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The pink umbrella lay open in the gutter, its end tip caught between bars in the steel grate. A child walked by and looked at it, considered taking it to school: there were storm clouds overhead. But when they saw the tear in the canopy – saw the sidewalk flowers through the fraying hole – they lost interest, and continued on their way.

A dog trotted by and sniffed at the umbrella, and later a cat walked twice around it before a car turned the corner and it bolted. It began to rain, and the umbrella became a tiny lake, water slipping out the rip and keeping it a steady level.

Two people walked by – a man and a woman, each with their own umbrella. The woman stopped to consider the object, and grabbed its handle to pry it from the grate. Pouring the gathered water onto the sidewalk – avoiding her shoes – she twirled the umbrella, considered it, and held her hand up to the rip to measure. With a satisfied nod she closed it, and put it under her arm, and went on her way.

Her home was warm, with honey-colored floors. She left her shoes in the entryway, toting the umbrella through one room and then the next until she came to a little work table. Tools appeared: a darning mushroom, a stuffed pin cushion, a gleaming pair of scissors. Rustling through a drawer of fabric, she found what she was looking for and cut the piece to size, humming all the while.

The work was quick and deft; the needle caught the light as she drew it back and forth over the edges of the patch. With one last tug she cut the thread and held her work up for admiration, her humming paused as she studied the patch, and resuming as she gave it an approving nod and tidied up.

With her personal umbrella in one hand and the mended one in the other she headed back into the cold. She walked past where she had found it and further, past the supermarket and the park and down the steps into the metro station, stopping at a little rack of umbrellas in the corner with a sign below them that stated FREE in fading block letters. The mended umbrella slipped into one of the open circles and, humming, the woman turned and walked back up the stairs and out of sight.

As the first of many rush hour commuters streamed up the escalators and through the subway gates, a different woman beelined to the rack and grasped the pink umbrella before hurrying up the stairs and onto the street. She opened it and listened to the tapping sound of rain on nylon, and saw the small patch in the canopy, and thought for a moment how interesting and thoughtful and careful someone must have been to fix it.