From childhood onward, fog has fascinated me — particles of mist, tiny watery spheres suspended in air, flowing like a river around trees, rocks, hills, mountains, valleys, skyscrapers, roads and lampposts.

Clouds draped across the landscape like sheets of cotton fiber.

The Hound of the Baskervilles howling at midnight.

A detective in 1940s attire — fedora, trenchcoat and full-brogue, wingtip shoes.

A climber on a cliff watching the fog pour down.

A beachcomber watching the fog roll in.

A stranded sailing ship adrift at sea.

Fascination experienced alone has its moment.  But shared is better.

Perhaps here, in this fog, with my friend walking beside me, talking about what we talk about when alone together, best sates the wanton need to be the social creatures we are.

“A storm approaches, my dear.”

She called me dear.  She, the woman of my dreams, or perhaps a woman of whom dreams are made when life is the dream one imagines when the dream wanders away, as dreams often do, on tangents associated with the day’s unfinished business, sorting itself out through REM sleep, rewriting synaptic paths, creating new mazes to meander when one’s thoughts have no goal or purpose in mind.

“Yes, darling, it does.”

Lightning lit the fog like a lighthouse beam passing over two lovers lost on a trek from nowhere to nowhere else.

Or, in this case, us.

“Have you ever been to the GHCC center?”

“The geek center?”

“You know, the Global Hydrology and Climate Center.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I haven’t, either.”

“But a friend of mine has worked there.”

“Uh-huh.  Do you think they’re tracking this storm?”

“Could be.”

“Will there be storms where we’re going?”

“Most likely not.”

“Not even solar storms?”

“Good question.”

We walked on in silence.  She slid her hand in mine and swung it up and down to a tune she hummed quietly.

I stopped, causing her to spin in her step.  I hooked an arm around her and, without saying a word, we intuitively jumped into a Lindy Hop dance routine we had secretly practiced for several weeks.

Out of breath, we looked together up at an opening in the fog, a night sky revealing the Pleiades, better known as the Seven Sisters: Sterope, Merope, Electra, Maia, Taygeta, Celaeno, and Alcyone.

“Which one are you?”

“Which one do you want me to be?”

“Hmm…mortal or immortal…”

“Love, my dear, is immortal, is it not?”

Lightning flashed again, thunder rumbling through our bodies.

“The storm draws nearer.”

“Yes, darling.  Which sister are you?”

“Well, I am certainly not your sister.”

“There is little doubt in that, although the DNA we carry varies by so very little I would venture a guess an extraterrestrial intelligence trying to separate us by biological means only would simply quantify us according to body type…gender, primarily.”

“‘Simple enough, Holmes.'”

“‘Elementary, Watson.'”

She gave me a shove and then threw an arm over my shoulder.  “Suppose we should find shelter?”

“Here?  In this open field of winter wheat?”

“Is that where we are?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?  Weren’t we on a concrete path?”

“And didn’t you want to step off the path into the grass a while back?”

“Yes but…”

“Have you never been here in the daytime?”

“No.”

“The park follows the edge of a working farm.  Some years they’ve grown soybean.  Other years they’ve let native flowers fill the fields, attracting thousands of flutterbyes, bees, moths and other flying insects in late summer.  This year, it’s winter wheat.”

“You come here often, then?”

“At least once a year.  During the workweek, it’s a great place to ride my bike or practice for the annual marathon.”

“Once a year?”

I smiled at her playful sarcasm.  “That’s all the training I need to run a marathon.”

“Su-u-u-re.”

“Well, that combined with all our dancing, of course.”

She threw her other arm over my back and rested her chin on my shoulder.  “We never practice slow dancing.  You ever notice that?”

I swayed a little.  “What’s there to practice?”

She lifted her head and swayed with me to an imaginary waltz.  “When was the last time you trimmed your ear hair?”

“What?”

“Your ear hair.”

She had mumbled into my shoulder.  “Oh, that.  I thought you said something else.”

She leaned back and looked me in the eye, her dominant right eye looking into my dominant left eye.  “And what did I say?”

“I’m not sure.  It sounded like ‘rimmed your air air,’ which made no sense.”

“Uh-huh.”

The lightning flashed again, much brighter, making her eyes shine, as if my face was a beacon reflected in her face.

“How far is it back to the carpark?”

“I dunno.  Fifteen or twenty minutes, if we run.”

“What if we laid down on the wheat?”

“Well, we could do that but it’ll still get pretty muddy.”

“At least we’ll have less chance of getting struck by lightning.”

Lightning struck a nearby hill, causing me to jump.  “Okay, you win.  Let’s lay down here…right now.”

I pushed two rows of wheat toward each other, forming a thin but dirt-free mat on which we sat down and then pressed our backs.

The top of the anvil-shaped thunderstorm blocked the Pleiades.

“You never told me which sister you wanted me to be.”

“You have to answer another question first.  Would you want to be the mother of my child?”

“Rather presumptuous question, isn’t it?”

“Not really.”

“I suppose not.  But, if I bear us a child, that will change my place in the Queue, would it not?”

“We could petition to be the first to carry a child off the planet.”

“That’s definitely more than presumptuous.  More like foolish, I think.”

“Wishful thinking, actually.”

“Indeed.”

“Well…?”

A pregnant pause filled the air, rimmed my air air, as it were.

She placed a hand on my chest.  “And I must answer the first question before you’ll tell me which sister you want me to be?”

“Unless you tell me which sister you want to be, first.”

A few heavy drops of rain landed around.  Lightning flashed past us in a space beyond our field of view, with the thunder seeming to emanate from a spot directly above us.

“You know, dear, we could die out here, making this whole conversation a moot point.”

Through the thin sheets of fog, thick sheets of rain filled the world around us.  The wheat beneath us grew wet and soaked the only dry area left, the small of our backs.

We had turned our heads toward each other to prevent the streams of falling water from filling our mouths and beating our faces.

However, my left ear soon became numb from the cold rain pooling in the canal, my eardrum throbbing with the amplified sound of tinnitus.

We lay like that during the fifteen or twenty minutes that the storm took to pass over us, time we could have spent running back to the carpark.

As the last low scuds of cloud wisps flew past, the starlit sky reappeared.

“Can I bear you an imaginary child?”

“If you wish.  I’m not asking to be a father, just asking if you’re willing to be the mother of my…our child.”

“In that case, yes.  I would bear you a child if…”

“Thank you.”

“If…this was a rhetorical question I had to answer in order to address the second question.”

“Or the first.”

“No, you said I had to answer the second one first so it makes the first question the second one.”

“If you say so.”

“If I say so?  You know, it’s not an easy question to answer.  There are loads of issues involved with calculating the odds that our future, the one we’ve planned these long months…”

“Long months?  They feel like they’ve flown by to me.”

“Well, they would.  It’s easier for a guy, even in these so-called modern times.  Anyway, as I was saying, to even think, for a moment, that I could take time away from our hard work to not only conceive and carry a foetus for eight or nine months…”

“Or ten.”

“Certainly not!  Nine’s enough, as it is.”

“I could find nine months for us in the schedule, easily.  Ten, not much harder.”

“Well, sure, if it’s just looking at a work breakdown schedule and deciding whether a task is a task or a bottleneck or a deadline that can be slipped without noticing…but we’re talking about a living being here, one that requires more than just nine months on a schedule.”

“I love the way you say ‘shed-yule.'”

“Oh, dear, as far up the career ladder as you and I are, sometimes you can come up with the silliest childlike observations.”

“Still, it’s neat the way you say that word.”

“You’re trying to change the subject, aren’t you?”

A cool breeze followed the storm like a stray dog looking for a meal.  I shivered.  “I suppose so, yes.  I’m getting rather cold, here on this wet, muddy wheat.”

“I thought you were used to cold conditions.  Hadn’t we practiced traveling in cold space conditions enough to immunise you against the need for warmth?”

“Of course.  But we hadn’t practiced it in wet clothes and on damp ground.”

“Good point, dear.”

I turned, folded my knees under me and jumped up, reaching out a hand.

She grabbed my hand and lifted herself up.

“So, where were we?”

“Either getting back to the carpark, deciding whether to have a kid and impact our plans, or merely saying which of the Seven Sisters you’d like to be, hypothetically speaking.”

She shrugged her shoulders and inclined her head toward the carpark.

Between the shine of the stars, the Milky Way brilliantly alive, and the occasional flashes of lightning growing more distant, we sloshed our way back to the strip of grass and onto the concrete path.

Because it was dark and no one could see us, we both took off our clothes and rung out the excess water.

“You know, up there one day, as we’re looking down at this part of the planet, we’ll remember this moment.”

I nodded.

“Dear, will we call this a romantic moment?”

I reached out my hand, grabbing hers, and spun her around.  She circled on her toes like a fairy with wings, a nymph fallen from heaven for one brief dance in the night, a symbol or sign portending good fortune, I thought.

“Romance barely describes what I see right now, but it will suffice.”

“I, then, am Maia, mother of Hermes, messenger of the gods, protector of literature, sports, commerce and intrigue.  Your favourite subjects.”

“Hermes is our son?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are safely ensconced in the history already written about us.”

“But we already know that.  The records, the computations, the calculations, the error reports and the sample sizes, they all point to our predetermined past AND future.”

I kissed her hand and bowed.  She curtsied, let go of my hand, and began to dress.

Another line of fog spread from the river.

I picked up my clothes.  “Race you to the carpark!”