10
It didn't take long for the shock to set in. Within two minutes of leaving the ground Mary's hands were clammy and cramped from clinging to the distastefully whimsical handle of the umbrella, and although Mary could see that this insufficient grip could be life-threatening, she couldn't seem to muster any definitive emotional reactions to the fact. Feeling with a good deal of certainty that she ought to be terrified, she tried to wring a logical plan of action from her stunned mind and found that her brain had ceased to function. All she seemed capable of doing was watching with a numb remoteness as the frantic people and stalwart buildings below her slowly became blurred shadows in the downpour, growing further and further away until all she could distinguish of the earth was a vague, lumpy gray mass.
Some vague amount of time later, as the ground below her came to the brink of disappearing altogether and the first hints of unease were beginning penetrate Mary's stupor and send sharp stabs into her gut, the torrential rain suddenly began to lose integrity and break up into millions of droplets that spread together into such a dense cluster that Mary felt as though she was being tugged upward through a vast lake, closing in around her and making it difficult to breathe. Just as she began to panic in earnest the cloud suddenly gave way, and the sun burned so fiercely into her eyes that she started and gasped, and would undoubtedly have fallen all the way to her death on the earth below had her hand not been cemented to the parrot by some otherwordly force.
And then the glare faded from Mary's eyes and the sight of the clouds rolling away in sun-goldened billows beneath her feet was so magnificent that the terrifying distance of the earth below her, and the hardened knot of discontent in her chest, and every thought, and every breath suddenly became superficial, and all she could do was stare, with her whole face open wide to drink in the scene. She felt awash in the bliss that is born of identifying something as infinitely more perfect and awe-inspiring than oneself, so wonderingly joyful that she had a whimsical, silly sort of fancy that her heart would break with the beauty of it. With some subconscious part of her mind she had always suspected that when the sky turned dark and crowded and pounded the earth with unfeeling rain it was because the sun had abandoned Mary's little corner of the world, relinquishing it to the crowded misery of reality; and now, to be shown, in the most vivid, strikingly true way that she was wrong, cast a whole new shade on Mary's soul, murmuring vibrant suggestions of a hue of life yet undiscovered, one that would completely demolish every perception and thought and feeling that Mary had ever experienced, only to reform them with all the hidden beauties exposed and gleaming.
All this passed through Mary's being in one warm, swooping rush; but Mary herself felt as though she had passed whole years of her life in that one moment. It was with mild surprise that she looked down and saw that the last few wisps of cloud had only just slithered from her toes. She felt a rush of laughter at her fanciful rhapsodies pressing inside her chest, and, prompted by the insatiable joy that still pulsed inside her, obligingly gave it voice.
The somewhat hysterical nature of this laughter was what finally began to tug at the edges of her reason. Taking stock of her circumstances with a briskness that was decidedly milder than usual but no less practical, Mary decided that, seeing as her hand was evidently irreversibly coupled with the umbrella that was somehow keeping her afloat, she had no reason to fear a plummet to her death in the near future. Further (and she had a feeling that she should perhaps be more concerned about this), for some indefinable reason she felt almost certain that were she to fall, no harm would come to her. Reasoning was nonexistent, but she nevertheless felt undeniably safe.
However, that still left the issue of how to restore herself to earth before the ominous whine of hunger that she suddenly became aware was issuing from her stomach grew into anything more troublesome. This dilemma proved itself to be easily resolved, for the inkling of the predicament had no sooner presented itself in Mary's mind than the umbrella was caught by a sudden wind, swift but gentle, that propelled her over the clouds at a rate that seemed fantastically disproportional to the refreshing breeze that played lazily amongst her curls.
Gradually the storm broke up beneath her and Mary began to catch glimpses of sunshine-splashed hills and glittering gray lakes through the fragmented clouds. She had just begun to enjoy the unorthodox trip when it ended abruptly with a whoosh of wind that placed her gently on an irrationally solid cloud, and she found herself gazing through soggy, sooty air at a grimy landscape, painted in a patchwork of sullied shades of gray and sparse muted greens and giving off a low, busy hum. The light was dimming as the sun sank lazily down into the golden warmth of the horizon and Mary beheld London once more.