The bell sounded, sending a sharp shock through the drowsy silence.

Enter autopilot. Kids gathered their things and tromped out of the room. Glory joined them, her head turning involuntarily back out the window, looking for some clue of Nature’s intention. The fog pulsed with nearly invisible lightning.

Of course. Glory’s antennae stood up.

Moments later, another bell sounded, this one akin to the fire alarm she knew so well. It was accompanied by a bright LED strobe flashing down the hallway, illuminating the excitement of the middle school herds. They loved a break from routine. They lived for a disturbance in schedule. They pined for a postponement to that group presentation they hadn’t finished. Whooping and screaming, tearing through the halls, they hardly listened to the voice-over sternly instructing them to make their way to the gym for an immediate, mandatory, emergency all-school assembly.

In the chaotic shepherding adventure that the schoolteachers’ union had failed to get stricken from their job duties, Morning Glory managed to find Marma immediately. They clung together to avoid suffocation and separation, respectively. Once they were seated, there was an Order to maintain, and that Order generally had the Maycomb section well-separated from the Vouvray section, so the two friends needed to hold tight and quietly refuse to budge. Usually, keepers of the Order soon found bigger fish to fry. And so it was, in this as in all school assemblies thus far.

Glory sat next to Marma, narrating everything that was happening, in part because it helped them both understand, in part because it was much more fun with the voice-overs Glory could supply.

“Thah has been a tahhhrible difficulty with the weathahhh,” Glory quacked through her invisible tiny megaphone. Marma was the perfect audience: difficult to impress and impossible to crack. So Glory went for it every time. “We seem to have been eaaaaten.”

“Eaaaaten?” whispered Marma.

“Eeeaaaaaaaaten!” Glory confirmed in Gollum’s shrillest whisper.

Far from cracking, Marma merely turned her whole face down a centimeter and looked at Glory over her glasses.

“We have been eaaaaaaten by a laaaahge cloud, it seems.” Glory switched to Katherine Hepburn. “And this laaaahge cloud is not neeeahly done digesting us, deah gahhhhhd! This laaaahge cloud has only gotten us into its stomach and rrrrrrallied its digestive juices. Unfaaaahtunately, children, we will burn in stomach acids for houwaaahs before we are finally released into a thin paaaaasageway to the foggy duodenum—single file line for the pyloras, make us prouuuud.”

Marma rolled her eyes and turned up her lips in more of a dare than a smile.

Glory just went on, “So we’re going to have to paaaih up aftah this, because some of you ahh to be digested as nutwients! Yes, this means you are etahhhnally bound to cloud-dom for all your days, but at least you’ll be useful…. and the rest of you, oh my deeeeah children, you will be eliminated.”

Marma stared at Glory’s mouth, as was her habit when Glory spoke. This was unnerving to some, but Glory said it made her better at articulation. [1]

“You will be eliminated, some of you as mere liquid waste—heads up, footballahhhs, this is most of you—and some as the solid waste—now, Bwee McDonough, you’ll be wesponsible as captain of the solid waste, do you feel like you can handle this sewious assignment?”

Glory couldn’t tell if Marma was smiling or about to sneeze, so she amped it up a bit.

“Then, of couwse, we have the gaseous waste pwoducts. Casey Twigglew, will you do us the gwand honaaw of employing your mighty tubahhh in sewenading the elimination of the waste pwoduct team? Thank you dahling. Foe that, we’ll put in a good wohd foe you to be utilized in a tenuwed position as a digestive enzyme or one of sevewal billion membews of the intestinal flowa team. Now, wheah wuhh we?”

Marma let out a snort, not because the digestive health lesson was all that luxuriously humorous, but because of the old-school-Barbara-Walters-special going on. Marma watched a lot of news reruns from the early 90s, mostly because her father wrote sociopolitical analyses and had pumped out several books on the early days of the internet.  [2] So there was a fond spot in Marma’s heart for the missing letter “R” and the abundance of “W.”

“Oh yes! We ahh doomed, being eeeaaaaaten and slowly digested by a laaaaahge gwey cloud. And the only one who can save us is… Mahma? Mahma dahling are you there? We need your expahtise. You ahh the only one who knows the cowwect density of gaseous waste. This is the key to our fweedom, the antidote to our doooom! If we can simply genewate enough flatulence for this cloud to blow, we will buhhst out of here in a fwee-wheeling blast: a possibly catastwophic, ultimately life-saving, cehtainly stinky, EXPLOSION! Save us, deahh child! Save us from the clouuuuud!”

It wasn’t Marma that cracked, but the highly fragile young man behind them, Casey Actual Twiggler. He had been fervently listening to the speakers at the front of the room, who had been saying something close enough in tone—if not in actual content—to what Glory’s Gollum-Hepburn-Walters mash-up was inventing. And Casey was terrified, distracted, completely at his wits end about what he was hearing. He grabbed Morning Glory by the shoulders and shouted, “Enough! Enough already! Someone save us! Dear God save us from the cloud!!!”

The whole assembly full of eyes turned and stared, some staring above open mouths of laughter, some staring under knotted eyebrows of disapproval. As the stern eyebrows tried to resume order, Marma stared, too—but not at Casey’s bright red face—at the symphony of lightning flashing outside in the opaque fog. The row of windows lining the ceiling made the gym into a night club she’d never been in. It had become a Fantasia of school-day surprises: first the magnificent mold, now this multicolored flashdance of fog. Marma’s mind was simply bent on the possibilities the Universe was opening up for one who had been an earthling for just over a decade.

When the last twitter of Casey Twiggler’s ridicule at last dissipated, the strobe effect had taken over entirely, and the room fell silent. Not even the know-it-all vice-principle could speak over the pulsing splendor. Even more formidable by the silence it cast, the cloud spoke in waves, pink and blue flashes lighting up every last molecule of the density engulfing the school. No sound could hold a candle to the immensity. When at last the administration made it their job to speak, to make plans, to set guidelines and offer quiet reassurance, the assembly had lost much of its authority structure. It was merely older humbled humans speaking to younger humbled humans.

The news teams would later refer to it as the “Frozen Fogstorm.” Like freezing fog and ice fog, it was an anomalous occurrence that coalesced forces over the long, chilly, wet autumn, the surprise burst of warm wintertime, and the sudden plunge into Real Winter. This brought together unforseen conditions of daily freezing fog and icy thunderstorms. Its heaviest days were at the beginning, which was doubly difficult because it was also the time when townsfolk went the battiest with panic and ill-prepared emergency responses. Over weeks, the opaqueness would ebb and flow and eventually disperse completely. But on that first day, it wielded the power to completely shut down all transportation and most electricity, pinning everyone right where they were. Lucky for many, that meant that some folks were stuck within arms’ reach of cell phones and emergency broadcast systems. Others: lots of coffee and acoustic instruments. Others still: glow-in-the-dark spraypaint. Silver linings all around.

The weather phenomenon had begun as an odd juxtaposition of air currents, pressure systems, and humidity, a bit of rather curious science for meteorologists to bat around cyberspace, until it became popularized as the crisis known as The Frozen Fogstorm. As soon as it turned from a verb to a noun, it became a Problem. It had a kitchy title and thus it could be treated as a Foe, a Top Story, a Fearsome Unknown that people could pretend to know by giving it a clever nickname. [3]

The Frozen Fog made headlines for months in Everett, weeks in Washington state, days in national news, hours in international reports. A blip in the saturated tronzfield of cat memes and politics. But it would make a lifetime impact on the inhabitants of Everett, especially the schoolchildren who were camped out overnight in their gyms and cafeterias.

Glory and Marma huddled in a corner to whisper together well into the night. Gaggles of teenagers giggled and snored, as muted adults shushed and shuffled, and twitchy kids tripped back and forth from the bathrooms all night.

For Marma, the best day of her life was getting better all the time. Science!!!

For her best friend, it was one long syncopated dance step of the Dragon after another, and which side of the story they were on was chosen only in the telling. In the dark disco of the wee hours, the two could barely keep their eyes plastered to the windows. They had been staring for hours at the shapes lit up in the fog. It looked sometimes like rain, sometimes like snow, and sometimes like flocks of birds swooping furiously through the swirling cloud dance. At last the meditation gave way to the hug of sleep.

“Ooh, I can’t wait for my dreams tonight,” Glory spouted out just before her eyes closed in the pulsing darkness.

 

-**

1. Not so much in this case.
2. Back when books were books and the internet merely caused family feuds about the 6 hours tied up on the phone line every night for the sixteen downloaded versions of Freebird, 97% complete.
3. Common tactic.