The runner-up in the 2024 Creatives Flash Fiction Contest, kindly supported by Fort William Mountain Festival and the Highland Bookshop. The theme for this category was ‘Symbiosis’.
What is a kingdom?
by Harry Clough
I’ve recently become an adult, learning how to live in a monochrome world. Sitting near a familiar patch of stinging nettles, I can only see one caterpillar feasting and pollinating with slow deliberation.
I still don’t know what you meant when you said, ‘All you have is time; time to forget, time that will fade beyond the endless summer, into the waiting sunset.’ We fed off each other for that short, brilliant time and I am hungry again.
I thought coming here would help, retreating to where the grass is warm and the sky is royal blue, where a cloud is searching for somewhere to call home.
I’m sat in my childhood garden, looking at the nettles that splay out like the rooftops of a city pressed against the falling sky, wondering how a caterpillar can learn to fly, while I have been thrown back to earth.
Lead image: Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash