The Weather Office

The invitation had been propped against Corinne Abara's monitor for three weeks. It is not every day, after all, that a weather officer is invited to the wedding of a couple whose sky she controls. "Nadine and Hollis," it read, "request the pleasure of your company on Saturday, the thirty-first of October. Ceremony at three o'clock in the old chapel on Mill Lane, followed by a reception in the orchard from a quarter past four."

At the Municipal Weather Office of the Ashby Valley, requests were submitted through an online form, checked against the valley's water reserves and approved by a committee that met on Mondays. Anything needed before the next meeting was left to the officer on duty, who that week happened to be Corinne. The clouds themselves were produced by a row of humming towers on the eastern ridge, and rain was carefully rationed.

On the Tuesday of the last week of October, two requests arrived within ten minutes of each other. The first, from the bride, asked politely whether sunshine could be guaranteed for the whole of Saturday afternoon. "If it rains," Nadine had written, "the photographs will be ruined, and my grandmother will never let me forget it." The second came from Moira Pratt of the farmers' cooperative, and it was considerably less polite. The winter wheat had been sown a fortnight earlier, and the soil was as dry as chalk. Unless the fields were given an hour of steady rain before Sunday, half the seed would be lost.

The difficulty was that both requests concerned the same afternoon. The towers needed several days to build up a bank of cloud, and the only one available that week would be drifting over the valley on Saturday between two and five. Had it been any other day, Corinne would have released it without a second thought. If she held it back, the wheat would suffer. If she let it go, a wedding would be soaked, and the committee, which counted the bride's uncle among its members, would hear about it by Monday.

She spent most of Wednesday staring at the problem and most of Thursday pretending not to. It was only on Friday morning, reaching for her coffee, that she knocked the invitation flat and read it properly for the first time. Underneath the printed times, in untidy handwriting, Hollis had added a note she had never bothered to read: "The chapel is booked by the hour, so we'll be thrown out at four o'clock sharp!"

Corinne sat very still. Then she opened the scheduling system and typed the order herself: steady rain over the entire valley, beginning at 15:00 and ending at 16:00, followed by clearing skies. She signed it as the officer on duty.

On Saturday, the last guests hurried into the chapel under a sky the color of wet slate. For exactly one hour, while the vows were being exchanged inside, rain drummed on the roof and soaked every field from the river to the ridge. At four o'clock, the doors opened onto dripping hedges and a clean, golden light. In the wedding photographs, the bride's grandmother is smiling broadly, and behind her the newly sown fields are dark and glistening.