The umbrella that was not mine
Rain hammered the covered walkway outside the public library. I grabbed a black umbrella from the stand — ours, I thought — and ran for the minibus, bag thumping against my hip. The street had become a river with headlights in it. At the door a girl my age said, “That’s my tape on the handle.” A strip of faded washi, cats wearing raincoats. I had never seen it. My ears went hot. I held the umbrella out with both hands, like a confession, and started to apologise to the rain as well as to her. She did not snatch it. She tilted it so we both fitted, and we walked to the stop without discussing justice. A bus threw water at our knees. She asked which floor I had been on. I said the study room. She said she had been looking for a history of the harbour and had found a book about fish instead. I laughed too loudly. On the minibus I stared at my wet sleeves and understood how easily a person can be sure and wrong at the same time. I had been sure the way you are sure of a password you typed a hundred times. The tape had been there all year, probably. I had never looked. The next Saturday I bought a cheap yellow umbrella that nobody else would want. I still look for cats on other people’s handles. When I find them I do not touch. I just remember the walk to the stop, two strangers under one mistake, and how she never asked for the umbrella back in a raised voice — only for the truth of a strip of paper.