Jacob stepped up onto the bus, flashing his pass to the driver. He walked to the back, sat down, and put his umbrella beside him.
It was six stops to the Zoo entrance. The window revealed the rows of shops and restaurants he had never gone into and crowds of people on the sidewalks, doing things. At the fourth stop, a group of children gaggled on; find an empty seat, one of the teacher chaperones yelled over their heads.
A girl walked to the back and looked at Jacob. He smiled and took his umbrella off the seat cushion.
She was maybe eight or nine. Nervous, hands in her lap, feet dangling, looking straight ahead. Jacob sat watching the window until the Zoo stop. He waited until the girl joined her classmates in the aisle and watched them file off the bus. When he reached down for his umbrella, it was gone. Confused, he bent down to see if it had rolled away under the seats.
Jacob wanted his umbrella. Now. Getting on his hands and knees, he looked for it. The bus lurched past the Zoo stop and proceeded on its prescribed route. People got on the bus, and people got off the bus. Jacob kept looking for his umbrella; it was black, and shadows could be obscuring it, you know, those shadows in the corners and where one surface meets another. That dark place between the floor and the wall? The door and the frame? Those cracks that appeared on everything? It was always found in the darkness, that thing you were looking for while never doing what other people did or going to the places other people went.
Excuse me, people said as they sidled around him.
Jacob saw where his umbrella had to be. A dark crack ran the length of the floor, pockmarked, pitted, and scuffed; he just needed to break it wider. That’s what you need to do in those dark places: Tear it away. Expose what you were looking for because it can’t stay hidden forever.
The bus hadn’t moved in some time. Jacob wasn’t sure where it had stopped. But he knew it wasn’t the Zoo. And he knew he wanted his umbrella.
The crack was now wide enough for Jacob to lower himself into. It was dark, but Jacob could see a faint and glowing luminescence ahead of him, so he walked towards it, feeling his way along the rocky walls, chipped, broken, and rough to the touch.
A pool of water, a cold blur, a perfect circle. Luminescence surrounded him, from algae, perhaps. Not everything that lights us emits light; it can be reflected, he thought, like the moon. Simple organic life. Deep sea creatures. Outer space. There is light in all of them. You don’t always know where it’s coming from.
His umbrella was there. It had been opened. He went to pick it up, but it rolled away on its rim, releasing a swarm of glowing orbs, fireflies, or something else. They had needed the protection, the dark shade of his umbrella. He knew this now. Jacob retrieved the umbrella and held it on his shoulder to shade their sleep. They collected there slowly and swarmed together, pulsing in a slow rhythm.
Jacob was alone. Again. At night. His mother had to go to work, she had said before she left. Jacob had fallen asleep but could never fall back asleep if he awoke to darkness. Ever. The umbrella, what do you want that old thing for? Clutched in his hand now, not under the pillow. The handle was wood, beech, his father had told him and was worn in the curved-shaped place, his father’s thumb holding it over him while they waited for the bus. The place where the handle met the steel rod had a rough dent that had cracked the beech wood in a jagged line. It had fallen hard that time they had waited for the bus to bring them to the Zoo.
Jacob opened it slowly. He liked the mechanical articulation, the slow, even movement, and the final click as it was fully expanded up and out. He stood up on his bed, holding the umbrella on one shoulder. Like his father had done, that time they went to the Zoo, Jacob didn’t care; there was a rip in the cloth, a long, ragged gash. Jacob didn’t care; it let the light in, which glowed.
