Parting cloud

A wing unrolled from the cloud. The cloud continued its eastward drift, but its appendage did not. It stretched away from its source, angling toward nothing. The netting of water drops connecting cloud annex to cloud central thinned languidly, strands releasing and parting. The whiteness of connection disappeared bit by bit, though nothing changed: the water, still all there, the wind, still moving, the weight of the air, the sun striking it, the land below. And like that, the wing was off, and then it melted out of visibility entirely. Gone but there; there but gone. And the cloud itself unravelled into sky over the next while, so slowly that it would not be measured in time, only perhaps recorded in an unwritten book of events that are sure to happen nearly unnoticed for no particular reason in a way that changes nothing although afterwards, a very full emptiness drifts on.