Nimbus

The cloud's name was Nimbus, and Nimbus had not rained in four hundred and twelve days, which was a record, and not the good kind.

He knew it was a record because the other clouds kept telling him. They did not do this to be cruel. They did it the way people say goodness, haven't you grown, meaning to be pleasant, not realising that the person who has grown is very aware of it and would rather not discuss it at breakfast.

Nimbus had grown. He had grown enormously. He was, by any reasonable measure, the largest cloud in the sky, which would have been something to be proud of if it were not also something to be deeply, horribly embarrassed about.

Other clouds were neat. Cirrus was a thin elegant thing, barely there, like a thought someone had almost finished thinking. Cumulus was cheerful and bright and rained on Tuesdays like clockwork. Stratus just lay flat and got on with it. None of them had this problem. None of them took up quite so much sky.

Nimbus moved very slowly now, partly because moving quickly was undignified when you were this large, and partly because he was trying not to attract attention, which was not going well, because he was blocking the sun from the village of Greywick and the farmers had begun sending letters.

The problem had started simply enough.

One spring morning, four hundred and twelve days ago, Nimbus had floated over a picnic. There was a family below (a mother, a father, two children, and a dog who was trying to eat a hat) and they had laid out a checkered cloth and sandwiches and a cake with candles, and it was someone's birthday, and they were laughing.

Nimbus had been full of rain. He was supposed to rain on the valley at half past eleven. He was on schedule. He was a responsible cloud.

He had looked down at the picnic.

He had not rained.

He told himself he would rain on the other side of the hill. He would make it up. A little extra, even. And he had drifted over the hill meaning to rain, and below was a boy sitting alone on a fence reading a book with enormous concentration, and Nimbus had thought: not yet. Not quite yet. Just a bit further.

That was four hundred and twelve days ago.

Nimbus had not planned to become who he was. He was not sure, at this point, how to become anyone else.

The Weather Board sent an inspector. Her name was Ms. Gust, and she was a very small and very brisk woman who wore a mackintosh and carried a clipboard and had the energy of someone who had no patience for clouds that did not behave like clouds.

She stood on the hill below Nimbus and looked up at him.

Nimbus tried to look smaller. This was not possible.

"You're enormous," said Ms. Gust.

"Thank you," said Nimbus, which was the wrong response, but he was nervous.

"It wasn't a compliment." She made a note on her clipboard. "You are aware that you are blocking the sun from four farms, two allotments, and one very confused sundial?"

"I've been meaning to move," said Nimbus.

"You've been meaning to rain," said Ms. Gust.

There was a silence. A pigeon flew through the lower edge of Nimbus, which felt rude, and neither of them mentioned it.

"Why haven't you?" said Ms. Gust. She said it the way a person says it when they genuinely want to know, not the way they say it when they're building up to something.

Nimbus looked down at the village below. He could see the rooftops, the little gardens, the school where the children were currently in the yard, their faces turned upward, watching him the way people watch large things they don't quite understand.

"Things are happening down there," he said, finally. "And when I rain on them, they stop."

Ms. Gust wrote something on her clipboard. Then she stopped writing and looked up at him.

"Things happen because of rain," she said. "Not instead of it."

It rained for four minutes and eleven seconds. It was not much. It was not the rain of a confident cloud.

But it was real, and it was cold, and it landed on the upturned faces of the children in the schoolyard, and they shrieked and ran inside, and then, after a moment, ran back outside and stood in it anyway.

Ms. Gust made a final note and snapped her clipboard shut.

"Better," she said, and walked back down the hill.

Nimbus was smaller after that. Not much. Four minutes and eleven seconds' worth. But it was a start, and the garden below (a narrow strip of nothing behind a house on Fell Street, belonging to a woman named Mrs. Potts who had stopped believing in gardens) bloomed the following week in a way that surprised her considerably.

She stood in it with her cup of tea and looked at the flowers that had not been there before, and then she looked up at the sky, and Nimbus was still there, still enormous, still embarrassed, drifting slowly above Greywick in his apologetic way.

She raised her cup.

Nimbus did not wave. Clouds cannot wave. But he thought about it, which is the cloud equivalent.

The next day he rained on the north field for twenty minutes, and the day after that for an hour and a half, and the farmers stopped sending letters. He remained, it must be said, considerably larger than average. He suspected this might be permanent. Some things, once stretched, do not go entirely back.

But the sun reached Greywick again in the afternoons, and the sundial worked, and Mrs. Potts's garden was, by October, quite remarkable.

Nimbus still moved slowly. He was working on that.