The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox Read Free

angry chill running over my skin.
    â€œWhat the heck is that?” I asked.
    â€œSnowstorm,” Dad replied. “Now, Weatherman, what are you going to do about a snowstorm in September?”
    â€œMe?” I squeaked.
    â€œWhat have I taught you, Neil? You have everything you need. Take your time. But hurry up, or we’ll get snowed in on the last day of Summer!”
    Yeah, so, what exactly had he taught me?
    Liz and Owen and I had never gone to school. Mum and Dad had always taught us at home, because all the stuff I had to learn to be Weatherman couldn’t be learned at school. When they tried to send Liz, she ran away and hid for two days, and when they tried to send Owen, he looked up at them with his big brown eyes and his lower lip all wobbly and they gave up on school for any of us altogether. So the two of them kept crowding into classes that were supposed to be just for the future Weatherman. They were learning all the stuff that was supposed to be secret Weatherman knowledge. Liz said it would save her the trouble of having to learn it all later when I turned out to be useless and she had to take over, and Owen was emergency backup Weatherman in case I went mad with jealousy and started a Weather War with Liz and we ended up destroying each other with giant tornadoes. Stuff like that is why you should never, ever listen to Liz.
    Lesson one: how the weather works.
    The skies are crowded. Honestly, they’re just packed.
    We call them the elementals, because they’re, well, elements. They live in the sky and make the weather, and the things they do affect stuff like temperature and moisture and air pressure and who knows what else? (Hint: I’m supposed to know what else.) And when they clump together you get wind and rain and snow and heat and frost and fog and monsoons and squalls and everything else that is, you know, weather.
    The big ol’ sun does most of the work, heating things up and letting things cool, while elementals run around, doing their thing—mixing it up, making the weather, being the weather.
    The winds that roar through our upper atmosphere you would not believe. Powering through the stratosphere, around the poles and across the tropics. Those winds used to be everywhere. Some could freeze you solid. Some could roast you in a flash. Some were full of dust that could strip you to the bone, and some were full of rain so hard and heavy that it could flatten you to a strip. Mostly you stayed in your cave and you didn’t go out much. If you were lucky, the weather wouldn’t scour everything edible off the face of the Earth while you were in there.
    We were all going to die. All of us. Everything. There would have been a planet of nothing but rock and dust and water for the elementals to play with till the sun went nova.
    Whoever the first Weatherman was, he (or she, Liz would say here) somehow saw the elementals and reached out to them and touched them and tried to talk to them—even though elementals don’t talk, any more than the microbes in your bodies talk. But somehow that Weatherman pushed them together, made them cooperate—more and more of them clumping together, working together, until finally they became complex creatures that could take control. And the Weatherman could speak to it—and it could listen.
    That first lonely, lost, amazing genius of a Weatherman saved us all. We owe that person everything. We have no idea who he was.
    There were four of these creatures. We call them Seasons. Don’t try to understand them. They’re too big and powerful and alien, and they don’t care about us. Except for one thing. Without that first Weatherman, they would not exist, and so they kind of owe us, and they pay us back every day by NOT sweeping us into the air and sending us flying around the top of the world for all eternity.
    The Weathermen at the four corners of the world regulate the Seasons, ushering them through the