I decided I would leave the city the following day, but—
“Rain again…”
—when I looked up, drops of rain were pouring down from the sky. It hadn’t been raining when I had stopped at a café on my way out, but apparently while I had been enjoying my coffee inside the café, the weather had taken a turn for the worse.
I don’t really like traveling in the rain, is the thing.
“P-please…! Please wait! Don’t leave me!”
As I was standing in front of the café in a daze, I saw a handsome man shouting by the side of the road. His expensive clothes were soaked through, and what had probably been a stylish hairdo was now soggy and shapeless.
“Oh, shut up! How dare you ask me that, when you’ve been fooling around on the side this whole time, you lousy bastard!”
There was a young woman trampling mercilessly on the man.
“You’re the only one I really want! Believe me—”
“Go to hell!”
A different woman joined the first and kicked the man when he was down. Taking a better look, I saw various colorful umbrellas all around me, and all sorts of different women were looking down at the pitiful figure of the man.
“You said you only loved me…”
“I’m gonna kill you.”
“You’re so cruel…!”
“How dare you? Eight-timing all of us!”
“You’re trash.”
In the rain, the abuse poured down on him incessantly. They were merciless.
As far as I could gather from the situation, the man must have been saying sweet things to multiple women.
“Hey, miss, what are you doing out here? Waiting for someone?”
He had probably, for example, been approaching women who were taking shelter from the rain in just that way.
“Well, something like that. My friend is just going to say thank you to a few people—” I turned in the direction of the voice that had spoken to me.
A young boy of about ten tilted his umbrella back and looked up at me.
“Going to say thank you?”
Maybe he wasn’t familiar with the idea. The boy cocked his head at me curiously.
“She’s gone to visit some people who helped her out. She got assistance from all sorts of different people while we were here in this city.”
“Oh, I get it!” The boy broke into a smile. His cheerful expression was a poor match for the dull, rainy sky. “It’s good to say words of thanks to people who are important to you, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is.”
“By the way, miss, don’t you have an umbrella?”
“Uh, well, no I don’t.”
“I thought so! By the way, what do you think of the umbrella I’m holding?”
The boy whipped his umbrella around to show it to me.
It was a strange umbrella, very old and worn. And yet despite its threadbare appearance, it was making a barking noise just like the cry of a dog. “Woof, woof !”
I guess you could really say it was an interesting umbrella.
“It suits you very well.”
“Eh-heh-heh, I sure think so! Thanks!”
As if he had been waiting for me to say those words, the boy smiled happily again and walked right off, still holding up the umbrella like a precious treasure. “Bye!”
“……”
“If you like, you could stand under my umbrella.”
“No, no, that’s all right. Besides, if you go around saying things like that to women who are total strangers, you’ll wind up like that guy over there.”
“Whoa, what’s going on there?”
“He’s probably some sort of awful jerk, I bet. If you don’t want to wind up like him, just don’t go around approaching women out of nowhere, okay?”
…Or something like that.
I imagined our conversation would have gone more or less like that.
But the boy just turned and left. While I was taking shelter from the rain, an unfamiliar boy had suddenly appeared, boasted about his umbrella, and then just walked away.
“—Sorry to keep you waiting, Mistress Elaina. It took longer than I thought to go around and thank all the different objects…” There came a voice from behind me. It was my broom. “…Mistress Elaina? Is something the matter?”
She looked down the road, following my gaze.
Down the main avenue, where many umbrellas of all different colors were coming and going.
There was a whole swarm of umbrellas, and though many had similar colors and shapes, there wasn’t a single other one exactly like it.
Staring at one particular umbrella in the middle of all that, I said, “I just met a strange little boy.”
The figure of the boy, holding his old umbrella aloft, finally disappeared into the crowd.
“…Ah, I see. So you met him, Mistress Elaina?”
Staring at the same spot I was, Miss Broom nodded in understanding.
Then, smiling softly, she said, “But, Mistress Elaina, that’s not a strange little boy at all. In fact, I believe that fellow is what’s known as an awful jerk.”
“I don’t mean him.”