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Is love a constant? Familiar, ever there, ever recognizable? Or is it like the pictures in the clouds, ever changing. A flower one moment, and the next, morphing into something else, a face perhaps, or maybe just a fluff of clouds? Drifting away, so subtly, so slowly, that you can't even say exactly when it stopped being what it was. A short story.

They were lying in the grass, looking at the clouds in the sky, seeing shapes in them. It was what they had done on their first date. Not really a date, even, just being with one another for the first time, savoring the pleasure of being together. Lying in the tall grass, not talking much, watching the clouds form and reform.

Jack remembered he had felt like he was a kid all over again that day, discovering himself, discovering life in a way he hadn’t known it before. They’d met less than twenty-four hours earlier, and already Larry made him feel different from how he felt with anyone else. Larry was one of those rare individuals who seemed to “happen” rather than simply to exist. How could Jack not have fallen in love?

What was funny about it, what was so different was, it had always been a little boy’s kind of love. For all the passion, there had always been some innocence to it that he’d never felt with any other guy. Whoever heard of lying in the grass staring at clouds on a first date, whatever you called it?

And now here they were again, not even a year later—the same hill, up past the last of the houses, beyond the lake, the distant cars on the highway below sounding more like the laughing chatter of water in a rocky stream. The grass long and sun-warm pungent, tickling his ankle where his Dockers had ridden up, the sky the color of a robin’s egg, the clouds like egg whites whipped up in an enormous blue bowl—everything the same, and everything different, too.

“That one,” Jack pointed, breaking the silence. “It looks like a boat, doesn’t it? A canoe, maybe, or a rowboat.”