Adrift, Adream, Aweigh

A Flash Fiction Short Story About a Kite

Hues and colors, pastels and paperwork. The milling people and we the kites are its grist flying high into the summer’s noonday: leash’d Icaruses whose dreams are reined by a man with a reel. Among the other kites high above the park, afraid perhaps of floating off and losing all the love from this life, I swivel in the wind to catch sight of my human, there now far below on the grassy knoll, his steady hands a welcome sight: I will not be set adrift this day for he knows well all forms of control. 

A child is sauntering. Please no, my kind human, don’t-- no… I see the reel pass into the hands of the child and my fear returns, multifold in its overwhelming anxiety. The Coast Line and the blue horizon beyond—is my fate now suddenly to drift into the ocean, to degrade as detritus and sink as aluminum sticks? I steel myself, attempt to stay flat and still within the wind. My human stands close to the child with the reel, hands at the ready to grab if need be. I am safe, they will keep me safe. The child is laughing and smiling, his arms moving with my tether in the wind, hands airtight against the reel, my human certainly explaining that holding onto me is of utmost importance until— 

Soaring. I the kite and I the unmoored vessel. My human is reeling from a cut on his hand, bleeding now from trying to grab the reel, grab the line. The hands continue to grab at my useless reel, my dangling uvula out of reach to all parties. 

Hands across the sands accommodate leaps and grasps and near-grabs. I am drifting off to sea and perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, I will wind up enjoying this freedom for as long as I can.

I will be sticks in the ocean, but I fly free for the first time. I will see the ocean, perhaps I will see more whales. 

I drift across the throng on the beach but there is no umbrella that will have me, no canopy for entanglement—they instead seem to shift away, their awnings flourish in laughter—fly, dear kite, fly! Grasping hands, a child on an adults shoulders reaching so far to grab and yet to no avail…

I am over the sea now. The rhythm of the crashing waves announces my permanent departure. I swerve and I swoop and I see my human one last time, his hands on his knees in a defeated half-hunch. In this moment, I am loved. He will miss me along with the chance to mandate my adventures. His figure and his form becomes a pale dot. I return to face the horizon’s abyss before me--the storms and the ever-always attempt to stay airborne. 

We will see where this leads us, whether we die at peace, adjoining the waters, or we are ripped apart, tattered into limbs adrift, or we are struck by lightning, a lone bolt to strike us flat. This is my denouement.

But here, o’er the Pacific, it is lightning that I doubt. I flutter along over tugboats and pontoons, beyond their grasp now and half-concealed among the marine layer save my magenta reel still garnering glances and attention. I am watched as I drift off to sea.