They Hit a Cloud and It Shattered

While walking around campus, I overheard a phrase that I loved enough to make it a story. "They hit a cloud and it shattered." I'm not sure what it meant in the real world, but I thought of so many possibilities that I couldn't pass up writing it down for later. I might write more versions, but here's the one I've written so far:

Me and my Dad used to launch model rockets from our backyard all of the time. We lived in a small town, grew our own food, and nobody ever came to visit, so it's what we did to have fun. We would mix our own sugar engines, filling little tubes of paper with the explosive substance. The rocket body would be an old paper towel roll, painted beige with the old house paint we had lying around. The fins were the house's accent brown, and I always made a point to write both of our names on the side in a red sharpie. When the weather was clear and the day was warm, we extended the long silver legs of the launch pad, the circular platform crusted with a black layer of exhaust. He would connect the wires for me, as I hated when the ignition failed and we had to waste time in making sure it didn't explode in our faces. As I grew older, we kept building our rockets to be bigger than the last. They would fly longer, fly higher, and get smaller in the sky before deploying their parachute and drifting back to the ground. I remember clearly that last rocket we launched together. It was our biggest yet, carefully designed to fly higher than ever before, although honestly, we just made everything huge. We set it on the pad with high hopes that it would wow us with its strength. So, it was set up on the pad, the ignition was wired, and we could barely be seen hiding behind a brick wall, the red stones singed from past launches. We counted down the ignition, then watched as the rocket disappeared from sight. It soared higher than we could have imagined, reaching the fluffy white clouds above. But then, it hit a cloud, and the cloud shattered. Shards of glass fell from the sky, leaving a dark hexagonal hole in the sky. The rocket's parachute failed and it dove back to Earth, burying itself deep into the dirt. That didn't matter much though. We weren't going to ever try to fly it again. In fact, this was the last time we would be launching anything at the sky.