The Bragging Kite
moral · 5-minute read · 3 min read
Tansy let the string spool through her fingers, feeding the red kite up into a sky scrubbed clean by morning rain. It rose fast, tugging like a fish on a line, and by noon it had climbed higher than every other kite on the hill.
The other kites, a blue box kite and a yellow one shaped like a fish, dipped and bobbed below it. The red kite looked down at them and felt something swell in its thin paper chest.
"Look how high I've gone," it called to a passing swallow. "I bend the sky to my shape. I choose my own height."
The swallow tilted a wing and said nothing, because swallows know better than to argue with paper.
The kite told the same thing to the wind, though the wind was the one lifting it, pressing steady palms against its face and pulling it higher with each gust. "You should be grateful I let you carry me," the kite said. "Not every wind gets to hold something so fine."
The wind did not answer either. Wind rarely does. It only kept doing what wind does, filling the kite's belly, easing it left, easing it right.
Down on the hill, Tansy felt the string grow strange in her hands, slack in one place, taut in another, the kite yanking as if it wanted to be rid of her grip. She frowned and let out a little more line, thinking the wind had shifted.
The kite crowed louder now. "I need no string. I need no hand below. I fly because I am built for flying, better built than any kite that has ever hung in this sky."
It said this just as a gust came sideways, hard and quick, the kind that had scattered leaves across the hill all morning. The kite, busy boasting, did not lean into it the way it had leaned into every gust before. It held itself proud and stiff, sure of its own greatness, and the wind slid right past it instead of under it.
The kite had nothing left holding it up but its own opinion of itself.
Then it fell.
It spun down past the blue box kite, past the yellow fish, a bright tumbling scrap, and landed in a heap of mud at the bottom of the hill, string gone limp beside it.
Tansy ran down and picked it up gently, peeling wet grass from its torn tail. She smoothed its crumpled edge and turned toward the hill again, ready to try once more, string in one hand, kite in the other, waiting for the next good gust to come and lift it, together.
The wind carries kites, not speeches.