The Umbrella Girl

The girl with the red umbrella perched high above the city, the ribbons in her hair swaying softly in a breeze the people below could not know. They all stared up at her, as transfixed by her smudged figure as they were by the height, and a few even yelled different words to try and capture her attention.

All such distractions were lost in the lull of the wind. Sunshine danced on her bare legs and played with the sequins sewn tightly into the crimson fabric of her tutu. The silken ribbons brushed against her long neck like a swift caress, then whisked away again so as to not be caught in their illicit act. They insisted on flapping about her auburn hair instead, tangling nicely with the long ringlets caught up into two ponytails on either side of her head. If her lined lips knew how to smile for real, she would be a magnificent beauty to behold.

Still, her fake smile, the one settled even more precariously than its owner, was laced with loveliness. She knew this. It was why she never left her tiny home without it.

"If you're going to do it, you may as well just get it over with," he said behind her.

The girl startled just a little, the same as she always did when he appeared like that. "It's the highest I've ever gone," she told him. Glancing back at the silvery wire strung between her and the other skyscraper, she added, "And the furthest."

"Are you nervous?"

She shook her head. It was never nerves that got her right at the very end.

It was the fall.

"You don't have to worry," the boy promised her. "I'm not going to let you die."

"Will you let me fall?" she whispered. A ribbon curled around her ear. She tightened her grip on the lacy umbrella, suddenly doubting her choice of balancing tool. Even the great high wire walkers of years gone by used poles when up this far.

A hand touched her waist; warm breath stilled the wind snapping against her cheek. "Trust me, Kiara." His eyes were sharp as needles, sticking into her soul and pulling out all her fears.

She took a breath. "Let's go."

The crowd gathered below had grown in size by the time she stepped first onto the wire. A child cried out in assumed terror for her, but the girl was already walking. Her feet curved with the shape of her much thinner surface and the umbrella in her hand stretched out far to give her some sense of stability. She risked a glimpse farther forward; the boy was already waiting for her in the center of the wire.

"Focus," he called out, his voice hardly needing to fight with the wind that had picked up speed. "You can make it to me, can't you? Just a little more space on your own, Kiara, it's not too much. You can make it."

Pep talks usually distracted her from the task at hand, but she felt less shaky with every word of his that reached her ears. In no time at all, she was standing beside him, her hand holding the parasol somehow cradled in his without her noticing how it got there. He touched a finger to the small of her back and smiled softly.

"Got you," he said.

Then they were dancing.

Gasps traveled upwards from below, screams and praises intermingling as the tiny people watched the girl with the umbrella dance. She was light enough to look like air, her toes never leaving the wire, the only wildness about her being the ribbons again, viciously swiping at patches air the moment she left them empty. Silver and red flashed to the same rhythm and the same child from earlier yelled again: "She's flying, Mommy, she's flying!"

The boy laughed at that, his head tilted back to expose his pale white throat. "Maybe someday, she will," he teased, eyes directed on hers through every turn.

"If I were flying," she countered, "it would look just like this. Only there would be no wire. And everyone would see me walk on air." She let her gaze travel to the shimmering space behind his back. "Or maybe they wouldn't see me at all."

He grinned. "Ah, but watching you is the best part. You're a fairy even without wings," he praised. She flushed, heat rising to her cheeks as quickly as the wind whisked it away. How did he always guess her thoughts before she truly started to think them? It was uncanny, his quick observation of her mind.

The only one to see the flash of color that matched her gaudy skirt shade for shade, he could have laughed at her. Instead, he did the most natural thing in the world: he stepped off the wire.

Anyone else would have screamed. The girl just twirled her umbrella and thought about stepping off after him. Fly for real, if only for a moment's span.

How rude of him to not fall down before her eyes, to escape crushing his lovely skull on the sidewalk under his impossibly sturdy legs. He looked ethereal without the earth to support him.

Looking back at that shimmery space usurping the place where a shadow might be, had they been waltzing on the ground, she bent at the knee and nimbly switched feet. The silver wire trembled beneath her, even it afraid of her false footprints. "And with them?" she asked him. "What sort of creature would I be then?"

His proffered hand was a dangerous thing in mid-air. "Shall we find out, my red lady?"

A voice shouted for her to keep going. To move forward. To walk on her two paper legs that were indeed better made for a higher atmosphere.

Her parasol dropped to let her touch his fingertips. A terrified whisper went up from below. She leaned into him, the air currents clawing desperately at her hair in an attempt to push her back. He was the only thing keeping her afloat.

She took a breath. "Let go."

~~~

The papers were somber the next day as they retold the tale of the girl on the high wire, the one who dropped her umbrella. Her body was mangled like a snapped toy by the cold stones of the street she'd dared to walk above. At first, it was hard to tell the difference between her ribbons and her blood pooling between the cracks the city was always promising to mend anyway. Now they has to scrub it, too, wash the stains and the glitter fallen from her sparkling red tutu, if they were ever going to get something done the right way.

Six mourners attended her casket as it was dutifully lowered into the ground that Sunday. None of the pallbearers knew her. Of the tiny audience attending, only four stayed the whole way through. One was the priest. The other was her mother. The other two were a little girl and her best friend, hardly old enough to know the consequences of life and death so vividly.

"When I grow up," the first child whispered during the prayer, "I'm going to be just like her."

"When you grow up," the second one whispered back, "you'll know better."

No one looked up when a laughing wind passed over their heads. Only the little girl heard the first real smile in the wind's voice when it told her "I flew. And someday, so will you."

A shimmery bit of sunlight caught her eye just before it vanished, leaving nothing behind but a sense of a fantasy and a promise of something more. Everything remaining was tinted with the color red.