Edmund’s Umbrella
It had taken Edmund nearly nine hours of needle and thread to put the umbrella back to rights this time. Even as he worked the weary ache out of his stitch-numbed fingers and considered his handiwork, he worried that he’d been forced to reinforce and reanimate the poor umbrella one time too many, and that the next outing would be the end of him.
You only got one umbrella after you’d opted into the life; it was issued to you with your colors and your small cottage equidistant from all the other cottages around the field.
The meeting place was in the center, where they provided food and a venue for the entertainments, which were self-produced by bitter men, frightened men, angry and boastful men. The entertainments were the products of men who had to walk through the fields to put on the entertainments, traveling at least a half-mile along hard-worn trails or across private paths to retrace those never forgotten moments that you still needed to see.
The dead were left on the fields, their umbrellas untouched beside them.
Stones that had contributed to the death of men were especially prized, but there was only one day on which a man could legally gather dornicks.
You could gather dornicks on the day after you fixed your umbrella. You had to fix your umbrella three times a year.
Edmund eyed his bucket, still half full from that near-disaster with Schultz, who lay moldering not far from what had been his cottage. After his stone had felled the man, Edmund had gone and sat down beside Schultz’s cabin not specifically to think about what had happened, but that is what he had wound up doing.
It had been a strange experience, thinking about how he’d killed a man. In the seven years he’d been a stone-thrower he’d killed dozens with glee. Killing men was the better part of the reason why you became a stone-thrower in the first place.
Maybe it was just the passage of time, maybe it was the fact that Schultz had opted into the life only a few seasons after Edmund himself, but Edmund had sat down outside Schultz’s cabin, and with complete disregard for the danger of such an idea, he leaned his back against the outer wall, shut his eyes, and had a good long think.
Epiphanies didn’t come naturally to Edmund, and as he hadn’t had much experience with them, he blamed the transitory nature of his to the fact that it had been so cleverly punctuated by the stone that had slammed into the wall scant inches from his left ear.
Edmund had been trying to wrap his mind around the concept of the epiphany ever since it had happened. As it stood, he wasn’t certain of a number of things, and that had him worried.
For reasons that he struggled to explain, Edmund knew that something terrible had resolved itself inside his mind in either the seconds before or after that stone had snapped his eyes back to awareness. How else to explain his behavior?
His hands had snapped immediately to his umbrella, snapping it open for the defensive powers a good stone-thrower has with his umbrella, but instead of snatching up weapons from his arsenal of dornicks, he’d charged with only his umbrella.
Every stone-thrower has scars, in his years Edmund had never seen one arrive at the fields without scars, nor had he seen one partake in more than a few maelstroms before he bore fresh marks.
The umbrella though, was the key. You could be insanely accurate and throw a dornick as though it were blown from a cannon, but if you couldn’t use your umbrella you were toast. The umbrellas were made of heavy canvas, and a talented stone-thrower could dance with the incoming missiles, simply changing the path of the stones enough so they wouldn’t maim.
Shultz had been one of the few entertainers that Edmund respected, and an excellent stone-thrower. Edmund had first noticed his skill when he’d tried to kill him two maelstroms after his arrival on the fields; Shultz had managed to divert a scathing headshot while hopping over the lazy shot aimed at his knee, and made it easily into the tree line where he retorted well enough to get Edmund moving with his umbrella.
Stone throwing wasn’t as popular as some of the other varieties of entertainment lifestyle available because the size of the stones didn’t play so well on video. Dornick is an old word that was once used to describe a stone that could be thrown from a field being cleared, which means the biggest stone at play in the fields is only a couple of inches across.
The thing with Shultz had been a fluke. Edmund was trying to avoid the fact that he’d lost his taste for killing, and while they had certainly never talked about it openly, Edmund was fairly certain that Shultz felt the same. They’d taken to passing through each other’s territories a couple of times a maelstrom, throwing and deflecting a few well-placed shots. They were talented stone-throwers, and even when the anger faded, there was still the responsibility; there were all those cameras, and there was still the game.
The thing with Shultz had been a fluke. Edmund had thrown a stone on a big lazy arc, and perhaps Shultz had gotten cocky, or perhaps it had been some seam in his umbrella that had finally failed, but the dornick had split canvas, met Shultz’s jaw and put him down. Edmund had done the only honorable thing and followed up; he’d thrown a fatal stone into Shultz’s temple.
He didn’t know what to expect when he walked out into the maelstrom in a few days. If he’d simply killed Shultz, things might have moved along as they had been. He would have been respected and tolerated if not feared, but generally just left alone had he not killed David with his umbrella.
Whatever epiphany had struck after he’d killed Shultz, and Edmund had the unmistakable feeling that it was the fact that he was tired of his life as a stone-thrower, it had brought out some strange demon inside him.
David was a monster, a rare killing machine that had decided he would be a stone-thrower rather than a more glamorous life with chainsaw or shotgun. In hindsight, Edmund was fairly certain that the first shot had shattered a few inches from his ear by design, as David played for the cameras.
David was a rising star, and there had been an awful lot of cameras about when Edmund had been jerked out of / into epiphany. He’d seen the replays and still couldn’t quite believe that he’d managed to cast aside all those stones and then use that same umbrella to kill a man easily ten years his junior.
The question was what happened next, and Edmund was certain he would have a fairly uninterrupted walk to claim the dornicks that had killed Shultz, and still have first dibs on what remained in David’s bucket.
He just didn’t know what it all meant.
- finite . . .
yeah, two days of almost trying to work on this, and it never fell into what i wanted it to fall into, so here is the failure.
to make up for it, please enjoy this short video of my kittens and Teenage FBI live by Guided by Voices, since the kittens have no volume, they work pretty good together
that will be all . . .
cheers