I first noticed the weather when my left pocket began to thunder.

It was a small sound, like a wardrobe being moved in a distant dollhouse. I stopped halfway between the potting bench and the kettle. Thunder again. A loose button rattled against my hip.

Now, I keep many things in my coat. Pencils. String. An excellent stone. A packet of seeds whose instructions have become a single green thumbprint. But I am reasonably strict about not carrying atmospheric phenomena, and I had certainly not put this one there.

I looked inside.

A dark little cloud had arranged itself above the pocket lining. Beneath it, rain fell steadily onto a receipt.

“Oh,” I said. “You are ruining the expense claim.”

Lightning illuminated the purchase of six terracotta pots.

I. Initial conditions

My first hypothesis was that I had brought it home from the market. There had been a stall selling unusual bulbs, and I remembered walking through something damp between the hyacinths and the secondhand cutlery. At the time I had assumed it was Tuesday.

I held the pocket open beneath the desk lamp. The cloud retreated into the seam.

“No, come back. This is the interesting part.”

It produced a hailstone the size of a punctuation mark.

I put the hailstone in a saucer and wrote sample A beside it. By the time I finished writing, sample A was water. I added formerly. This seemed a promising start.

There was a faint smell of wet paving stones. Not the greenhouse path: a different path, somewhere with broad grey slabs and grass between them. I could almost see it. When I leaned closer, the cloud gave a sharp crack and the receipt split neatly across the subtotal.

All right! A weather system with boundaries. I moved my nose back.

I fetched a large glass jar, laid the coat across its mouth, and waited for the cloud to descend. The cloud waited for me to become embarrassed. We remained like this for eleven minutes.

Then it rained down my sleeve.

II. Unscheduled expansion

By three in the morning, my coat weighed as much as a remorseful spaniel.

I took it off. This required holding one arm straight out while a localized headwind filled the other sleeve. A seed packet flew past my face. The excellent stone remained where it was, admirably skeptical of the whole affair.

At last I got the coat onto a chair.

The cloud rose out of the pocket.

For a moment it hung there, no larger than a cauliflower, grey underneath and silver at its folded edges. A thread of lightning moved inside it. I forgot about my wet socks.

“LOOK AT YOU!”

It expanded.

This may have been coincidence. I include the sequence because a responsible investigator should record possible contributions to a disaster.

The cloud spread across the potting bench and darkened the labels. Rain ticked on the empty pots. The brass scoop rang a bright, ridiculous little note. Three broad leaves tipped under the weight of water and discharged it directly into my shoes.

I moved the desert plants. I moved the notebooks. I moved the open bag of compost, which was already reconsidering its solidity.

The cloud followed the notebooks.

“Absolutely not.”

I held a baking tray over them. Hail drummed on the metal. Somewhere in the rafters, a bird who did not ordinarily live in the greenhouse woke up and complained. I had no time to investigate the bird. For once, a mystery would have to wait its turn.

III. A question of altitude

I tried opening the door.

Outside, the night was clear. The path ran pale between the beds. There was a beautiful amount of sky available, all of it unoccupied at ground level. I gestured at this generous provision.

The cloud squeezed itself behind a hanging fern.

I tried a fan. It turned the cloud into a long grey sausage, but when I switched the fan off, the sausage returned to being weather. I tried politely announcing that visiting hours were over. Thunder rattled the propagator lids.

Finally I climbed a stepladder to open the roof vent.

The rain stopped.

I looked down. The cloud had risen to the third step.

I climbed one step higher.

It followed.

“Ah,” I said.

Then, because I could not help it: “AH!!”

My earlier mistake became obvious and therefore deeply annoying. I had been offering a door to something that wanted height. A door was an excellent solution for me. I was not a cloud.

I extended one hand toward the roof vent. The cloud drifted up beside my elbow. Its rain was very fine now, almost warm. I could see the dark path again, not in front of me but somewhere inside the rain, a street climbing between houses toward a ridge.

It must have been a remarkably steep town. I wondered whether the market had sold it to someone as a bulb.

“There,” I whispered. “Straight up. Plenty of room.”

The cloud touched the open vent and recoiled.

A cold wind came down through the gap. The cloud flattened against my chest.

I caught it without thinking.

There is no sensible way to describe the weight of a thunderstorm held in both hands. It was heavier than mist and lighter than laundry. The tiny lightning moved between my fingers without burning them. Rain ran down both wrists. Through the glass above us, the sky looked very large.

“Oh, you little thing,” I said.

Behind my head, the bird made a skeptical noise.

IV. Applied millinery

I needed something tall enough to enter the sky and small enough to be familiar. Something with an inside that could travel outward.

I considered a chimney, rejected this on grounds of not owning one, and fetched my umbrella.

It was green, crooked, and had a hole near one rib. I had been meaning to repair it for months. Now the hole looked strategic.

I opened the umbrella beneath the cloud.

Rain struck its green canopy. The cloud settled above it with an air of recognition. When I raised the umbrella, the cloud rose too. When I tilted it, the cloud rolled into the shallow bowl made by the fabric.

I stood on the floor holding an upside-down umbrella full of storm.

The bird fell silent. Even it had to admit this was new.

Moving the arrangement toward the roof required considerable dignity to be abandoned. I wedged the umbrella handle between two ladder steps, climbed past it, retrieved it, and discovered I had brought the headwind back. My glasses went crooked. Water poured from the umbrella onto the chair below.

“Do not,” I told the cloud, “mistake my competence for prior experience.”

A little thunder. I chose to interpret it favorably.

At the top of the ladder, I lifted the green canopy through the vent. Most of the cloud stayed tucked against the fabric. A thin piece of it explored the outside air, drew back, and explored again.

Through the hole in the umbrella, one star was visible.

The lightning inside the cloud reached toward it.

“Yes,” I said, very quietly now. “That one.”

The cloud unrolled.

Not all at once. First a trailing edge, thin as breath on glass. Then the dark middle rose from the umbrella and spread over the roof. The little silver folds opened. Beyond them, a larger pale cloud was crossing the stars, and my small storm reached it like a sleeve reaching a hand.

There was a low roll of thunder.

From up here it sounded nothing like a dollhouse.

V. Clearing

I stayed on the ladder until the green fabric stopped dripping.

Below me, the greenhouse gleamed. Everything had acquired sharp edges and a smell. The brass scoop held one perfectly round bead of water. A line of hailstones was melting across the baking tray, each with a tiny copy of the lamp inside it.

The bird came down from the rafters. It was a wren, apparently, with a torn bit of string in its beak. It landed on the chair, inspected my coat, and went into the left pocket.

“Excuse me,” I said.

It came out with another piece of string.

I decided to take this up in daylight.

I closed the roof vent, descended the ladder, and emptied my shoes. I wiped the notebooks. I hung the coat where the kettle's warmth could reach it. The receipt was beyond saving, although the lightning had left a delicate branching mark through the price of the pots. I kept it.

At the bottom of the jar I had originally prepared, there was a little cloud.

I stopped.

It was white, flat-bottomed, scarcely larger than a sugar cube. No thunder. No rain. Just a scrap of fair weather, sitting patiently in the glass.

“Well,” I said.

I looked at the jar. I looked at the umbrella. Outside, the departing storm lit the far side of the garden once, softly.

I did not put a lid on the jar.

I set it by the window, where the morning would find it, and went to make tea. The wren was back in my coat. Something in the right pocket gave an almost inaudible rustle.

That could wait until after breakfast.