by Kara Oakleaf
Joan from H.R. calls me in to discuss the clouds. The Troposphere Offices are sleek, all glass and polished silver and pristine as clear skies. Joan’s desk is a glass rectangle, and before she comes in, I can imagine the kind of executive who sits here. Young, in a suit and those shoes with pin-thin heels that clack against the floor like they might pierce it.
But the woman who walks in is older. Flats and a cable-knit sweater, and when we shake hands, she places her other hand on top of mine, like she’s reassuring me. She has a pale, watery face and her graying hair is cut short, coils of frizz at her temples.
If I were to sculpt her, I’d use something altostratus. But I would never sculpt someone like Joan.
At the desk, she pulls a manila file thick with papers from her bag and thumbs through it quietly. I’ve never been called in to H.R. before, and the stack of papers has me nervous.
Joan slides a photograph out of the file and hands it to me. “Have a look, Darrin,” she says. “Does this look familiar?”
The photo is a blue sky with stretches of cumulonimbus over Nebraska, and there at the center is the face of Leonardo Da Vinci, carved into the edge of a cloud. It’s my work. I didn’t get the eyes right, I can see that now. But he’s recognizable, the features as clear as if the cloud were made of real stone. – the long hair and beard disappearing into plumes of white, the line of his nose, the curve of the lips. Leonardo sculpted into the sky.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, that one is mine.”
When I was young, my mother was an art teacher, and sometimes brought me to visit her classroom. The potter’s wheel was my favorite. The heft and solidity of cool, wet clay, the way it spun like a globe, and formed itself into something new under the pads of my fingers. Clay dries thick on your hands, a coating of skin made from rock, and for days it flakes off of you in a trail of dust.
I don’t mind working in clouds, but clouds don’t do that. Once I’ve formed them and released them into the atmosphere, they leave nothing behind, and I can only watch them go as they drift east, breaking apart in the wind and erasing any trace of my fingertips.
Leonardo is my favorite model. He’s quiet, and nods to me slowly when he looks at my work. I’ve done Mozart too, though his hands flit around like they’re charged with electricity and I can never get them right. I did Einstein once, shaping the wild wisps of his hair from long strands of cirrostratus.
Mostly though, I like the artists. I was always a traditionalist. The greatest artists sculpted figures from Greek mythology or the Judeo-Christian saints, and I have my own gods. Michelangelo, Frida Kahlo, Auguste Rodin. Leonardo, of course. They’re all around – wandering the layers of sky, watching the rest of us. I wonder if some of them still make their own art, even in this place. None of them have been assigned to clouds, and I wonder if H.R. lets them do their own thing, if they spend most of their time alone, making real art in some hidden corner of the atmosphere the rest of us can’t see, but I can’t bring myself to ask.
I don’t kid myself. I’d been at it for a decade back on earth, days alone in a cramped studio with the wheel and a mound of clay spinning between my legs all afternoon, and nights waiting tables. Had I lived longer, I wouldn’t have been one of the greats. Maybe I would have had a show someday, something in one of the smaller galleries.
Now I have clouds and every day I tell myself that this counts too, that the sky is its own kind of gallery.
Joan looks hard at me. “Darrin,” she says, and I know she’s going to tell me to stop.
There’s nothing in the handbook against this sort of thing, I’ve checked. Still, some of the other people in my division have given me looks when Leonardo stops by, and I wonder if one of them ratted me out.
“You know you can’t do this,” Joan says, and even though I knew it was coming, something inside of me breaks open.
“It’s a little different, I know,” I say. “But people have always liked this kind of thing. Finding shapes in the clouds. Don’t you remember doing that?”
Joan smiles. “I never saw anything quite this precise, Darrin.”
Precise. My work is precise.
Joan tucks the photo back into her file. “The problem is,” she says, “there are meteorologists who saw this one.”
I can’t help it – I smile. It’s not like I do it for the fame. It’s just soothing to work like this – deliberately, intricately. To give something its own form. But I’ll admit – it is nice that someone noticed.
The way I see it, a life is supposed to have its own shape. A kind of arc, a rising and falling, the way a body grows and then diminishes from the inside out. But by the end, I couldn’t quite make out the shape of my own life, and I worry I forgot to do something essential while I was there.
“It’s not good, Darrin,” Joan goes on. “One of the meteorologists got a photograph and now they’ve all seen it. Half of them are ready to re-write the entire cloud classification index, and the rest think they’ve seen the face of God. They’re preparing for end times.”
“God?” I say. “It’s not God. It’s plainly Leonardo.” My voice is louder than I mean it to be, and Joan looks at me sharply.
“Listen,” she says. “You’re good at what you do, Darrin, but maybe the Midwest is not the right fit for you. How do you feel about the cold? I might have an opening in polar stratospheres soon. The northern lights? You’d have some color to work with.”
I’m still stung by the God comment, but I don’t say so. Joan tells me to think about it and I head back to work, back to swaths of clouds over the prairie. Maybe I’ll make a thunderstorm today.
For a whole week, I keep my head down. Joan looks in on me a few times, but I’m following the rules. No more faces in the clouds, and everything I release into the sky is a formless abstraction. When Leonardo strolls by, I just nod to him and go back to work. I think I could get his eyes right this time, if I had another shot.
By the second week, my hands are jittery and itching, my fingers begging me to make something. I think of the electricity running through Mozart’s hands, wonder if my own will catch fire if I don’t find something more to do with them.
And then, while I’m gazing through the atmosphere on a clear day and watching only the faintest wisps of clouds pass over the people below, the people who never seem to look up, I start to think about a new project.
Once, I had a teacher who claimed working with constraints stretched your creativity as an artist. Joan is my constraint now, and all of a sudden, I’m doing something new, something less traditional than I ever tried on earth. She’s forced me to experiment, and she’ll never know it, but I’m still sculpting. I focus on miniatures now, and I’ve abandoned my gods, my famous faces. Instead, I find a single, anonymous person going about their day, shaping the moments of their own lives. I watch them breathe. There are tiny droplets of water in every breath you know, and all of them eventually rise into the air.
When I’ve gathered enough breath to form the smallest of clouds, small enough for the meteorologists and even Joan to miss, I study those anonymous faces and I sculpt them, single piece by single piece. Their eye set against the backdrop of a stratus, the swirl of their ear in a nimbus. It’s almost avant-garde.
And somehow, it’s enough. Even if they never look up. I watch them, my models, as they walk beneath the shadow of their own image, and then each sculpture slowly breaks apart and scatters across the blank canvas of a Midwestern sky, and I let it go.
Kara Oakleaf’s work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Monkeybicycle, Pithead Chapel, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been listed in the Wigleaf Top 50, as a finalist for Best Small Fictions, and appears in the Bloomsbury anthology Short-Form Creative Writing. She received her M.F.A. at George Mason University, where she now teaches and directs the Fall for the Book literary festival. Find more of her work at karaoakleaf.com.