A Spanking Blue Day
A Spanking Blue Day
Fiction. Ambitious t-shirt crossover fiction, though. The best kind of fiction.
Hi! My very good friends Kamran and Kiran are small business owners. They design and hand-print bespoke, sustainable and very cool clothes at Lossless. Their new design inspired the following short story, and a small excerpt will feature on the shirt’s sleeve. There’ll be some information how to get this sweet merch at the bottom of the story. But! If you don’t think you’ll make it that far, go find @losslessgoods on Instagram. Good on ya.
A Spanking Blue Day
She is a cerebral sort of cumulus cloud and that is why he loves her. She thinks. Meditates. Says complicated things. He’s drawn to her in ways he can’t understand, like they’re somehow meant to collide. That’s fine by him. Very fine by him. It’d be pretty great, actually. Because she is bold, she’s white gold and fluffy in all the right places. He watches her morph into serious shapes. Like dice. Dental tools. Weapons. The Face of God.
‘Do you think we have free will?’ she asks.
‘Umm,’ he says back. And lets it hang. He isn’t really a Big Picture sort of cloud.
‘I’m not so sure that I chose to float in this direction,’ she says. ‘You know what I mean?’
He says he does. He doesn’t.
They drift west-southwest, away from the sea. There are others around. A white armada charges up ahead, creamy cirrus wisps strafe high, new clouds are birthed behind all the time. It’s a messy sky. And it’s loud. Everyone’s got an idea, a philosophy. Everyone’s trying to send their message to the ground in interpretive, ephemeral dance. Everyone's trying not to rain, or evaporate, until they have to.
But she and him make their own space. Their own pocket of sky. And it somehow seems like it’s just the two of them, floating very almost together through a spanking blue day.
‘Why must we dissipate?’ she asks.
He hopes she’s being rhetorical. He hasn’t the foggiest.
They float on. They seep closer together but still do not touch. It’s a magnificent day.
‘It’s a magnificent day!’ he says. And he’s not wrong.
She weakens her hold on her droplets, so as to be flattened by the wind, so as to cast a wider shadow onto the ground, so as to make a point.
‘No, it’s not. It’s too hot,’ she says, feeling her edges begin to fade. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Some clouds might burn up at a line like that. Not him.
‘So, umm, do you float here often?’
They are made of ice crystals. Trillions of particles of water are burned out of the ocean. They ascend, to the heavens, on eddies of warmed air. Up high they cool, freeze, and there’s so much less pressure. The world makes sense. Those rarefied droplets swill together, they condense, they acquiesce, they become.
White chariots ride through velvet skies. They carve the blue.
But the air is drier in the west. They’ll be torn apart. Droplet by droplet. They cannot float forever and are destined, doomed, to disband and disperse and go to wherever it is that disparate, desperate specks of nothing go. Some are vaporised. Some float higher up. Some rain down. Some seep back into the water table and live to rise again.
He has zero idea about his impending doom and that is why she loves him. He just is. Wide, weird, dim-witted. Mindless. Their trajectories will meet eventually, maybe soon, which she is glad about even if it wasn’t her decision. He’s nice. She watches him morph breezily into whatever arbitrary shapes the shifting winds and atmospheric pressures determine. Like rabbits. Love hearts. Dragons. Arrows. Horses. Angles. Angels. Symbols. Cymbals. Spaceships. Words.
‘The air is getting drier,’ she says. ‘Very soon we will go. Can you feel the sun’s burning rays?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he says. ‘They tickle.’
She hates this answer. It’s also the best thing she’s ever heard.
‘Should we rain together?’
‘What?’ he says.
‘We could just rain, you know? Fuck this “slow fade” bullshit. We could dump ourselves down, empty ourselves out, return to the dirt. Maybe we’d be together down there?’
They float in silence for a time.
‘I’ve heard that there’s a paradise in a world beyond this world,’ he says, forgetting that she’d heard that too, from the pontificating cumulonimbus hippie up ahead. ‘I’ve heard if you endure the sun and evaporate, you’ll be reformed in a cloudy utopia for all eternity. So. Umm. Maybe we should do that?’
‘You don’t really believe that shit do you?’
‘Umm.’
In the end they don’t decide. The air changes all of a sudden, and they must split, fray, dissipate. They are fragmented, into wisps. What they were is lost. And as their sundered ice crystals float on, west-southwest, parts of what was her float through parts of what was him.
So yeah as I said, head over to @Losslessgoods on instagram to check out Kiran and Kamran’s work. Or you can head straight to their website. Free delivery on all domestic orders! Go there now and buy t-shirts or shorts or rugs! Their clothes will make you look cool and make lots of friends and probably live forever! So, support an Australian small business and two very good dudes by checking out Lossless RIGHT NOW.
Disclaimer: At this time, Kamran and Kiran are currently unable to ship rugs internationally.