The Boy Who Wanted a Pet
Otto wanted a pet more than anything in the world. A dog, a cat, even a goldfish — he wasn’t fussy. But Mum always said the same thing. The house was too small, she said, and Otto was too forgetful, and that was that. So Otto had no pet.
What Otto had was the longest, driest summer anyone could remember. The grass went brown and crackly. The river shrank to a trickle of warm mud. And the whole village began counting the days to the Midsummer Fair — the one day all year with ribbons and races and Mrs. Okafor’s famous lemon cake.
Everyone agreed on exactly one thing: it must not rain on the Fair. It was on the way back from the muddy little river that Otto heard the grumbling. Something was stuck in the big oak at the top of the lane. Not a kite.
Not a lost balloon. A cloud — a small, round, grey storm cloud no bigger than a sheep, snagged in the highest branches and dripping sad little raindrops into the dust.
“Hello,” said Otto, because it seemed polite.
The cloud sniffled and rained harder. So Otto climbed the oak — he was a very good climber, whatever Mum said about his knees — and he tugged the little cloud free. It floated out, shook itself like a wet dog, and bobbed along behind him all the way home. He grinned the whole way.
He named it Smudge.
What Smudge Did
Keeping a storm cloud secret, Otto soon learned, was not easy. Smudge had moods, and the moods had weather.
When Smudge was happy, it puffed up white and round and made a tiny rainbow you could hold in your hand. When it was sad, it drizzled.
When it was cross, it crackled with little blue sparks. And when it was frightened, it boomed with thunder. The bigger the feeling, the bigger the weather. Otto found out about the thunder at two in the morning.
“Otto!” called Mum up the stairs. “Why is there a storm in your bedroom?”
“Bad dream!”
Otto called back, sitting on a very damp pillow with a guilty cloud hiding under the bed. By morning he had a plan, and the plan was simple: keep Smudge happy, and keep Smudge hidden. He fed it the steam off his cocoa. He told it jokes.
He carried it to school in his bag with the zip open a crack, and all through lessons a soft grey nose poked out, sniffing. It worked. For three whole days, it worked.
Wednesday
Then came Wednesday. Halfway through the spelling test, a wasp landed on Smudge’s nose. Smudge did not like wasps. Smudge was frightened of wasps.
The thunderclap blew every pencil off every desk. Rain came down so hard inside the classroom that Mr. Pringle’s papers turned to soup and the spelling test floated cheerfully out of the window. The whole class screamed with delight. Mr. Pringle did not.
Otto grabbed his bag and ran, a small soggy cloud rumbling behind him, and he did not stop until he was home with the door shut.
“It’s getting harder, Smudge,” he panted.
Smudge drizzled on his shoes, sorry.
The Midsummer Fair
On the morning of the Fair, the sky was a hot and perfect blue — not a cloud in it, except one sulking in a jam jar in Otto’s bag, because Otto had promised himself that today, of all days, Smudge would stay hidden. The Fair was everything. Ribbons snapped in the warm air. There were egg-and-spoon races and a coconut shy and Mrs. Okafor’s lemon cake up high on a glass stand.
Otto almost forgot the worried little cloud in his bag. Then the brass band struck up — all at once, very loud, right behind him. Smudge had never heard a brass band. And Smudge, you remember, was frightened of loud noises.
The lid popped off the jar. Smudge shot up into the perfect blue sky, swelling from sheep-sized to barn-sized to something far bigger, black and boiling, and it let out a crack of thunder that knocked the hats off the whole front row.
Then it rained. It rained on the races and the ribbons. It rained the coconut shy into mud. And with one last terrified boom, it rained Mrs. Okafor’s famous lemon cake into a sad yellow puddle.
The whole village looked up, soaked and furious.
“That cloud,” said Mrs. Okafor, “is nothing but trouble.”
And everyone turned to look at Otto, because everyone seemed to know the trouble was his. His face went hot. The cake was ruined and the Fair was ruined, and it was all because of the small grey thing shivering in the sky above him.
“Go on, then!”
Otto shouted up at it, and his voice cracked.
“Go away! Clouds belong in the sky. Not with me.”
Smudge gave one small, heartbroken drizzle. Then it drifted away over the hills, until it was a grey speck, and then nothing at all. The rain stopped. Nobody cheered.
Otto walked home alone, and he had never felt worse.
Smoke on the Hills
That night the wind changed, and it carried a smell that made the whole village sit up in bed. Smoke. The hills were on fire. The long dry summer had turned the grass to tinder, and one spark — a knocked lantern, a careless match, nobody ever knew — had set the slopes alight.
The flames came marching down toward the barns, and the barns held all the winter hay, and there had been no rain for weeks, and the river was only mud. People ran with buckets. The buckets were not nearly enough. You cannot put out a hillside with buckets.
And Otto, watching the orange light crawl closer, thought of the one thing in the world that could. He ran. He ran up the lane and past the old oak and out onto the dark hills, calling into the smoke until his throat was raw.
“Smudge! Smudge, please!”
For a long, awful moment, nothing. Then a small grey shape came down out of the dark, uncertain, hovering just out of reach.
“I’m sorry,” Otto gasped. “I’m so sorry I sent you away. You’re not trouble. You’re my friend, and I need you, and I should never have said it.”
Smudge bobbed closer. And here is the thing about Smudge: the bigger the feeling, the bigger the weather. So Otto wrapped his arms around its cold little edge, and he was not frightened, and he was not cross, and he was not sad. He was brave, and he was full of love for his silly cloud, and he let Smudge feel all of it.
Smudge swelled. Sheep-sized to barn-sized to bigger than the barn, climbing over the burning hills, black and enormous — and it opened up and poured. It rained the fire down to hissing steam. It rained the slopes black and safe.
And then, softer, it kept on raining, down onto the brown and dying fields, until the dust drank deep and the whole valley smelled of wet, living earth.
Home
By morning the fire was out, the fields were green at the roots again, and the well had water in it for the first time all summer. Nobody called Smudge trouble after that. They gave it a little perch on the church tower, though it mostly preferred Otto’s windowsill. It watered the gardens when they were thirsty and made hand-sized rainbows for the smallest children. And at the next Midsummer Fair the sky was a perfect blue — except for one small, proud cloud that kept itself to a happy little drizzle, and not a single drop on the lemon cake.
“Still too forgetful for a pet,” said Mum, watching Otto wave up at the sky.
But she was smiling.
“Good thing a cloud knows its own way home.”