Face-Slapping16 min read
My Black Umbrella and the System That Wouldn't Shut Up
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"Host," the white cat said, floating like it owned the ceiling, "you have crashed six worlds. Try to behave this time."
I rolled the black umbrella between my fingers and blinked at the little cat. "Try? I prefer to experiment."
The cat's whiskers twitched. "Experimentation has consequences. This is your last chance."
"Last chance," I echoed, and let the umbrella tap the floor like a metronome. "You keep saying that."
"It is not a joke." The cat's voice went silky. "If you fail, you will remain in the void forever."
"You and your void." I let my eyes roam the blank white space. "Boring."
The cat sighed. "I matched you with the closest body. Adelaide Clarke. You must follow the main task or at least behave."
"I love messing things up," I admitted, smirking. "It keeps life interesting."
The cat's eyes narrowed. "Do not test me."
Then the white space blinked, and the next thing I knew I was staring at a rusted metal door and a ceiling that smelled like antiseptic and old cigarettes. I lay under a torn blanket and found my wrist bleeding. The body I had woken into had been beaten.
"You again," I said, looking down at Adelaide Clarke's wrist. She had been sixteen when she died — or so the memories said — and her life before this room was a string of cruelty and ignoring looks. Her name on the chart was Adelaide Clarke. Her life had been short. I had a system and a task and no patience left.
"Host," the cat said, as if now my opinions mattered. "Task one: retrieve the fragments of a soul from Eben White. Task two: punish those who hurt Adelaide Clarke."
"Punish?" I hummed, tasting the idea. "I like the sound of that."
The hospital room had one rusted dresser, rude graffiti across the walls, and the odor of someone who had not been washed in months. I pulled the cloth from my wrist, tied it like a tourniquet, and reached for Adelaide's memory.
I saw the first bruise. Then the routine: a girl sent away by parents who wanted sons, left in the ward, starved of attention. A nurse who smiled in the staff room and beat children behind closed doors. A stepmother who visited once and never again. A final steamed bun, a tantrum, a shove. Adelaide died with one more bite of bread in her stomach and a hand over her mouth.
"Vile people," I murmured. "They deserve better."
"You must not act rashly," the cat warned, with an orange glove of patience. "You are bound to the tasks."
"Bound?" I shrugged. "I prefer 'negotiable.'"
We did not have time for my jokes. Footsteps thundered. The rusted door banged open. Officers entered and scanned the room.
"This is the room?" one asked, a heavy set man with a badge. "We were told there was a suicide."
"There is no suicide," the director of the ward murmured too quickly, and his fingers trembled when they pointed at Li Julianna.
Julianna Vincent stood by the doorway with a face made of varnish and small apologies. Her hands found the hem of her cardigan as if it could save her. She had been the one who had been paid to care and had chosen to hurt. The stories about her were folded like wet paper in my head. I sat up, let Adelaide's smile appear on my face — the face that had been beaten — and the police shifted.
"Officer," I croaked, and watched the room tilt. "They were trying to kill me."
"You're... alive?" the badge-man said. "But your—"
"Look," I said. "I have cuts. I have bruises. They told everyone I'd killed myself. I didn't."
"She was found with a cut on her wrist," said the director, his eyes seeking the floor like a boy at detention. "We... misread things."
"Misread?" I laughed like a chain breaking. "You let people hurt her. You let her die."
The officers moved. Words were taken, sworn. Julianna was led away for questioning. Her hands looked small and neatly kept in handcuffs like stage props. For the first night, I let the system purr with victory. The cat blinked and said, "You are showing restraint."
"Restraint is different from kindness," I corrected. "But we'll take this."
Ellen Yamazaki was the young officer who stayed with me overnight. She had a gentle mouth and a stern heart. She made tea and held my hand when I shivered. "You are incredibly brave," she told me, eyes not blinking. "We will help."
"I am not brave," I said. "I'm stubborn." I watched her blend firmness and softness and thought: people like Ellen were rare like rain after a drought.
We made the police reports. I performed "Adelaide" well enough that people believed the pattern of abuse. At the station, I learned that Li Julianna had a family who loved her; they had been blind. Her son, Blaise Moeller, and daughter-in-law Alessandra Galli begged and pleaded. They came offering money and humility.
"Please," Blaise said, falling to his knees in front of the table where I sat. "My mother— we can compensate. Two hundred and fifty thousand. We'll settle."
"Two hundred fifty thousand," I repeated, tasting it like a number I had never seen. "For silence?"
"We can't afford scandal," Alessandra whispered. "Please, for our name."
"Is that so?" I smiled in Adelaide's teeth. "Two hundred fifty thousand for the life they took? For the lies? Fine. One payment, one handover. And you will never step near a ward again."
Blaise and Alessandra signed. The hospital director pushed papers. Officer Cedric Dominguez watched like a judge not yet surprised.
"You're lying to yourself if you think money fixes blood," I told the director quietly. "But this will stop their hands."
When the cards slid into my palm and the signatures were wet, something cold untied itself in me. I left the hospital with Ellen's number in my pocket and a list of well-intentioned officers who had become interested in the case.
I could have walked away. I could have slept under my black umbrella and called it practice. But the system hummed. "Secondary quest unlocked," it announced. "Find evidence against Julianna Vincent, ensure public accountability."
"Public," I said. "Audiences make all the difference."
The first time I saw Julianna Vincent in person again was at the hospital's staff meeting. They had scheduled a 'welfare review' and invited families. I arrived wearing the body's thin jacket and the cat's patience. The room smelled of court and bleach.
"Please," the director said when my face appeared at the edge of the circle. "This is a private staff meeting."
"This is private?" I said loudly. "You told families lies and called her death a suicide. Is that private?"
There was a hum while the director folded his hands. I was older inside than Adelaide had ever been. I had patience like a steady drum. The meeting filled. Nurses and aides shoved chairs closer. Julianna's laugh arrived late, soft like someone testing a new voice.
"For being a liar, I have no sympathy," she said, smoothing her apron. "We did our best."
"Our best?" I asked. "Is your best measured in absence of witness statements?"
She scoffed. "You have no proof."
"Oh," I said. I had proof because I made sure of it. "Watch this."
I stood and clicked the director's laptop. The projector whirred. On the screen were images Julianna did not expect: time-stamped messages she had sent to a friend boasting about 'breaking little ones' and a video where she had struck Adelaide. The room inhaled like a sea pulled back from the shore.
Julianna's face at first carried a small, practiced smile. She was comfortable with cruelty because it had never been seen. The silence cut her like glass.
"This is sick," said a nurse at the back. "Who recorded this?"
"A device in a closet," I said. "Someone left a recorder. People collected what she had thrown away."
Julianna's smile changed to a lifted eyebrow. She blinked. "That's doctored," she spat. "Photos can be faked. I—"
"Do you deny this?" I asked. "Your voice, your hands."
"My hands? My voice?" Her tone sharpened; she tried to summon anger. "This is a setup. You want me gone."
A man started filming with his phone. "I'm posting this now," he said. "This can't go unshared."
People in the room began to murmur. Someone whispered that the hospital had been under investigation for neglect. Someone else said that this evidence would change everything.
At first she was haughty, bending to that old, ugly confidence. "You can't do this to me," she hissed, and the room vibrated with disbelief.
Then the moment when she saw the video paused on her own face, on her hand striking a small girl. Her breath fled. Her shoulders drooped. The mask cracked.
"She was full of lies," she whispered, as if to convince herself.
"No," I said, stepping forward. "You were the liar."
I watched the sequence: smugness, confusion, denial, collapse, begging. It was a scene of a person discovering that the cameras in our age were witnesses with teeth.
"Who are you?" Julianna gasped, and then, "No, my son—"
"My son signed papers," I said. "He promised money. He also promised nothing would happen. Did you think the world would forget?"
Her first response was pure denial. "This is a mistake. That's not me." She rubbed her wrists as if they could be scrubbed clean. "You have no proof. I didn't—"
"Do you see your hands?" a former patient asked. "Do you see the scars you made?"
The room shifted like a shaken jar. Phones snapped photos. Recording lights blinked. Someone uploaded the clip; people railed in the comments like a rising tide. A nurse from admissions put down a cup of coffee and started to tremble. "I... I filed a memo months ago. They told me to hush."
"Silence is complicity," I said. "You took that child's bread and gave her bruises instead."
Julianna's eyes bulged. Her face was mud. "No! No—" Her mouth twisted into the long chain of excuses. She reached for the director's arm, clawing for protection.
"You're under investigation," Officer Cedric said, and I felt the air change. "People are witnesses now."
She tried to laugh it off, to call it a joke. "This will ruin me," she said. She tried to pull the viewers to pity: a mother who had needed a job, a woman who had been blamed. It did not work.
Then she fell apart.
"Please," she whispered. "Please don't—"
Her knees hit the linoleum and the sound in the room changed tempo. It was not the dramatic bend of a woman too proud to kneel but the raw collapse of someone who had been safe behind small cruelties and now had no place to hide. "I'm sorry," she choked. "I didn't mean... I thought..."
"Why?" someone asked.
She had no answer. The camera caught her tear as if to be sure cruelty could not stay dry-eyed.
A crowd outside the hospital's sliding glass doors had gathered by then. Phones were out. The clip had spread. People dug their own memories out like tools and spoke. "She beat a child in room 12!" one called. "They lied when they said it was suicide!" another shouted.
They were angry and hungry for justice. Someone applauded. A few—shocking in their zeal—began to clap slowly, as if they were giving an ovation for truth. Others filmed. "You're on camera," they told Julianna. "Everyone is watching."
Her reaction had three acts: first a grin that said she was untouchable, then a small, brittle attempt to deny, then a total collapse into begging. It was ugly and necessary.
"Don't make me," she begged, voice a rag. "Please— I will go. I'll get help. I'll—"
"No," I said. "You will answer for what you did."
She tried to stand to plead to the director, to Blaise, but when every face turned away, her confidence bled out. People who had shrugged at the smell of bleach now brandished their phones like small torches. Women whispered that their own grandchildren would never be left with her.
As she fell to her knees and reached for anything—mercy, lawyers, the director—no one offered it. The crowd recorded. Somebody laughed. Somebody wept. Someone's camera caught her voice as it crumbled, from "you can't" to "please." A child in the corridor muttered, "That's the nurse who hit my friend."
She began to beg. "Please—please—I'll do anything." Her voice wavered, became small. "Don't take my job. I won't— I'll apologize. I... I'll pay—"
"Pay?" I said, and the room echoed. "Pay? Money won't put Adelaide's breath back."
"No," she said, and the pride that had kept her hands busy for years drained out. She clawed the floor with two fingernails, sobbing like something hollow.
Phones recorded the collapse and the reaction. A man in the doorway started a live stream with the words: "Watch the nurse who killed a child plead in public."
"Shut that off," the director hissed. "Shut it—"
It was useless. Julianna's face became a public thing. The crowd's reaction moved like a rolling wave: astonishment, disbelief, then unleashed commentary and finally a thin, bitter chorus of approval for her undone pride. "Good," someone said. "Let her feel what she made others feel."
"She wanted to hide," Ellen whispered at my shoulder. "Now she can't."
"Justice," I said. "Not revenge." My hands rested on the black umbrella I had left at my side. The cat in my head hummed.
The scene lasted long enough to be burned into pixels and testimony. Julianna's fall from authority became a livestream, then a ten-minute clip, then a thousand copies. She became an example to other people who thought they could bribe silence. She had gone from the smirk to the pleading to the chair of a spectacle. People photographed, whispered, slapped "like" on accountability. Some recorded for their children so that women would learn: cowardice has court now.
When the police finally led her away, she clung to the director and begged. "I didn't mean—" she said again. Her voice, once lacquered, had cracked like old paint. Her family stood in the doorway and watched, stupid and small and finally aware. Blaise stared as if watching a funeral. Alessandra held herself as though the sound might break her in half.
"You will answer," Cedric told her, and the cameras ate his words.
"What happens now?" Ellen asked me later, when the staff had dispersed and the hospital smelled like wet coats.
"They'll investigate," I said. "They'll film their own statements. The state will ask questions. The internet will remember."
"And her reaction?" she asked.
I thought of the way a person changes from smug to ashamed, the way denial curves into pleading, and how crowds rage and then file their accounts like evidence. "She will hate being watched," I said. "That change is the punishment."
"You did this," Ellen said softly.
"I did what I could," I answered. "And the system insists on progress."
Eben White — the boy whose soul fragment I needed later — watched the whole thing from the doorway like a caged animal. He had red hair and too many bruises for a boy who liked to fight. He and his small crew of followers were rough as stone, but when the alarm sounded, they were shaken.
"Why did you do that?" Eben asked me afterward, once the crowd and the cameras had moved on.
"Because she needed to be seen," I said. "And because watching has teeth now."
He tilted his head. "You're weird," he said. "Also: dangerous."
"I prefer 'useful,'" I said, folding the umbrella into her shoulder bag. "You will be useful once I get your fragment."
"Fragment?" he echoed, softer.
That night, the system pulsed the task log into my mind: MAIN - Collect Eben White's missing soul shard. SUB - Punish those who hurt Adelaide Clarke.
"They make tasks sound poetic," I grumbled.
The weeks that followed were a messy braid of court visits, hospital interviews, and the slow creep of settlement money into my pocket. I paid lawyers and changed my name registration — a new ID, a new tabula, fresh paper. The world called me Adelaide still when it mattered; I called myself Cadence Klein in the mirror sometimes. I found a small apartment, paid two years' rent in cash, and learned how to microwave food without making smoke alarms cry.
Eben and I circled each other like two stray dogs who had been starved for attention. He would show up at the edges of my days, sulky and blunt and then suddenly brave, throwing a loose "I'll cover you" when two kids mocked me on the street. I would let him: a friend's protection paid dividends.
We were not lovers. We were not enemies. We were two wounded beasts and the system's strings pulled us into small collisions.
"Why are you on me?" he demanded, once, when I caught him in the act of sending me a half-sincere text in the middle of the night.
"Because my job says so," I replied. "And because I'm going to take your fragment when you're ready."
"What fragment? What's that even mean?"
"It means something missing, Eben. Something of you that belongs in you. It's broken, or stolen, or lost. I have to gather it. Officially."
"Officially," he said with a laugh that didn't reach his eyes. "Great. As if my life isn't messy enough."
"You like drama," I said. "You always did."
He glowered. "I don't like being rescued."
"You won't be rescued," I said. "You'll be watched." I pointed at the little white cat, which was curled like an outline in the corner of my mind. "And fed."
If the system had a voice of pride it would have been the cat purring. "Task progress increased: forty percent," it announced. "Continue interaction."
I hated that cat for being right, but I also loved that it was honest. We began the slow work of becoming "known." I ate with Eben and watched him do a million small opposite things — gentle with birds, reckless with street fights, odd with tenderness for the injured. He had a loyalty that flexed like muscle.
Ellen's presence became steady. Cedric's watchful eyes followed our legal steps. Even the director showed up in the margins when I needed signatures. The world had become a choreography of people who did not expect to care and then did.
There were times I wanted to take Adelaide's body and crawl into the void with the white cat. There were nights when the umbrella felt heavier than a shield and the tasks seemed endless. And there were days when I tasted sun and thought about how small the world could be if you decided to bite a piece of it.
"Do you ever miss your other lives?" I asked the cat once, halfway through another court day.
"It is not about missing," it said. "It is about completion."
"Fine. Then complete," I told it. "Completeness sounds boring. But boring is safe."
"Safe and dull," it agreed. "But you live longer that way."
I laughed, and I kept walking. The umbrella knocked the pavement and kept time.
Several weeks later, after Julianna's public breakdown had run through the feeds and the hospital had been forced to change policies, after Blaise and Alessandra moved out and never came back, after Adelaide's money had been tucked into accounts that I guarded like small birds, there remained one task undone: Eben's fragment.
We had grown enough familiarity that when I approached him with a request he did not roll his eyes. He shrugged and offered his grudging truth.
"Fine," he said. "We could be acquaintances. We could be... less horrible."
"That's progress," I said.
It was not a love story, bound by vows. It was a slow, honest series of arguments and shared cigarettes and an occasional late-night meal at a diner where the waitress forgot our names and just called us "hungry." It was small. It was precise. It was almost human.
One day, we sat on a rooftop and the city breathed around us. He held a paper cup like it was a chalice. I had my umbrella, closed, leaning against my knee.
"I feel like something's missing," he admitted softly. "Like a voice that's been cut out."
"That's the shard," I said. "It will be hard."
He laughed a little. "You make it sound like a treasure hunt."
"It is a treasure hunt," I said. "Only the map is resentment and the treasure keeps moving."
He looked at me as if trying to decide whether I was joking. "What then?"
"Then we find it. Then I take it. Then you put it back together."
"Odd plan," he said.
"It fits you," I replied.
He smiled without meaning to. Then he pulled out his phone, scrolled, and offered me a playlist. I accepted. We were friends enough to steal songs from each other then laugh about it.
Time is a strange thing when you're carrying other people's lives. You learn to mark it by small rituals: the umbrella leaning in the corner, the white cat's daily complaints, a cup of tea cooled to the right lukewarmness. We became a strange little crew: me with my umbrella, Ellen with her patience, Cedric with his justice, Eben with his bruises. The system kept track like a ledger of favors. I kept watch like a clock.
Near the end of the shard hunt, I realized how mean I'd become. I thought of Adelaide, and the way she had died with a half-chewed piece of bread. I thought of the nurses who had been silent, of those who could have stopped a hand and didn't. I thought of Julianna, kneeling under public shame.
"Are you satisfied?" Ellen asked me once, in the alcove of the precinct after a slow day.
"Somewhat," I admitted. "But satisfaction is a moving target for someone who likes the edge."
She laughed. "You're dangerous and reasonable at the same time."
"That's a curse," I said.
The shard came in a small, ridiculous moment. Eben got in trouble and the world showed me a sliver of a memory he had been clinging to: a locked letter from a father who had left handprints on his childhood bed. I stood in the middle of a scrap alley and read it with him, and when the last word fell, the system hummed like a satisfied cat.
"Task complete: fragment recovered," it announced, and the white cat preened, triumphant.
Eben blinked at me like he had seen something new: his own reflection, perhaps. "You did it," he said. "You actually did it."
"No," I said, and meant something else. "We did it."
We didn't make speeches. We didn't declare anything. We let the shard slip back into place and watched Eben like a man who had found a pocket he didn't know he'd lost. He breathed differently after that. He laughed softer. I took pictures of him laughing and burned half of them because I am sentimental enough to be practical and practical enough to be careful.
The system kept its word. My access to power — the small, awkward magic that had surprised and saved me — relaxed like a fist opening. The white cat nodded. "Reward: partial restoration."
"Partial," I echoed. "Tempting."
It wasn't all tidy. Julianna pleaded in court and tried to call for pity. Her family unravelled in the press. They begged and the press watched. But for those who had laughed at a child's pain, for those who had thrown up their hands and said "not me," the world had a way of prying open their palms.
People asked me later if I felt forgiven when the shard was lodged in Eben like a coin slid back into place. I thought of Adelaide and of all the small, sour things the world offered children and how those small things had stacked until a life bent toward the end. I did not feel forgiven. I felt less hungry.
"Do you miss the old you?" Eben asked, once, when we were both tired of answering questions.
"I miss naps," I answered, and then we both laughed.
The public punishment of Julianna remained a stain on the hospital's white walls and a lesson in what happens when someone who hides cruelty is forced into the light. She was not beaten in the square; she was unmade in the bright glare of witnesses. She begged. She tried to deny. She cried. She collapsed. The audience's reaction moved from shock to whisper to voyeurism to an ugly applause that turned into shame. Her reactions were real: first a thin smile, then confusion, then accusation, then a final raw plea. People filmed, took notes, and some even clapped. That punishment — public, messy, watched — changed things. It did not bring Adelaide back. Nothing could. But it did divide silence from the world.
When it was over, Cedric walked with me outside and said, "You didn't have to take it up like you did."
"I did," I said. "Someone had to."
"And the system?"
"The system is terrible at etiquette," I said. "But it keeps its promises."
Weeks became softer. People changed in small arcs. Blaise and Alessandra moved far away and used the money to stitch their shame into a new life. The hospital replaced certain staff and added cameras. Ellen was promoted because she had the steady face for it. Cedric watched the files like a hawk, and Eben trained and hurt and laughed and then hurt again and learned.
As for me, I kept my umbrella. It clicks when I open it and I always know what city I am in by the sound. I keep the white cat in my head like a vocabulary I can't unlearn.
"What's next?" the cat asked one evening, when the sky had the color of tired coins and Eben was somewhere laughing too loud.
I closed the umbrella and tapped the tip. The sound was like a small clock.
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe a new world. Maybe nothing. Maybe more toilets that flush when you want them to."
"Host," it said, with a reluctant purr. "You are not finished."
"Of course I'm not," I said. "Who would be? Life is a list of things left to do."
I looked at my umbrella and then at Eben, and then at the hospital where a small plaque now bore Adelaide Clarke's name — not as an obituary but as a reminder that a child had been seen.
Outside, someone laughed. Inside my skull, the cat blinked in the pale light.
I tightened the umbrella strap. "Come on," I told the cat. "The next world won't overthrow itself."
The cat blinked. "Very well. But this time, behave."
"I will try," I promised, and then the umbrella clicked shut.
The End
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