She said it

"Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky"

Although his parents later told him they had no recollection of it, Sam Tweddle remembered staring out from the back seat of his family's car towards a church sign bearing the words "And God said, 'let there be light', and there was light".

His dad was applying thick strokes of paint to an outsized canvas when Sam asked him what it meant.

"Let there be light" his dad repeated, painting a long arc, and again "let there be light"

He looked at Sam

"Some people think there is a god, and that this god spoke everything we see into existence. The whole lot" he said.

Naturally, then, in the logic of a six-year-old's reasoning Irma Kelley must be a god too, or perhaps the god, the one from the church sign. For Sam, that she had sunk into a coma after her single act of creation, and that she was nine years old at the time, didn't factor into it. Her words, and the subsequent appearance of dancing purple clouds, were remarked on not only by members of her huge family but her teachers and several neighbours too, recorded on video before and after the fact. It was the matter-of-fact way these claims were delivered, quite unlike the wide-eyed, spittle blowing pretenders who later flooded the internet with counter-claims, that convinced Sam. She said it, it happened.

What surprised Sam most as he got older was the number of people who came to believe there had always been purple clouds and they had always danced. Even the church got a new sign: "And God said 'let the clouds dance, and they danced". Seeing it gave Sam a hollow feeling. Irma for them was just another faker. But Sam kept the faith.

***

Seventeen-year-old Sam switched off the alarm on his aging phone and closed his eyes. Unable to drift back into sleep, he propped up his head with a second pillow and picked up his phone. No calls, no new messages of any interest, nothing on any of the Irma Kelley blogs he still followed. No surprises there. He rolled out of bed, and pulled on a pair of jeans.

Damn these plants, he thought, working his way down through the leafy tendrils hanging over the landing and stairs, and around piles of books. Thank god a cleaner had been found to work around all the clutter. Without Mrs Jakes's twice weekly visits, the place would have rapidly begun to eat itself. Her whirling efficiency, cleaning and dusting everything without apparently moving anything, was a marvel. That train of thought led to a stab of guilt as Sam reached the bottom step. It was his mother's life insurance pay-out that covered costs like having a cleaner, saving Sam and his dad the bother, these days.

Sam looked around. He could still easily picture how it had been. The light, bright and airy rooms of his childhood home. Pieces of his father's art here and there, framed photos from the sets of movies his mother had produced.

With a faint rustle, his father emerged from the curtain of vines that obscured the open entrance to the living room, and continued across the root-covered floor towards the kitchen. The plants 'kept the air clean', or so said Mrs Jakes. Whatever. Roots covered the floor so uniformly his dad could shuffle over them without tripping.

"Morning Dad" Sam said.

Three years and he still couldn't get used to seeing him like this. Nicotine-stained hands gripped a mug encrusted with tannins from endless cups of tea, long and dirty nails extending his grip all the way around it. His father motioned vaguely with his free hand and graced the room in general with a smile from under his Wurzel Gummidge whiskers, not looking at Sam. Worn out slippers, the dressing gown that Mrs Jakes somehow managed to get through a wash cycle once a week, as his father looked on like a mournful puppy, and a wafting cloud of grey hair completed the look.

"Do you want some porridge, dad?" Sam asked, in the kitchen. Since he'd been doing the weekly shop, choosing anything expensive made Sam feel guilty. Porridge was cheap, easy to make and gave him enough fuel to get to college, the shops, and the bike shop on his battered old racing bike.

"Porridge?" his dad said, in a wondering voice, as if he'd never heard the word. He looked down at a jar of marmite on the counter. He opened it, dipped a finger inside and drew a long straight line across the counter, then another line across it, his long fingernail tapping and scratching on the smooth surface. In the upper right-hand corner of the cross he had made, he dabbed a single, dark blob of marmite.

"No thanks, son" he whispered.

***

Sam pulled up at the Mill street traffic lights and leaned on the handlebars, looking down at the irregular surface of the road. The weather had not been warm enough to evaporate puddles from dips and dents in the road, accumulated during the previous week's rain. A stagnating pool at the road's edge duplicated a lone, dissipating cloud from last night's dance, as it slipped down towards the horizon across the blue-yellow morning sky. Bits of what looked like confetti but might have been small flower petals floated in the dirty water. Sam watched the reflected cloud break apart and dissolve.

The blast of a car horn right next to him set his heart thundering. He jerked his head around to see the grinning face of Danny Chalmers, and his own startled face reflected in the glass that separated them. Ste Walton, the first kid Sam knew at the sixth form college to get a car, leaned across from the driver's seat to grin semi-apologetically at him. Sam's eyes followed Danny's pointed finger to the light now turning green, then the small hatchback pulled away with a whiff of burning clutch.

Raising a peddle with one foot, he was about to set off when something jerked at his attention from across the junction. Sam had heard the term tunnel vision before, and knew what it meant, but he had never experienced it until that moment. His peripheral vision faded into shadow, sound stretched far away and a whiff of ozone invaded his nostrils. There, directly over the cross roads on the far corner was...Sam's eyelids performed an epically slow blink, then sound and light rushed back, and whatever it had been was gone.

He blinked, and stared at the empty patch of pavement. Tiredness. Lack of sleep. Lingering side effects of the meds he'd been put on over the winter. He couldn't even recall what he'd seen, if he'd seen anything. Which he hadn't, he was sure. Trick of the light.

Still, he thought about raising it later with Mr Tardus, after college, at the bike shop, but couldn't think of a way to broach the topic. As usual, Mr Tardus seemed to know what he needed, and pointed to three bikes newly acquired for reconditioning.

"Give them a once over and replace anything that needs replacing, please Sam" Mr Tardus said.

The work earned Sam some pocket money, but he would have done it for free. The hard metal of sprockets and cranks, the thick odour of oil and grease, the shine of steel and the smooth feel of aluminium, these were real, tactile, things. They didn't change. The way the sprockets clicked into place and cables stayed taut reassured him he had not seen anything at all real at the crossroads. He just needed a better night's sleep.

"Do you remember Irma Kelley?" Mr Tardus asked, some time later, coming into the workroom from the shop.

"Yes, of course" said Sam. He had long since finished refurbing the old bikes, and was working on a new build. Mr Tardus reused everything that could be re-used, putting together bikes to sell second-hand, but not on this bike. All of the parts were new, and the best available. "What about her?"

"Well, it looks like she might finally be coming out of her coma"

Mr Tardus leaned against the doorframe, polishing his reading glasses and looking at Sam curiously.

"How long has it been now? Ten years?"

"Eleven" said Sam. He looked up "She's awake? Talking? Can people go and see her?"

"No, nothing like that" My Tardus replied. "Something about her brain activity, they said on the news. A new technique, maybe. I'm not sure"

A cold lump of disappointment slid through Sam's chest. Mr Tardus looked at the bike he was working on.

"You'd like to visit her, in hospital?" he asked.

"I thought maybe...if she was awake" Sam trailed off. Truth was, he had never really stopped thinking about Irma Kelley, and her connection with the now familiar dancing clouds. He even dreamed about her, sometimes, wielding words like a paintbrush.

Mr Tardus continued to look at him, his face inscrutable. He folded his arms, and nodded towards the new bike.

"Now there's a bike that'll take you places. Why don't you ride home on it, once you're done?"

Sam stared at the bike. He knew the exact value of every component, and the mark up percentage on the finished build. Put together, it came to a lot more than he had earned in the last two years of working evenings in the shop.

"Mr Tardus..." he began

"No arguments. You can tell me how it rides"

It was nearly nine when Sam finished tinkering. Ok, so it was just a push bike, not a Harley or even a crappy hatchback like Danny's, but it rode like a dream. Smooth, slick, silent and fast in every respect. The glossy black paint picked up faint hints of the first purple tinged clouds forming in the darkening sky.

***

Sam didn't want to leave the expensive bike in the garage, so he took it directly into the house. If he hadn't been thinking about how light and cool-looking it was, Sam might have wondered why all the lights were on, shining out of the windows on both floors, before he went inside.

He leaned the bike carefully against the wall in the narrow entrance hall, and walked through towards the kitchen. Standing by the long table in the dining room was Mrs Jakes, and a tall man he didn't recognise. Sam wasn't used to seeing Mrs Jakes standing still. That alone was enough to tell him something wasn't right.

"Where's dad?" he asked

Mrs Jakes gave him a look he couldn't decipher.

"Sam, we need to talk" she said.