Above the Clouds Live WP

The morning sky is mostly cloud, deep steel blue-greys that mirror the hues of the highway. Everything is a muted shade, like a matt photograph in a dimly lit room, everything except the tail lights that flow into the heart of the city. They shine like the first berries on winter holly: unabashedly brilliant, scarlet, hypnotic.

The sky is a sombre grey save for the band of salmon pink that hovers over the mountains. The dusky grey peaks give the bottom a jagged edge, whereas the clouds above soothe it with charcoal swirls.

The sky is a thick blanket of fog hovering thirty feet or so from the frigid ground. Branches newly bereft of leaves stretch up toward it, disappearing into the white as it their tips were yet to be painted on the brilliant canvas above.

Today the sky is nothing at all. It's like a child began to draw on it with a pencil and then erased it in a way that smudged and spread the grey. And all the while the rain streaks down, invisible until it hits the sodden ground.

Above the frenetic city hubbub, the honking taxis and swarms of pedestrians marching on their own personal missions the sky was comparatively in slow motion. The movement of the clouds was barely perceptible and even the birds wheeled in slow lazy arcs. But this juxtaposition was lost on the citizens. No-one even looked up. And so the sky above, as pretty as any million-dollar painting slowly darkened to midnight blue, never quite black due to light pollution from below.

The sky was low and dark. The thick cloud, grey as the stone they pulled from the quarry, gave the monochromatic world outside a claustrophobic feel. By this time of day the birds should have been singing and the horizon tinged with reds and pinks, oranges sometimes. But the weather was accountable to no-one and the trip could not be delayed.