Umbrellas

• Liam Edis, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2015

The rain fell. The street was empty of cars and of people, of wind and of life. Puddles reflected the stillness of the sky: the dizzying and endless dark, the sprinkled handfuls of stars. Hazy lights floated far away - the streetlights, the building lights, the distant lights of traffic signals - and they hovered like the lights of ships, sleeping dreamily out at sea when seen from the shore.

A bell tolled, somewhere.

The first umbrella appeared, as it always did. It turned mechanically down the street, the rain thrumming against it in a fixed drum beat rhythm. Another umbrella, an identical grey, followed. A web of gossamer threads pulled them together: one strand led a third umbrella into the procession, and others trailed through the dark to pull more through sliding glass doors. Soon there was a sea of umbrellas flowing down the street, hundreds of them, lilting and falling in the rain.

The last straggling building lights snapped away as the umbrellas streamed between them. Viewed from above the procession seemed to swell and deflate as if it were a colossal organ, expanded and contracted by a giant’s breath. The sky fell towards the building tops, seeming to cloak the world in black; from afar the city looked a misshapen monster, a vast assembly of hulking obstacles, a shadow cast by the city that rose above the stars.

The rain fell. Harder, now, and the moon was lower in the sky. The umbrellas rose higher when they swelled, floating up and up and up, then falling in a stomach-drop protraction of time. From somewhere a little wind blew, sweeping across the surface of the umbrellas.

The leading umbrella stopped. Behind it the others murmured down like a great whispering wave.

Two roads diverged in the light of a yellow street lamp. From the depths of one road came an enchanting song, ethereal, sung by a seductress on a faraway rock. From the other came only silence.

The umbrellas did not move. A flood of water gushed beneath them, its surface alive with ripples and the reflections of stars. Tremulously they began to twitch towards the song, pulled by the threads straining from their spools.

Suddenly a great wind roared through the city. It hurtled against the umbrellas, sweeping them back, frenzying the rain. Great hands pounded upon the clouds. An umbrella ripped from the ground, whipped up towards the sky, lurched violently in the air. A fissure cracked open in the sky.

Below the umbrellas seemed to fill with some force of their own. They swelled forward, charging with some electric energy, rising vertiginously like a great wave reaching its crest. The airborne umbrella spiralled up, slowing in its suspension amongst the stars, drifting higher and higher as the lullaby called below…

Somewhere, a streetlight flicked on and off. A chunk of starlight, suspended in the deep space of the night, hovering bare metres from the ground.