High in the sky lived a family of clouds, and their name was McCloud. They were Scottish clouds. The father, Horace, was a wispy cloud, a cirrus cloud if you want to be technical about it. The mother, Electra, was a storm cloud. There were two daughters. The older and gentler one, Lorna, stayed close to the ground, hovering over hilltops and often masquerading as fog. The younger and more boisterous one, Stella, was thick and puffy, the type of cloud that inspired people to say, That’s a frog … or maybe duck … or a Studebaker.
For many years, they weren’t a sad family or an angry family (even though the mom was stormy). They weren’t a happy family either. They were merely a family of clouds, called the McClouds, and no one, outside of meteorologists, paid them much attention.
That is, until Lorna disappeared.
One morning, she told her parents she planned to linger over a valley and provide some shade for picnickers, which was something she often did. Good deeds made her feel, for lack of a better word, good. She practiced kindness as much as possible, but she was always home by dinnertime.
Except on this day. The next day too.
The McClouds were understandably worried. They asked friends to help them find Lorna, and a search party of clouds swept across the land. When that many clouds come together, it’s called a storm front, and this one turned out to be a doozy. It flooded the coasts of every continent, leveling towns, killing millions, and causing mayhem.
And it was all for naught. Because they didn’t find Lorna.
The other clouds gave up after a while. Then the McClouds gave up too. Lorna was gone for good, they figured. It was best to focus their energies on Stella.
Stella loved the attention. With Lorna out of the way, she was the star of the family. Her parents kept a close watch over her, but they also spoiled her. They did whatever they could to keep her close and happy. They couldn’t bear to lose another daughter.
Meanwhile, down on the ground, leaders had gathered together.
“We must put an end to this catastrophic weather!” shouted the secretary-general of the United Nations when they held an emergency meeting of the world’s top scientists. The scientists agreed. So they teamed up to create the greatest machine ever. It was basically a giant fan designed to blow all the clouds out of the sky.
The McClouds had no idea that this was happening, because they were spending all their time indulging Stella. Stella would puff into different shapes and her parents would flatter her.
“You look like a palace of pillows,” they’d say. Or, “You look like a bucket of popcorn.”
Keep in mind, compliments in the cloud world often revolved around fluffiness.
When the humans finally finished their machine, which they called the Ultra-Blow, they put it on Mount Everest and fired it up. All the other clouds in the world had already grown wise to the humans’ plan and had slipped off and hidden in caves.
Not the McClouds, though. When gusts from the Ultra-Blow reached Scotland, it was nighttime and they were asleep. The force of the wind pushed the three clouds together and they melded as one. All their thoughts and emotions became intermingled. They became a singular soul.
It’s an odd thing to share someone else’s soul and an even odder thing to share it with your family. But because of this, the mystery of Lorna was solved. Lorna had been there all along. Her sister, Stella, had absorbed her and had been hiding her deep in her billows.
Why did she do this? Simple. Stella was greedy and wanted all of her parents’ love.
Damn you, Stella! her parents were tempted to say, but saying that was essentially damning themselves. They were a single entity now, and the Ultra-Blow kept blowing them up and up and through the atmosphere and into space. And so it was that the cloud named McCloud hurtled into the void, disgusted with itself, bewildered by itself, in love with itself, like every family since the beginning of time.
Little-known fact: clouds freeze in space. And when McCloud froze, it stopped thinking and being. It ended up in suspended animation.
For eons, the frozen cloud traveled through space, until it came upon a young planet. As it was pulled in by the planet’s gravity and hit the planet’s thin atmosphere, McCloud melted and broke into thousands of little pieces, until it wasn’t a family anymore, or even individual personalities. It was aspects of personalities: anger, confusion, compassion, and so on.
Back on Earth, there was no weather, for all the other clouds were forced to stay in hiding or face the wrath of the Ultra-Blow. However, on the young planet, where the remnants of the McClouds fell from the sky, there was always weather. Except it was thoughts and emotions that rained and snowed. It was the essence of a family that once was and would never be again.
The animals on the planet weren’t much more than blobs in the sea, but they absorbed the precipitation and became intelligent and swamped by feelings both good and bad. They evolved, slimmed down, and grew arms, legs, and eyes. After a while, one feeling dominated their hearts and minds: anger.
Because in the end, that’s what dominated the cloud named McCloud. Stella was angry with Lorna for being so kind and generous, something Stella couldn’t manage herself. Lorna was angry with Stella for absorbing her. Horace and Electra were angry with the entire situation, but mostly with themselves for letting the situation come to pass.
The aliens channeled their new intelligence and anger. They built spaceships and set coordinates for Earth with one directive in mind: destroy everything. The land, the animals, the humans, the clouds. Everything.
Damn you, Stella. Damn you.