Lena’s Cloud Cub [FICTOID]

The Baltimore zoo eagerly awaited the arrival of Lena’s first cub.

Lena was a young female leopard they acquired and raised from a cub.  When it became obvious she was pregnant it created quite a stir because there were no adult male leopards in her compound.

“Parthenogenesis,” said some.

“Nonsense!  Precocious sexuality among one or more of the young males,” said the skeptics.

In either case, Lean’s deliver date was widely anticipated and documented.

On the day in question as she went into labor, dozens of cameras focused on her from every conceivable angle, teams of vets on call, waiting to rush in and assist if needed.

The moment came --

-- and to everyone’s amazement what looked like a small cloud of steam emerged.

Thinking this to be some heretofore undocumented aspect of leopard gestation, the vets zoomed their cameras in, expecting to see a live birth.

Instead they saw nothing, even an ordinary zoo patron could watch the video and see Lena clearly looked post-partum.

And the cloud did not dissipate!  Instead it hopped and frolicked like a real leopard cub.

This became quite a sensation, not just among biologists but physicists and meteorologists as well (chemists simply assumed everyone was tripping on a bad batch of blotter acid; theologians tried to get in the mix, but they were quickly shouldered aside).

The scientists attempted to catch the small non-dissipating cloud but that proved useless.  Nets?  Get real.  Suck it up with a vacuum cleaner?  Too agile, never got close.  The best they could do was spectroscopic analysis whenever the cloud cub passed between the sun and a camera but all that revealed was H2O, nothing more.

Eventually Lena’s cloud cub fell out of the public eye, replaced by a TikTok influencer’s plastic surgery to look like a frog.

Lena died at the ripe old age of 24, pretty good for a leopard.  When its mother died, the cloud cub hovered over Lena’s still form for an hour or so, then abruptly shot up into the sky to merge with other, larger clouds.

The cloud cub has not been seen since except in dreams -- terrifying, soul-shaking dreams.

© Buzz Dixon