Umbrellas

• Shannon Burns, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2016

Social order defines everything. Even the rain only wets those who do not carry umbrellas. Lucy was a perpetual non umbrella carrier. When the rain fell, it fell upon her, and when night came she was cloaked in all of its darkness. She wasn’t lucky. She wasn’t one of those people who got everything they wanted simply because they wished for it, and she certainly wasn’t perfect. Lucy spent her Friday nights at home, usually with a book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She didn’t get invited to parties, and sometimes her tea spilt onto the pages.
On this day, Lucy was walking through the park when the thunder began to roll in, and huge raindrops started to hit the ground. Most might have run for cover, tried to stay as dry as they could, but Lucy had never been, nor did it look as if she would ever be, someone who fell into the groove of what ‘most’ people were doing. Instead she took two steps forward, moving out of what little cover she might have had from the trees on either side of the path. She spread her arms wide and tilted her head up to the sky. Nobody was around to see her, no one to tell her that she ought not to be doing this, or that she looked stupid. It was just Lucy, alone with her thoughts and the sky, and the park she shared it all with. And this was exactly why she loved life, despite all of the rain it had poured upon her head while missing the heads of others.
Tiny steps brought her closer to home, but Lucy didn’t rush herself. She relished in the dampness of the air, feeling refreshed as she brought it into her lungs. It was days like these that made all of the other days worthwhile, it was these moments, where she truly felt that the world was her oyster that she lived for. She wasn’t about to brush that feeling away, or force it to pass any quicker than it had to. Her house wasn’t a far walk, and short though her strides were, it wasn’t long before she was standing back in front of her front door. Lucy’s house was quite shabby. The paint was peeling away from the front door, and the enamel on the handle was chipped. The grass was brown and dry, and the curtains clothing the windows looked as if they had been snatched up right out of the 70’s.
It wasn’t much, it wasn’t where a rich person would live, and not someone who carried umbrella’s and didn’t let the rain touch them. Lucy reached a hand forward to turn the handle, and as she did so, glanced over at the house next door, which was in far better condition. The grass may have always been greener on the other side of the fence, but she had no plans on leaving her own backyard.