The Umbrella Man

Soren didn’t hear him coming in, or what he said as he drained the water from his boots into a bucket.

“What?”

Gallagher said it again, but the door was open and the roar outside filtered whatever he shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Close the door!” Soren yelled, making a slamming motion with his hands.

The bell above it made a delicate cling as audibility was restored. Water droplets tapped at his mug as Soren realised that the roof had become a belly, swollen, precipitation leaking into his chamomile tea. 

“You don’t make boots too, do you?” Gallagher said; his voice no longer drowned out by the downpour that had been happening non-stop for almost a month. His auburn hair stuck to his face, wrinkled like a prune, like fingers that sat in a bath for too long.

“I should; maybe I could expand the umbrella business into a rain gear empire.”

When they were little, Soren would always try his little gadgets made of twigs and leaves and cardboard on his little brother. As the sun rose and fell, those gadgets only got wilder and messier. Everyone thought that there was a screw loose until he came up with a game-changer. The mother of all umbrellas.

Like a typical mad scientist, he had locked himself up in the study room at his parents' house. His plan, nurtured by the warm light of a desk lamp, mushroomed into life. With a fortified shaft and reinforced stretchers, the utter behemoth that couldn’t close shut became the rooftop 3000; fit for what would become the worst storm scientists had seen since records began. Resistant to gale force winds that would upturn houses and hailstones the size of a tennis ball. The Umbrella Man, they called him; lines snaked around street corners as the first raindrops fell on their foreheads. Lining up for something he created.

“I’ll be first in line for those boots,” Gallagher began, “but I’m not going to be your guinea pig again.”

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”

“You want to see my scars?”

And they shared a laugh because they were all good since the rooftop 3000 wiped their debts from the farm, piling on since the storms started coming in quick succession. After his invention, it became a godsend to be associated with Soren.

“This rain, it’s killed all my crops. It's all sludge out there; I had to pull one of my lambs out of the mud last Sunday.”

“You think we should sell?”

“Too late for that, I think. Nobody wants to buy a farm where your ankles are always knee-deep in muck, you know? Half my crops don't grow anymore.”

A silence was shared. Getting rid of the family farm was never an option, but that was before Pa died and they lost half their land to that witch, mother nature.

Soren had stripped the carpet flooring after rainfall had surpassed a week. It was because his customers wouldn't pour the rain in their gumboots into the buckets clearly marked ‘POUR RAINWATER FROM YOUR BOOTS IN HERE”. Most continued to ignore it, even after he added a ‘PLEASE’ at the end. Grey carpet became brown and yellow and green as more people made their way through the back door. Ma said she’d kick him out if he didn’t fix it. When he ripped it out it became patchy, like potholes on asphalt, fluffs of grey stuck on the ashy concrete at its bedrock. He covered it up with some Afgan carpets he stumbled upon at an indoor flea market.

“What’re you designing now, Doofenshmirtz?”

Gallagher examined some sketches that were scattered on Soren’s desk, lines and measurements of inventions that were birthed on graph paper, inventions that would die in a desk cupboard when physics wouldn’t allow for them. Lines merging, on their own meaningless, looked rather beautiful on paper. Ma told Soren that he could’ve become a mad artist instead, but artists die poor, Soren replied.

Pencils and rubbers abraded furiously on a page of a sketchbook as Soren’s eyebrows cuddled together in thought. Gallagher wasn’t to disturb his brainstorming and the inevitable ‘Eureka!’ moment when the lines inexorably came together to spawn a new ridiculous plan of his, lines in a language that only his brother could understand. 

When Soren was consumed in thought, questions and conversations seemed to bounce right off him, then he'd catch them just as the fruit of the exchange began to stale.

“Boots.”

 Soren looked up.

“What’s your shoe size, by the way? 38?”

Gallagher gasped. “You know Ma’s feet are big! I’m sure even you can fit in her heels, with you and your what, six feet of height?”

Her feet were massive. They were taken back to when they took one of her heels, quite dandified gilded French ones. With the sun at its zenith, a Gallagher of around sixteen years ran around the lawn in them as Soren analysed his gait to observe whether he should gift his mother heels with wheels or boxy heavy-duty ones, since they looked like they were about to burst at the seams whenever Ma would slip her chubby toes in them. 

Soren decided it wasn’t worth revisiting after Gallagher took a fall and made his ankle rotate in wondrous ways, his face red as they repositioned it while Ma held his brother by the ear, ready to give them an earful once they got back home.

“What kind of grip do you think I should have on these boots?”

“I don’t know, Soren. Don’t you have a book on that or something?”

He had a whole library behind him. Shelves upon shelves of books on types of wood joints and opinionated works on the best type of water-resistant material. These books collected dust at the back of library shelves, and Sue the librarian had no problem gifting all of those to him, even helping him load it onto the red wagon he brought. First-time customers sometimes got confused as to whether it was a bookstore or an umbrella shop.

“A…B…C…” He muttered.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The rain, I think it's stopping.”

“No, it’s not, Gallagher, it’s just…”

The pounding outside reduced to a knocking, getting lighter as Soren’s finger drifted along the book spines from D to F.

And before he could get to G, it had stopped.

Just like that.

A month’s worth of rainfall ceased like the silencing of an orchestra.

And the sun came shooting through the clouds, white rays of warmth against the grey swirl of the sky, now parting. Steam swam up into the air as it felt the touch of heat, of light. It shot with determination, like someone’s temperate breath firing against the frigid air, but ten-thousand-fold, endlessly. 

And like a wave people’s heads peeked outside their windows, pushing back the curtains, as they too investigated the sudden change in environment. It was like a plane descending in succession, ears popping.

Soren and Gallagher peered out the window too, intensely. They watched as people opened their doors and stepped outside, stupefaction in their pruned and pale faces. Feeling the sky, the sun, the warmth of it. 

All without their umbrellas.