Day 5 Winner of Quarto’s 2024 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. View the prompt here

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

I learned to make kites because my mother loved them. There was never much to go around when I was young, but my mother was a seamstress, and so there was always fabric littering our floors. When she fell sick, I learned to stitch and sew the bright scraps of her work into buoyant little birds that floated through the drafts in her hospital room. They danced in the air over IVs and beeping machines, a circus of shimmering colors with hollow like-bones. Once, one slipped out the window and we watched it soar, filaments of prom dress purple, all the way to New Jersey.
This is how I knew that the river could be flown across.
“You have to be still,” I murmur to Em as I gently loop wings over her shoulders, “Be still and let the fabric carry you.”
I choose green for her, like her eyes, like luck, like the wealth I know that the others are building their machines and contraptions to chase to the other side. It’s her little sister that I drape in soft blue, our two best friends in yellows pulled down from the curtains that used to dress my windows. The colors of life, I weave them together in the hopes that they will float us across.
I fly off the wind of my mother’s last breath, for the bills that drowned her as sickness ate her alive. I know Em and her sister are sailing for me. All of us willing to leap for the fields empty and burning across the world in rapid and shuddering reds of fire and famine. I open the window, look over the ledge. The soft light of morning sky breaks like hope through our feathers.