The three runners-up in the 2024 Creatives Flash Nonfiction Contest, kindly supported by Fort William Mountain Festival and the Highland Bookshop. The visual art runner up was also featured in this category, ‘Texture’.
Feelings
by Sue Trees
Run your fingertip across the Cairngorms’ rolling plateau, Suilven’s ice-sculpted shoulders and the stone-circled swell of Bennachie. Feel the shattered jags of the Cuillins, the scree skirts of Torridon.
Touch the crusted tops of stacks Handa and Gaada. Scratch the gritty, sediment suites of the Dunnet cliffs and stroke the silky strands of Camusdarach and Luskentyre.
Skip to the hard-knotted isles of Sula Sgeir and Fuaigh Mòr. Now feel the crumples and creases, the pocks and pools of the Flow Country. Slide across the wind-wrinkled skin of Loch Quoich, dip into the sheep-nibbled glens of Clova and Esk and follow the silver-threaded burns.
Trace the twist of tracks and byways, the ribbon of rail across Rannoch Moor. Feel the points of pines, the stubble of heather, the pleats of peat, the corrugations of idle lazy beds.
What you’re feeling is just the surface.
What lies beneath is another story.
Advice from a Place of Love
by Lauren Kedar
A friend is losing her sight.
It scared me at first, even though I had no right to feel that way. I clung onto the sunset as though it was my last, watching as the sky burned and the moon rose and the snow turned from bullet-blue to strawberry ice cream. How beautiful, I thought, and how terrible not to see it. But then the night came, and I began to feel it too: a crispness in my lungs, a bitter stillness on my cheeks. The snow had the feel of peppermint creams. Lower still, I found a silken bed of larch needles and claimed a handful for myself. Delicate. Tingling. Thousands of nerve cells firing, screaming for the attention I’d never given them.
My advice? Go outside, while you can, and feel the world. Smell it – taste it, even – but never, ever, just look.
Dunfermline Wall
by Scott Anderson
Lead image: Loch Torridon on a calm summers morning by martin bennie on Unsplash