Ali Shaw

Finn Munro

His body was as smooth as a weathered pebble on the sea shore.  He had very little complexion: he was not so much a white man as a grey one.  He had a flat pair of buttocks and skin as hairless as that of his head.

He stood on the ridge between her viewpoint and the sun.  His tall body was an eclipse and the light was a corona behind it.  He spread his arms in a pose of dejected surrender.

Then, very gradually, he began to dissolve.

Like chalk washed into a blur by the rain, his outline began to distort, and almost imperceptibly he lost his form.  One minute he was a man and the next he was a blurry grey silhouette.  His skin became a coat of mist.  The sun shining from behind him lit him up and edged him with its brilliance, wherein he stopped looking man-shaped and instead resembled a cloud formed by chance into the posture of a human being.

He broke up.  His head caved in, becoming nothing more than a dented sphere of fog.  His chest tore apart and the blue sky and bright sun shone through the place where his heart should have been.  He disintegrated, every second less like a man and more like a cloud.

– from The Man who Rained by Ali Shaw