Look

Picture an empty arctic tundra, pure white all around, glass cliffs rise to fill the background, surrounding the ice, smooth and unscalable. You and I stand across from each other in the biggest puffiest coats you can imagine. Your coat and snow pants can be in your favorite color, I am wearing mine (red). We both wear thick mittens and knitted hats with big colorful pom poms. We wrapped our scarves around our noses and mouths because it's so cold.

We kneel on the frozen ground; it is plain white snow. Between us there is a perfectly circular hole in the ice about a foot in diameter. Imagine the hole an ice fisher makes, the depth and the patient sitting. Within the hole is a cloud. Tentatively you reach into the hole with your mittened hand and find the cloud is soft and tactile, and it tears from itself when you pull on it. I see the cloud-piece in your hand and immediately plunge mine in too, to see what it's like, to touch it for myself,

 

until we are digging frantically like dogs, uncontrolled, hunched over the cloud-hole, throwing handfuls of cloud behind us as we go. Big chunks of wisp fly up over our shoulders and gradually slow down, floating and recondensing, finding each other, and traveling a calm orderly line away from our frenzy. They hit the glass cliffs and slide down, stacking on top of themselves and becoming solid, a staircase surrounding and filling up the basin we're in, an empty coliseum. Maybe later we will forget about the hole and climb up and out, see what's on top of the cliff. Or we'll stay digging until we find the end and we can submerge our hands in the clear sky itself.