The Umbrella of Small Mercies

Pim had mended one thousand and six umbrellas, and not one of them had ever rained on the inside until the morning he found the grey one.

He travelled with the weather, which is to say badly, in a cart that creaked like an old joke and held everything an umbrella-mender requires: whalebone ribs and bamboo ribs, waxed silk in nine colours, a tin of tiny brass rivets that he loved more than was sensible, and a kettle. He went where the rain went, because rain is where umbrellas come to grief, and a man who can put them right is always, eventually, welcome. He was a small man with large pockets and the particular cheerfulness of someone who has decided to be pleased by things on purpose.

The grey umbrella was wedged at the bottom of a junk-stall's bin between a one-legged stool and a portrait of a stranger's aunt. It was the most apologetic object he had ever seen — colourless, drooping, its handle worn smooth by some long-gone hand. The stall-keeper let him have it for the price of fixing her gate, which Pim did, whistling.

He opened it that night in his cart to inspect the ribs, and it rained on him.

Not water. Or — water, yes, a soft warm drizzle falling out of the canopy from nowhere at all, pattering down inside the dome — but the rain smelled of bread, and where it touched his cold hands it left warmth, and at his feet, where it pooled, there was suddenly a thick sliceof buttered toast that had absolutely not been there before. Pim stared at it. He had, he realised, been quietly hungry for hours and too busy to notice. He picked up the toast. It was perfect. The rain stopped.

He spent half the night testing it, in the way of a man who fixes things and therefore cannot leave a mystery alone. He found that the umbrella did not rain on command. It rained on need — the real kind, the kind underneath the kind you think you have. He held it wanting gold and got nothing. He held it bone-tired and it rained sleep over him like a grey blanket until he woke clear-headed at dawn. He held it lonely, not admitting he was lonely, and it rained the smell of his mother's kitchen and a sound he hadn't heard in years, which was his own father laughing, and Pim sat under it and let that particular rain fall for quite a long time.

By morning he understood what he had. An umbrella that gives you what you most need — but only, only, if you are honest enough to stand under it and want.

He thought of all the people in the world who could use such a thing. Then he climbed onto his cart and went looking for the town that needed it most, which is how he came, by noon of the second day, to Quietford.

Quietford did not need rain. That was the first wrong thing. It was a tidy, prosperous, pleasant little town with window boxes and a clean square and not a single person in it asking for anything. He passed a baker who said his bread was fine, quite fine, no complaints. He passed a child who, offered a sweet, said no thank you, I don't require it. He passed the mayor herself, a brisk woman named Ottilie, who informed him that Quietford had everything it could possibly want and therefore wanted for nothing, which she said the way you'd close a door.

Pim looked