airplane blue sky cloud

Flash Fiction: Into the Cloud

A bird sang, and Anna raised her eyes to the topmost twigs of the still bare maple. Far, far above the tree, a jet plane ghosted across the luminous blue of the springtime sky. No contrail, and flying ahead of its sound. Silvery-white, it looked almost translucent, beautiful. Anna thought how strange that dozens of humans were up there, perfectly ordinary people talking, eating, farting, sleeping, anticipating their arrival in some distant city.

The tubular shape vanished behind a medium-sized cumulus cloud that billowed pure white, its edges made incandescent by the morning sun. Anna waited, neck craned, to see the aircraft emerge–because you just do.

She waited. Nothing emerged. No jet plane. No sound, either, although it should have arrived by now. The cloud shifted its shape, sending out illuminated tendrils, elongating, transforming. But the flying craft had disappeared completely, as though vaporized.

Exactly three minutes later, the rain of blood began.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

49 comments

      1. Oh, so it really happened (up to a point)! So it’s likely it did fly into a wormhole and the people are now being displayed in cages in the Andromeda Galaxy! (grin)

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  7. I didn’t see that end either – being science fiction oriented, I just assumed they flew into a worm hole or into the open bay of an alien space ship. heh heh

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  9. I suppose one could take any situation and end it with “and then the blood began to flow.”

    Isn’t there a “then he/she was murdered” theme on the net? Take any story situation and add… I don’t recall the exact phrase, however.

    Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill was murdered!

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    1. True enough. That ending is sort of gratuitous, but it made for a nice little story artifact. The whole thing actually happened, up to that point. The plane went behind the cloud (from my point of view) and never reappeared. It probably changed direction and was less visible to me after that. It seemed sort of strange, and I couldn’t resist turning it into a little something.
      Too obvious and easy? Yes.

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      1. Sorry, I’d not intended to shoot it down.
        Things that vanish, things that explode, things that melt, morph or meander drunkenly, those are anomalies that defy the normal patterns. Disrupt the flow and you’ll get our attention.

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    1. Thanks, Lea. At one point I had the idea it wasn’t a plane at all but some sort of alien craft seeding the earth with death. And another explanation is that the cloud was an alien that ate the plane.
      A bit of fun based on a real event.

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  11. It’s like the plane disappeared in a flash. Is that why they call it Flash fiction? (I’m deliberately being obtuse, I know what flash fiction is–short fiction under 1,000 words). Great story and description.

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  18. Perfect figurative use of the word incandescent. I will remember that sentence to remember the definition of the word.

    Liked by 2 people

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