Your next little escape
Make room for
a little wonder.
Settle in. This one starts with a lost umbrella and a very unusual note.
Flash fiction · About 2 minutes
On Tuesday, Nora took the wrong umbrella from the café. She knew because hers was black, and this one was yellow. Also, hers had never contained a note saying: Please return before the rain remembers.
She went back at lunch. The café owner pointed to a tiny door beside the coat rack. “Lost property,” he said, without looking up.
Behind the door sat a woman knitting something that looked suspiciously like fog. Shelves held single gloves, forgotten names, and one jar labelled The reason you came upstairs.
“Ah,” the woman said. “Our sunshine umbrella.”
“It’s raining outside,” Nora said.
“Not under it.”
Nora thought of her father, who had stopped leaving the house after her mother died. He used to walk every afternoon. Now he watched the weather, finding a reason in every cloud.
“Could I borrow it until tomorrow?”
The woman put down her knitting. “Only if you leave something in exchange.”
Nora searched her pockets. A receipt. Two coins. The key to her flat.
“Not those,” the woman said gently.
So Nora left the excuse she had been saving for not visiting her father that evening.
He opened the door in his slippers. She held up the yellow umbrella. “Fancy a walk?”
Outside, rain tapped the pavement. Beneath the umbrella, the air was warm and smelled faintly of cut grass.
They walked to the corner. Then to the park. By the time her father began telling a terrible joke, Nora had forgotten to check whether it was still raining.
The next morning, she returned the umbrella. On the shelf sat her excuse, folded neatly beside a hundred others.
“Want it back?” the woman asked.
“No,” Nora said. “I think I’ll walk home.”