The (Short) Story of the Evil Umbrellas [Completed]

The (Short) Story of the Evil Umbrellas

The (Short) Story of the Evil Umbrellas

Hi, my name's Lydia. But you might know me as:

a) That girl who was electrocuted and died in the hospital.

b) Too Young to Die.

c) The only kid in the obituary section of your newspaper.

d) The cautionary tale of why you shouldn't be out in a thunderstorm.

Let me address the elephant in the room: In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm dead. Right now you're probably thinking, "Good for you! Why should I care?" But with all the attention that was given to my unfortunate demise and all the consequences that are currently springing from it, I kind of thought you might want to know about the reason I passed on. So here it is:

I saw dead people...

As umbrellas.

And the umbrellas didn't like it.

Okay, that was a little random. Maybe I should backtrack a little.

When I was younger, there was this one street I always had to cross to get to school. There was no way around it, no other street to go along, no way out. I was stuck crossing this road, and I hated it. For... what could be kindly called a strange reason.

Every time I crossed I would see umbrellas floating around me. Row in row, all uniform, only their very tips touching. They were all different colours too. Some bright, some dark, some patterned, some not. Objectively, they were beautiful. There are probably some photographers that would die to get a shot like that street.

Now you might think, what's the big deal? That doesn't sound too bad, and when you're a little kid on a rainy day, it really might look like a bunch of umbrellas are floating around you. But here's the kicker, here's what scared me, they were floating twenty feet in the air.

No one else ever saw them, and when I pointed them out to my friends, they accused me of just trying to get attention. I even took a picture once, but I was the only one who could see the umbrellas when it was developed. Eventually I couldn't risk losing another friend, so I stopped pointing them out, and pretended they didn't exist. And got new friends. Because it's hard to like someone who thinks you're crazy. But more on that later.

So for years, this was just a really weird thing that happened. Like, it didn't actually inhibit my life, it just made people think that I was insane and untrustworthy. Okay, so it may have inhibited my social life somewhat, but it didn't physically hurt me. It was just there. Then one day... it happened.

One day a man on that street had a heart attack as I was crossing it. I saw him fall, hand clutching at his chest, head banging against the pavement and eyes going dark, the whole shebang. Sound like a normal death, right? Well no, because something happened next.

I saw an umbrella start rising from his body.

To be clear, the man hadn't been holding an umbrella, it just appeared out of thin air above his body. It went up and joined the others, slotting into a gap in the formation that I could have sworn hadn't been there a moment before. But that wasn't the only extremely weird thing about the mysteriously-appearing umbrella. It was the same colour as the man's coat. And as the man's coat had been this bright, flourescent orange, I doubted it was a coincidence.

So, based on the meager information and solid data I had, I created a hypothesis, what if the umbrellas were souls of those who had died on that street?