each other warily, with a kind of sullen bewilderment, then the man wiped self-consciously at his eyes, shook his head as if refusing to answer Matthew’s unspoken question, and turned away without a word.
So that’s how it’s going be, he thought, still trembling at the memory of her. With the exception of the types who belong to alien abduction support groups, every person who saw it, including me — especially me — will stonewall, pretend it didn’t happen. Either that or call it a strange-shaped cloud and be done with it.
It won’t get into the papers, either, not even as one of the lamely jocular pieces read at the end of the evening news by some smirking, overpaid hairdo. One might call it a mass cover-up, except that the authors of the conspiracy will be all of us battle-hardened driver ants, too weighed down by mortgages and car payments and golf memberships to risk our precious reputations. Fairies — or whatever the hell it was — the size of the Empire State Building might not care who they show themselves to, but little men like me have to care who we tell.
The skies hadn’t really opened, not for him, nor, probably, for his crying cousin over there in the next tent. What they had just seen — and would never, ever see again, not if they lived for ten thousand years — apparently wasn’t quite shattering enough to transform them into the modern equivalent of sack-clothed apostles, compelled against all odds to share their vision of transcendent beauty with anyone who would listen. Maybe he wasn’t worthy, or even capable, of being vision-struck and reassembled into something new. Maybe he never had been.
He realized with a wincing sadness that Judy wouldn’t believe him any more than his children or his friends would. He wouldn’t have believed them, either. But he had seen it... seen her. Of that at least he was certain. And if he knew with equal certainty that nothing in his life, neither in the past nor the future, would ever be as dear to him, or held on to as tightly, as the memory of that three or four-second glimpse, he also knew that he lacked the courage to tell anyone.
Judy handed him a towel when he crawled back into the tent. “What were you doing out there?” she asked.
“Getting wet,” he replied, hiding his face in the towel.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
