1.

Here near the fringe of Blomberg & Blomberg Plastics's properties lie the dunes where the healer herself emerged. Records from Blomberg & Blomberg Plastics' Public Museum of History's Private Library say her face was patched from years under the sun. She spoke no local dialect. The tent community used the universal gestures. She signaled she would perform three miracles over three days. The first would happen now. She raised her hand toward the sun. Night fell fast. A smell like roses blew in. Wings rushed low overhead. Something thumped around the community's feet, large geese, pelting down so hard that everyone covered their softest part, crying for the healer to quit, but flesh rained heavily. Fathers rushed children to tents. Mothers cloaked mothers with cloaks. At last it stopped. The community was baffled. They couldn't know the wealth under their feet. They wouldn't have cared if they did. They lacked the imagination to use a goose right. They chewed only roots or cactuses. They were bowed with sentiment. They lingered in the rain. So they returned to their tents abuzz from the miracle, which they viewed as a curse. What did this mean, they whined. What prophet murders innocents, they whined. Here I add to the official account notes from an unnamed young man, an ancestor of Blomberg himself. This young man considered the first miracle a test of faith. Let's call our note-taker B.B., as in Before Blomberg. B.B. told the other community members the miracle might lead to more miracles they would understand the benefit of. And who among them was gifted with a healer's sight? B.B. invoked the word "sacrifice." B.B. invoked the word "mystery." They listened. They listened but struggled to hear over their terror. To the lamb everything new is a predator.

2.

See how this area bulges up irregularly? A tower stood here, a remnant from a civilization older and wiser than the tent community. This ancient civilization used the tower during war for scouting enemy movements but B.B.'s notes report the tent community employed it to watch the sun set, to feel the wind, to follow where their whims led. These people didn't deserve enemies. The ambition-free see tools as toys. Flight is for birds. The ocean is for fish. The moon is for no one. Only visionaries can herd the always comfortable toward truth. So the day after the miracle of birds, the healer led the community up their once-useful pleasure tower. Though tall, the tower was narrow, allowing few people at once up top. Several followed the healer on the tight, winding staircase. They marveled at how her powerful toes gnarled into claws to grip the stairs. On top of the tower, she took a bowl from her satchel. She raised it high. The community warily shielded their eyes against the sun—several volunteers had buried all of the corpses of the geese earlier that morning, not even bothering to strip the useful meat—but the healer brought the bowl down to show it brimming with dough. She offered it up again. When she lowered it, the dough had firmed goldenly. She removed the large, round loaf. She offered it to B.B., who nodded. She broke it open. It steamed out dark rank air. B.B. reached toward it cautiously but a maggot wriggled out onto his palm, and he jerked away, flinging the maggot from him with a shout. That night, B.B. dreamed the maggot burrowed into his wrist and wings sprang from his shoulders and he hung over the world like an angel. This dream is its own phenomenon. What is the maggot? Oil. Who is B.B.? Blomberg & Blomberg, caught in flight.

3.

Fifty years ago there was a lake where now you see a crater. It's been said only change is constant. We must accept this principle to enter anything worthy. But imagine water here, as water was. Imagine a lake the size of a town. This is where, that third day, the healer told everyone to meet her. B.B. tried to tell his dream to the others, how he believed it prophesied a miracle, how the seed might take centuries to fruit. B.B. reminded the others of the story of the man who waited in a cave for the divine, who at last arrived as a still, small voice, after disasters had passed. But the fools were tired of miracles. Genius only aggravates the idiot. So B.B. went alone. The healer hardly seemed to notice him. She raised her palms to the sky. Darkness passed over. Fog thickened. The lake boiled lightly. The skin on the healer's forearm parted to the elbow. A smell like sulfur breathed from inside of her wound. She lowered her arm through the water. It fouled the lake with foam. B.B. knelt mute. The healer raised her other palm. The day brightened. The fog lifted. The lake cleared. Fronds waved at the bottom where fish darted confused in the light. The healer, her arm now whole, signed for B.B. to drink. He bent, took water into his mouth, and raised his face to swallow, but it tasted sour and thick as blood, so he spat it out. That night he dreamed no dreams. He woke in the dark with tears on his cheeks. He didn't want this wisdom. But the fire of doubt purifies every worthy conviction.

4.

The healer slept among these boulders. We have unearthed crude ancient tools around here, all collected in the Blomberg & Blomberg Public Museum of History, itself a marvel. Did you know the Public Museum of History you see towering over the skyline was built from a single sheet of plastic? But the tent community didn't yet understand this kind of wonder. The day after the miracle of the lake, a mob including B.B. congregated at these boulders to order the healer out. The healer calmly swept the ground where she'd slept and departed their company, as they'd asked, though at the dunes from which she'd first emerged, she paused, her head swaying for a moment back toward them, her hand lifting in a wave, or perhaps, a curse. Later, near the boulders where the healer had slept, a child spied a faint cloud the size of a human head suspended five feet in the air. The cloud smelled like the air itself. It remained, for days, for weeks. The children were warned away. The adults would not near it either. Finally, an old woman, stunned by the recent death of her sister, approached the cloud, ignoring the others' pleas, listening only to the noise of the pain that guided her. She reached out her fingers into the cloud, and when her hand passed in, her face relaxed of its grief. She left her hand in the cloud, crying out with such joy that B.B. rushed to join her—for here could be his miracle, his voice after the storm—and when he touched the cloud, it relieved him of need. He was the angel over the world. He was Blomberg & Blomberg. Now whoever touched the cloud found peace. It healed their bodies. Poxes vanished. Hearing returned. A tumor fled a breast. A broken nose straightened. Wrinkles tightened. Eyesight improved. After several months, the cloud vanished, but the community flourished. When they dug in the earth to install a monument for the cloud, they discovered where oil stirred in the earth. This was the miracle of the miracles. This was the healer's true legacy. Our plastic is its crown. See the smoke of Blomberg & Blomberg's commerce? Even the sun hides from its majesty. And so we call the healer "the healer." And so B.B.'s testimony, and the witness borne by me, together with financially interested parties like you, upon whom Blomberg & Blomberg depends to gift itself to the world, can confirm the healer's miracles as miracles. Wonder sustains us. We yearn for our angel to pass over. We long for its shadow.

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This story originated with the phrase "Birds, Bread, Blood, Clouds," which I saw in Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.