Etta Farnan
Nights like this always made Deipara think the clouds had hands. They hung adamant around her dangling legs. This same cirrostratus veil could listen, and ze’d been playing her tearful, late-night songs on zir mum’s old panpipes. If the clouds did have hands, then they delighted in clutching Deipara hard between fists of grey.
Zir lips quivered. Soft, lilting notes from her brass panpipes faltered like dancers, gracing the night sky. She sobbed into the instrument. And then ze breathed. She’d written this one about a deity accidentally dropping a pebble, and the fall back down to Earth.
The windwarden’s gliders glinted in the moon’s light as they drifted back into the hangar.
‘Fuck,’ she muttered, rolling her reddened eyes.
It’d been easy to tell which one was Theo’s back when she’d wanted to know. Back when they’d only just moved, before their kisses had grown obligatory.
The station Theo and Deipara had moved to was a three-kilometre-long triple-turbine colony, providing power to a quarter of the country below, and Theo had eagerly joined the dawn patrol of windwardens. Now he was just another white dot careening through the clouds.
The last of those white dots disappeared into the hangar. After what had happened that morning, they’d all been sent out again at dusk to do a second sweep.
In the guilt of the morning’s malfunction, Theo had taken it. He’d pressed it into Deipara’s hands tearily, and she’d let herself fancy it a crystal from the earth below — not the thing that had nearly killed them all.
She turned it over in her palm. A small clump of microplastics no bigger than her fingernail had brought the entire yawing mechanism to a halt. The oversized polycirro particle glimmered at her under the light of the moon.
If the clouds did have hands, ze imagined them maliciously slipping it by Windwarden Theo on his glider earlier that morning, tucking it deep in the cogs of the wind station’s yawing mechanism. Always making sure we never forgot what those who came before had done.
The whole station had shuddered, screeching at the sky as the colossal gears had struggled against this tiny, plastic clot. Deipara didn’t think she would ever forget that sound.
Rage buzzed down to her palms, and she closed her trembling fist around the rogue clump of plastic. A grunt escaped her throat as ze threw it as hard as her arms could.
It twinkled like a falling star.
The clouds swallowed it.
That buzzing was still there, so she swore again. Her tears boiled with frustration. If the clouds did have hands, Deipara knew they were just squeezing at zir brain.
‘Dee!’ A voice bounced up the walkway. Theo’s tone grated against zir mood. His fingers met Deipara’s collarbones like slow, constricting snakes.
‘You’ll catch a cold, Dee. You didn’t wait for me, did you?’ Zir partner’s voice was sandpaper against her eardrum. The warmth of his breath, venom burning. If the clouds did have hands, then it was this. These hands and this voice; they were the true reason she felt trapped.
‘Can you play me something, Dee?’ he groaned. ‘The day’s been so long.’
The skin, the breath, the cadence; always the same day after day after day. Ze missed soil under her nails, a tide caressing her feet, birdsong at her ears.
She didn’t say any of this. Ze never did. She just fought.
Wriggling out of Theo’s grasp, she pushed back against him, and her panpipes fell from her fingers.
‘Hey, hey,’ Theo said, trying to soften her jerking movements. ‘What is it?’
The panpipes clattered down next to her knee.
‘It’s nothing,’ she lied, lost in trying to escape the feeling. ‘Can’t you just—’
Her knees brushed the fallen instrument, and it fell endlessly. Ze and Theo watched as her mother’s old panpipes slipped beneath the clouds to meet the world once more.
Deipara’s tears dived after it.
*
Weeks after the sky had taken her mother’s panpipes, Deipara was wiping her red eyes and dangling her legs off the edge of the windwarden hangar.
Theo slunk down beside her, and it was the first time in months that his arms around her hadn’t felt like a form of suffocation. They breathed in time, and Theo began to hum a tune. Deipara sucked in a breath — it was one of hers. Tears met her cheeks again before he finished the song for her.
‘Thank you,’ she said eventually.
‘I don’t remember what it was about,’ he replied, lips against her forehead. ‘Something about your mum I think.’
Deipara curled into Theo. ‘You do.’
Theo sighed. ‘I miss it all too.’
It wasn’t just the world below. Everyday, ze watched him fly out into the sky with people he knew up here. The metal of the hangar was pressing hard against her tailbone.
‘Can I talk to you about something?’ Her voice was small.
‘Of course, Dee.’
‘Actually,’ she broached, inching slowly from his warmth, ‘I think I’d rather do this out there.’ She pulled her legs back from the threshold to oblivion and pointed out at the sky.
‘You want to go out on my glider?’ Theo asked. ‘Seriously?’
She nodded and, judging by the way Theo was looking at zir, she must’ve finally
been smiling.
A slyness sprung across Theo’s face, and he whipped around to check if anyone was watching. They were alone together.
He grabbed her hand and led zir to his glider, positioning her how he would stand, zir hands on the front rails. He nabbed a visor from another windwarden’s glider and loosed the molecular net from the back.
Deipara flicked her visor down. Theo’s hands were warm and gentle against hers as he guided zir to start up the glider.
The solar glass wings pulsed at her sides, and they lifted into the air.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ Theo said, hastily strapping a harness around the two of them and planting a kiss on Deipara’s cheek. His fingers curled zir’s around the accelerator throttle.
Her face was washed in streams of cool wind as the glider unleashed itself into the open sky. Theo gripped Deipara’s hands harder. She realised ze was shaking.
‘Do you like it?’ Theo asked in her ear.
‘I thought the wind would be louder,’ ze laughed. A tear skimmed off the edge of zir visor, blowing backwards to the join the clouds below, pregnant with rain. ‘I love it, actually.’
Orange light crested her vision as Theo jerked her grip, spinning the glider. The solar glass wings glinted gold in the sunlight as Theo glanced off the billowing wind.
He whooped and ze laughed, throwing her head back.
‘So,’ Theo said, ‘what did you wanna talk about out here?’
Deipara swallowed the buzzing anxiety back into her chest and spoke. Days, weeks, months later, ze wouldn’t remember what was said. She’d try to fashion what she could into songs for him to hear. They’d recount bits and pieces to each other between the pillows, after stressful days. She’d try to grow plants on their balcony. And ze’d smile whenever she’d watch Theo glide out across the sky with the other windwardens.
If the clouds had hands, they were carrying Theo and Deipara on the glider. Gently letting them grind across the fingers and dip into the grooves on the palm, riding on blankets.
‘Ready?’ he asked, eventually.
Theo pressed Deipara’s fingers onto the accelerator, and they headed together for the white crest. The clouds were ending for an ocean of sky, falling away towards the world below.
A lonely glass bird refracting citrus sunlight sailed towards that stark line, and broke it. Puffs of nimbostratus billowed in their wake. The wings of Theo’s glider parted from the cluster of clouds.
He lifted zir hands from the throttle.
The wind station was a small dot behind them as they fell. Deipara and Theo cradled each other, out of the clouds’ reach. However briefly, they floated together.
Etta Farnan (which is short for Henrietta, which is also long for Henry) writes fiction and sometimes makes zines. They live between Wurundjeri land and Whadjuk Noongar boodja, and she is always thinking about the beach.
Long Trek Press 
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