Day 5 Winner of Quarto’s 2021 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. Transcript of the prompt can be found here.

The flowers all took to the sun. They bent their necks to reach the light the way an old woman’s cane elbows towards earth. The flowers were once small, remember? You took them in your palm and gave them to the wind. You were the man in the airplane bathing the coast in poppy seeds who might surrender to bright life. Like breadcrumbs to pigeons, you thought. You learned to fly the plane when you were a teenager. You took your girlfriend up with you, showed her how the horizon runs and runs like fire catching a curtain. You vanished into the clouds. Climbing high, higher still, above the lost kites, the thickened water. When you landed the ground gave you new feet. You felt like god that day, her hand against your thigh, the knot of veins in your forearm. You were a boy. You planted the seeds. What was the girl’s name? The roundness of her stomach; the footprints she left in the snow. It doesn’t matter. The coast is bursting in orange now. From up here it looks like it’s one great big goldfish, swimming laps. Breathing water.