The yellow umbrella

He reached for the pack of Pall Mall on the nightstand. ‘Just one more … after this pack I quit’.  He didn’t usually prefer this brand, but alas, he could not find the one he liked.  Taking one cigarette out of the small blue pack, Gareth felt a little annoyed.  Although he knew what he was smoking, he missed the sound the little menthol ball of the Kent Click made under the light pressure of his teeth. This couldn’t possibly be the last pack as it tasted all wrong. 

It was always the same story with him. He wanted to quit, he did quit…over and over again…It was easy. Unlike his friends, he didn’t associate smoking with coffee. He could go out to a coffee shop with them and talk for hours at a time, sipping espresso while they surrounded themselves in layers of smoke. The problem arose when he got back home…To him, smoking went hand in hand with reading, with thinking, with writing.

And he was about to do just that… He fancied himself a writer, a poor example of one anyway. The only successful thing he ever wrote was ‘ The adventures of Professor Poopypants ’. It literally gave him an army of groupies that consisted of his seven year old sister and her friends, and that was 5 years ago. Now, an English major and an aspiring novelist, he felt the pressure to produce something. His professors always said he should just sit down and write, write every day. He did. It was crap. Somehow, after an extraordinary beginning, and it was always extraordinary…he got bored of his characters and killed them all. 

 

*

Marguerite took a sip of her coffee/ brandy/ vodka and started thinking while listening to the sound of rain drops on her window…She knew she behaved like a spoiled child earlier but there was nothing she could do now. Only wait…

‘Do the writing! Be the writing!’ He grinned as he remembered the mantra Miss Devereaux, one of his teachers, told them, first year of college. This was awful and he knew it. ‘Who should I kill now? Marguerite the ingénue or maybe Alfred the butler? Oh what the hell, let’s kill them both! Or better still we can make one of them shinny and full of teenage angst…yea! That sells well ’, and he started laughing. His amusement however did not reach his green eyes.

‘Coffee is the answer to this. Hell, coffee is the answer to everything’. Coffee of course, and maybe with a drop or two, or five of Jack from the little silver bottle he always had in the inside pocket of his worn out leather jacket. 

As he put his boots on an opened the door, a breeze of cold, fresh air suddenly entered the smoky attic he lived in, and a black cat was staring at him from across the hallway. It literally gave him the chills. He instinctively felt something was wrong, or about to be wrong anyway. He wasn’t overly superstitious but his instincts never failed him before. He walked down the stairs and to his bike trying to shake that feeling. ‘No words to calm me down Chuck ?’ Gareth whispered into the night. He didn’t care if someone was watching him…probably thinking he was insane, talking to himself in the middle of the night. He was a bit insane…

One of his friends asked him once about Chuck. His answer was simple, at least it appeared so to him… ‘You know how people are supposed to have a small devil on the left shoulder and a small angel on the right one ?’ he gave a mischievous grin. ’Well…I only have one of them… a little fat, almost obese Cupid-like creature. And he can’t just fit on one shoulder so he sits on the back of my neck basically annoying me with advice on quitting smoking and stuff. He also gives me back pains due to his weight and all…’ he started laughing at the face his friend made, and gulped down another Tequila shot. So that was Chuck…always there with a witty comment at hand. But now he seemed nowhere to be found. 

‘At least I can safely spike me coffee now.’ he whispered to himself while getting on his bike and driving to a coffee joint that was open all night. 

*

The snow fell heavily while Gareth parked his bike and entered the coffee house. The room was so smoky one had to squint to see anything. But to him, it was soothing, like a plate of creamy risotto on a stormy night. After three shots of espresso, brandy-flavored of course, he scanned the room for familiar faces, cigarette in one hand, Jack in the other, trying to look all mysterious and brooding. Somehow he was trying too hard, because he came across as sulking.

And then he glanced out the window and he saw her…first, it was the yellow umbrella that caught his eye, cadmium yellow that reminded him of summer…then he saw her face, fair, almost white, surrounded by locks of dark hair, eyes almost the same shade as her umbrella.  She fascinated him. Gareth rushed out the door, cutting through the smoke, with a speed he never knew he possessed. He had to meet her. ‘There…’. There she was, two meters in front of him, gliding through the snow. She was looking at something, eyes piercing through the darkness. ‘Hey! Wait a second’. She didn’t seem to hear him and continued to walk away, her feet seemingly bare, as white as the snow they stepped on. No matter how fast he ran, and he ran faster than he ever had, he couldn’t seem to reach the girl. She appeared to be strolling.  He was imagining things. But she couldn’t have possibly moved at that speed. ‘No really…Wait a second…I have to talk to you !!!’. 

This time she stopped and turned around to smile at him. ‘God she’s beautiful...’ Gareth said, more of a whisper to himself really. He would have liked to say it to her but he could not find the words. As he tried to move closer he realized he couldn’t. His feet seemed glued to the ground and the same feeling he had earlier started creeping its way through every fiber of his being. But in spite of that he could not help staring at her. And the girl became more beautiful with every passing second.

She approached him…closer and closer, until her face almost touched his and kissed him. Gareth suddenly felt like a moth mesmerized by a flame, later to be consumed by it. 

‘Forget me.’ She whispered in his ear, her cold breath sending chills down his spine, and not the good falling-in-love, brain-turning-into-mush kind. He couldn’t mutter a word if his life depended on it. And then she left, barefooted, clad in white silk, surrounded by snowflakes that seemed to fall everywhere but on her yellow umbrella…

*

He woke up in a puddle of sweat, curled into a fetus position, sheets tangled around him. ‘What the hell happened ? How much did I drink last night ?’ And then he sensed the familiar presence of Chuck’s fat ass on his back and a sense of security crawled back into his heart. ‘Good…now you’re here. Time for coffee Chuck…’ . Coffee indeed…instant coffee for instant gratification, prepared in a red soup cup, large enough to fill the void in his soul. 

And then he was back at his computer, the cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. Gareth suddenly felt the need to write. His story started with ‘A man entered a bar and asked the bartender…’, but very soon after he remembered a beautiful girl, her and the snow she seemed to be made of… She told him to forget her but he wasn’t going to…a beautiful girl and a yellow umbrella. ‘She walks in beauty like the night…’ he remembered lord Byron’s poem and he thought it suited her, whoever she was. 

She walked in beauty while the snow fell around her as if it were afraid any harm might come to her. The girl’s yellow umbrella seemed pointless at that very moment.

His fingers ran down the keyboard as if he were a pianist playing something he knew by hart. He felt Calliope standing right next to him, and Chuck smiling at her and it was an exquisite feeling.

And suddenly it was spring.