Sweet Dreams

The clouds were too soft. Too perfect. They floated above the horizon like whipped cream left too long in the sun, ripe, bloated, expectant.

Harold noticed it first. Not the clouds, but the way the sun rose.

Not upward.

Sideways.

"It’s slanting," he muttered, sipping cold coffee from a cracked mug. "The damned sun is rising sideways."

His wife didn’t answer. She was watching the clouds, her eyes fixed and unblinking.

"Don’t they look comfortable?" she whispered. "Like they’d let you rest. Let you sink."

That night, she climbed onto the roof and never came down.

By morning, the neighbors were doing it too. They pointed and smiled, whispering about dreams. Dreams of floating. Dreams of silence. Dreams of clouds with mouths.

Something blinked in the sky, a flash behind the fluff. A suggestion of shape.

Children started drawing suns with teeth.

The dogs refused to bark.

And every morning, the sun slanted a little more. Not just east to west, but down. Lower. Closer.

Harold stopped sleeping. He taped the windows. He scrawled warnings across the walls, messages only he could read.

"They feed on ease."

"The softer it looks, the harder you fall."

One afternoon, the air smelled like lavender and burnt toast. People lay in the fields, smiling at the sky. The clouds pulsed.

Then, without warning, one fell.

Not drifted, fell. Like a dropped body. It landed in a cul-de-sac and burst. Not vapor. Not rain. Something pink. Something fibrous. And something else inside. Still moving.

Harold ran.

He ran past the bodies of those still dreaming, their eyes open and glazed. He ran until the ground beneath him turned warm and soft. The grass was gone.

Only clouds now.

He stepped once, twice.

It held him.

It welcomed him.

Then it whispered, "Sweet dreams."

And the sky opened its eyes.

                                                                                         ~ D.G.