Clouds

…two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage.

Joseph Conrad, The Duel

No one noticed anything at first: the green lawns and shady walks, the halls of learning with white columns, the spires pointing calmly to an indifferent sky, seemed immaculate. Beyond the campus, beyond the town, the undulating wheat fields spread toward an invariable horizon.

But things began to go wrong—a crack in time, a mote in the eye. Late one spring, a gardener noticed that a great elm, which had survived the scourge of Ascomycota, had withered. A havoc of crows invaded the grounds, the roofs. On a sweltering day, a technician discovered that a pipe in the basement of the chemistry building had frozen. The Doric pillars of the library commenced to peel. Most telling, students took to scrawling obscene verses on classroom walls and professors wandered off into the fields in their underwear.

Still, routines persisted till a lisping poet lifted her gaze up to the sky. She saw two clouds, now silvery, now pewter, crisscrossing above her head. The clouds displayed further peculiarities. They raced or drifted in space, sometimes brushing the spires, sometimes soaring toward the stratosphere, never assuming the same hue or shape. At odd times of the day, passing each other, they seemed to glow or glower, as if expressing some inscrutable enmity. Yet they could be identified as the same two clouds, stalking each other, even at night, always within human sight.

The poet rolled her eyes heavenward; things got worse. Anthills rose like ugly ziggurats on the playing fields; a sweet stench clung to brick walls and the canopies of trees; deans played solitaire at their mahogany desks while their email sputtered in cyberspace. Many fled the college, the town. Donning dark glasses or shading their eyes, heads tilted back, the hardiest remnants passed the day watching the implacable clouds. But only the poet understood the rancorous compact in the sky.

In truth, whether they appeared as cumulus, stratus, cirrus, or nimbus, whether they disguised themselves as billows, contrails, or piles, the clouds dedicated all their energies to mutual annihilation. But no one, not even the poet, knew the origin of the celestial feud. Still, stories spread everywhere—cobwebbed fictions—to explain the malediction above.

At last, after shrinking to misshapen lumps, the clouds vanished. But the poet could still glimpse them at the edge of town, dust devils on an empty road, spiteful tumbleweed.