“Daddy, do you see it?” Ellie, my seven year old daughter shouted to me as she strained at the harness of her child seat. She was pointing out the window to the sky. 

I looked at her questioningly via the rear view mirror. “See what, Sweetie?” I asked.

“There, that cloud, there! Don’t you see it?” She had long arms for a child so young. She could also lean heavily into her harness, giving the length of her torso more stretch as her pointing finger poked me in the back of the head.  I was getting annoyed but was able to hold my anger in check long enough to pull the car over to the side of the road and brake to a slow halt.  

I unbuckled both of us from our safety restraints and hoisted little Miss Meghan from her backseat throne, plunked her onto the ground and gestured to the sky. “What?” I asked her. “Where? Which cloud are you talking about?” 

She did a slow pirouette until she found what she was looking for. Then she unhurriedly lifted her skinny arm and pointed out the cloud that had fascinated her to such an extent that I simply had to see it for myself. She was right; the sight of that incredible cloud formation totally floored me. The next thing she said was even more of a mind bender to me. 

“But who is it?” she asked me. “And what does he want?”

***

It was just a cloud formation, this one rotund and the only one in the sky, occupying such a small patch of blue that it seemed rather an inconsequential thing. That is, until I looked at it for longer than just a few seconds. As I gazed at it, the formation took on several details that I would have missed with just a cursory glance in its direction. “That cloud is pretty spherical,” I would say to myself at first glance. “That’s kind of odd, I guess.” 

The more I looked at it, however, the more I saw. They say that the devil is in the details. In this case, though, those details also seemed to point in a different direction. 

The eyes were the first thing I noticed, all squinting as if the rest of the face was caught in a paroxysm of laughter. There didn’t seem to be a nose, but the mouth was definitely smiling. I mentioned this to my little girl and she said, “Of course he is, Daddy. And, you know what?  I can tell that he’s smiling just for me!” 

I said nothing to that because I didn’t want to get into an argument with my daughter. The fact was, though, that I could tell that the face in the cloud was smiling only for my benefit and no one else’s. When the visage finally spoke, my assumption as to whom he was speaking proved correct.

“Stephen,” he said in a loud but gentle voice, “I appear to you and your lovely little girl just to prove to both of you that I am real, I am here, and I am exactly who you think that I am.”

I was surprised when Ellie harmonized what I said next, word for word, speaking at the same time that I did. “And who is it that you think we think you are?” we both asked.  Ellie looked at me the same time I looked at her with the same look of astonishment on her face. I am quite certain, which I had on mine. 

“I am who made the fundament from which all nature, life, and beauty sprung so many eons ago and has come to this very moment in which you, I and your sweet little Ellie now converse.”

“So you are God!” Ellie exclaimed happily.

“Your word,” said the animated cloud, “not mine.” 

“You could also be a damned liar,” I said archly.

“Were I not who I say that I am?” said a suddenly very cross and lonely looking cumulus puff of dense moisture. “Would I be able to do THIS?”

The entire god-faced cloud grew dark, and lighting seemed to fill the entire sky. Crashes of thunder nearly deafened both me and my little girl, so close were we to the source of their voluminous fury. “Fear me!” demanded the cloud in a roaring voice. “For I come to thee not as a god of love but as a bringer of truth!”

“And what truth is that?” I yelled back at the ferocity of the now waning storm. 

The truth, though, had now fully abated, leaving in its wake a lovely spring day full of warm zephyr breezes and the happy, chittering song of birds. Gone was the cloud harboring a face that smiled and spoke, got angry, and cajoled. The sky was now wide, empty, and pale blue. The face of God had disappeared. Being the cynic that I am, I assumed that the request for truth that I had made was what had frightened it away.

I told Ellie my theory for the sudden retreat of the face in the cloud. My daughter nodded at my deduction, but not because she agreed with it. Probably just to shut me up so she could regale me with her own idea of what had happened. 

“Maybe,” she said in a sage manner that belied her tender age. “He just had to go back to heaven and find the book where all the truth is written so he could look up the right answer to your question.” 

I was at a loss to understand what she was talking about. “Truth,” she said in the selfsame sage tone she had just adopted. “You wanted to know what truth is.”

“No,” I said, remembering the words I had used in my retort. “I asked what truth he was referring to, not what truth is.”  

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, disappointedly. “You know that there is really only one truth for everyone and everything, don’t you?”   She held out her skinny, little girl arms, stretched as far as they could to either side of her. “And it’s all right here. Everywhere you look, everywhere you are; it’s there and there and there and there….” She spun herself around, trying to point at everything that there was all at once.

“It’s all there and here! It’s ALL truth! All God!”  She laughed in a high, giddy, delighted squeal. “Right here! Right now! Forever and always!”

Stephen Faulkner is a native New Yorker who was transplanted with his wife, Joyce, to
Atlanta, Georgia. He and his wife are now both retired and living the good life in Central
Florida, keeping busy volunteering at different non-profit organizations and going to the
theater as often as they can find the time. He has recently had stories published in such
publications as Aphelion Webzine, Hellfire Crossroads, Temptation Magazine, Hobo
Pancakes, The Erotic Review, Liquid Imagination, Sanitarium Magazine, The Satirist,
Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Literary
Hatchet, ZiN Daily, AHF Magazine, Midnight Street Anthology #3 and the Press and is
also available through Amazon.com. A book of short stories entitled anthology,
“Crackers,” published by Bridge House Press. His novel, Aliana in Paradise was
published by World Castle Publishing in 2018 and is available through Amazon.com and
Barnesandnoble.com. His second novel, Lunar Effects was published by Eden Stories in
Speculations, a book of short stories, has just been released by Bridge House
Publishing.