The Little Cloud's Journey

High above the fields, where the air was thin and cold and tasted of nothing at all, a family of clouds drifted slowly east. They were big, fluffy cumulus clouds - the kind that look like castles and elephants and mountains of whipped cream - and they moved together in a comfortable huddle, the way clouds do. Cloud families stick close. They share the same wind, the same altitude, the same patch of sky. From the ground, they look like a single cloud. But from the inside, each cloud has its own shape, its own personality, its own way of catching the light.

The biggest cloud was Nimmi's mother. She was enormous - a towering cumulus that went up and up and up, with a flat grey base and a top like a cauliflower, brilliant white in the afternoon sun. She kept the family together, adjusting her drift to match the wind, nudging the smaller clouds back into formation when they wandered.

But the smallest cloud in the family - a little wisp called Nimmi - kept drifting to the edges. She couldn't help it. The edges were where you could see things. From the middle of the huddle, all you could see was other clouds: white above, white below, white on every side. But from the edge, if you leaned out just a little, you could see the ground.

And the ground was extraordinary.

Nimmi had been watching it all day. Fields in shades of green and gold, divided by dark hedgerows into neat squares, like a quilt stitched by a very patient giant. Rivers that glinted silver in the sun, winding through valleys. Roads, thin as threads, with tiny dots moving along them that Nimmi was fairly sure were cars. And ahead, getting closer, a chain of mountains - grey and green, with white snow on their peaks that looked exactly like Nimmi's own edges.

'Stay close,' said her mother. Her voice was soft and rumbling, the way thunder sounds from very far away. 'The wind changes near the edges.'

But Nimmi had spotted something she'd never seen before: a lake, high up in the mountains, dark and still, reflecting the sky so perfectly that it looked like a hole in the ground through which you could fall into another world. She leaned a little further. Just a little. Just enough to see.

A gust of wind came from nowhere. It was fast and sharp and cold - a different wind from the gentle breeze that had been carrying the family - and it caught Nimmi's wispy edges and spun her sideways. She tumbled, stretched, thinned out, and when she gathered herself back together, the family was gone. The huddle was a white smudge far to the east, already drifting away. The wind between them was moving in the wrong direction.

Just like that - one gust, one second of not paying attention - and she was alone.

Nimmi tried to drift back. She leaned her weight eastward, tried to catch the higher wind, stretched herself thin to offer less resistance. But the mountains created their own weather, and the air around them swirled in complicated patterns. She was caught in an updraft that pushed her higher, then a downdraft that sucked her lower, and when it finally let her go, she was drifting south, away from the mountains, away from the lake, away from her family.

The mountains were beautiful, though. She drifted between the peaks, trailing her edges along the snowfields, leaving wisps of herself on the grey rocks like cotton caught on a fence. The air was cold and clean and tasted of ice. An eagle flew through her - straight through her middle, its wings parting her mist - and it tickled so much that she giggled, which for a cloud sounds like a faint rumble in the sky.

She tried once more to find her family. She rose as high as she could and looked in every direction. Blue sky. Empty, endless blue sky, stretching to every horizon. No white huddle. No towering cumulus. Nothing but Nimmi, alone, with the whole sky to herself.

So she kept going.

She drifted over a city. Below her, buildings glinted in the sun like scattered coins - glass towers, church steeples, rows of houses with tiny gardens. Cars moved in slow lines along roads that wove between the buildings like rivers between boulders. A park spread out like a green handkerchief in the middle of all the grey, and in the park, children were playing. They were small as ants from up here, but she could see them running and pointing.

'Look at that little cloud!' one of them called. The voice drifted up, faint and happy. Nimmi felt proud. She was the only cloud in the sky above the city - the rest had drifted on - and the children were looking at her. Just her. She puffed herself up, made herself rounder, and shaped her edges into the outline of a rabbit, with long ears and a fluffy tail. It took a lot of concentration. Below, the children cheered and clapped. Nimmi held the shape for as long as she could before the wind smoothed her back into a blob.

She drifted over farmland - patchwork squares of gold and brown and green, divided by hedges and narrow lanes. The land was flat here, and she could see for miles. A tractor moved slowly across a brown field, leaving neat lines behind it. A farmer standing by a gate looked up and studied the sky. 'We could do with some rain,' he said, to nobody in particular.

Nimmi felt the moisture inside her. She had been gathering it all day - water vapour rising from the fields and the rivers and the sea far behind her. She was heavy with it, swollen, the way you feel when you've drunk too much water. She tried to hold it in. But clouds aren't good at holding things in. A few drops escaped, falling gently on the dry field below - not a downpour, just a scattering, like someone flicking water from their fingertips. The farmer smiled and tipped his hat. The brown earth darkened where the drops landed.

She drifted over a forest. It was dark and dense, thousands of trees packed together, and from above, the treetops looked like broccoli - green and lumpy and slightly ridiculous. Birds rose up through her and disappeared into the blue above. She could feel the warmth of the trees rising beneath her, warm air pushing upward, lifting her higher and higher until the forest was just a dark green smudge far below and the air around her was thin and cold.

And then she reached the sea.

The sea was enormous. It stretched in every direction - north, south, east, west - flat and grey-blue, with tiny white lines where the waves broke along the coast. Nimmi had never seen anything so big. The fields and cities and forests had all been contained, bordered, divided into pieces. But the sea had no edges. It went on and on until it merged with the sky at the horizon, and Nimmi couldn't tell where the water ended and the air began.

She felt very small. A little wisp of water vapour, alone at the edge of an ocean of air, drifting over an ocean of water. She thought about her mother's solid, towering shape. She thought about the comfortable huddle, the warmth of cloud pressed against cloud. She thought about the edges she had always been so keen to explore, and wished, for the first time, that she was back in the safe, boring middle.

The sea air was different. Salty and damp, it clung to her edges and made her heavier. She sank lower. Her wispy top flattened. She was tired - she had drifted further in one day than she usually drifted in a week - and she was beginning to thin out, her edges fraying, her centre losing its shape.

She was thinking about all of this, and feeling quite sorry for herself, when she noticed something on the western horizon. Other clouds. Far ahead, drifting in from the Atlantic, lit gold and pink by the setting sun. Big, fluffy cumulus clouds - the kind that look like castles and elephants and mountains of whipped cream. They were moving together in a comfortable huddle.

Nimmi's heart - if clouds have hearts, and Nimmi was sure they did - leapt. She used the last of her energy to catch the sea wind. She stretched herself thin, caught the updraft off a warm current, and drifted closer. Closer. The huddle grew larger. She could see individual clouds now - their shapes, their shadows, the way they leaned into each other. And there, in the middle of the group, towering above the rest, flat-based and cauliflower-topped and enormous, was the biggest cloud of all.

'Mum!' Nimmi called. Her voice was a rumble that rolled across the water.

The big cloud turned. Her edges rippled. And then she reached out - a long, soft arm of mist - and pulled Nimmi into the centre of the huddle.

'There you are,' said her mother. 'I've been looking everywhere. We circled back twice. Are you all right?'

'I saw mountains,' said Nimmi. 'And a city - and children who clapped - and a farm where I rained a little - and a forest that looked like broccoli - and the sea, Mum, the sea is so big - '

'That's a lot for one little cloud,' said her mother.

'It was,' said Nimmi. She was out of breath, out of words, out of everything except the warm, heavy relief of being home. She settled into the middle of the group, pressed between her mother and the other clouds, surrounded by the familiar coolness of family. Below, the sea glittered orange and gold. Above, the sky turned from blue to pink to the softest, deepest orange.

'Don't wander off again,' said her mother.

'I won't,' said Nimmi. And she meant it. For now.

Nimmi closed her edges, tucked herself in, and drifted to sleep - carried along by the wind, held by her family, rocked by the rhythm of the sky. She dreamed of mountains and eagles and a lake that reflected the whole world, and of children in a park who looked up and cheered at the shape of a rabbit in the sky.