The Bragging Kite

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. By noon it had climbed higher than every other kite on the hill.

The blue box kite and the yellow one cut in the shape of a fish creaked and bobbed below it. The red kite looked down at them and swelled in its thin paper chest.

"Observe the altitude," it called to a passing swallow. "I have put the whole hill beneath me before lunch, and I shall choose another height when the view here stops flattering me."

The swallow tilted a wing and said nothing, having somewhere to be.

"Gusts come sideways after noon," said the blue box kite.

"They did yesterday," said the yellow fish.

"Took the tail off a kite your size."

"Yesterday," said the red kite, "was a small day, and small days produce small opinions. You are a box. You are a fish. I take no advice from tackle."

The box kite said nothing. Neither did the fish. Below them the hill went on being a hill.

The kite said much the same to the wind, which was the one lifting it, pressing steady palms against its face and hauling it higher with every gust that came up the long green side of the hill. "You should be grateful I permit you to carry me," the kite said. "Not every wind is given something so fine to hold."

The wind did not answer. Wind rarely does. It went on filling the kite’s belly, easing it left, easing it right, holding it up as it had held up every kite ever flown from that hill and every kite that ever would be. The wind has the patience of a thing never once asked its opinion.

Down on the hill the string went strange in Tansy's hands. Slack in one place, hard in another, the kite yanking to be rid of her grip. "Come down a bit," she said. The line burned a red stripe across her palm, and she let out more of it.

"I need no string," said the red kite. "I need no hand below it and no hill under that hand. I fly because I am built for flying, better built than any kite that has ever hung over this hill, and when I have finished with this height I shall send word down about the next one."

It said this as the gust came sideways, hard and quick, the kind that had been rattling leaves across the hill all morning and bending the long grass flat in waves that anyone on the ground could see coming. The kite was busy. It did not lean. It had leaned into every gust before that one, without once noticing it was doing so, and now it held itself proud and stiff, and the wind went past it and not under it.

There was nothing holding the kite up then but its own opinion of itself.

Then it fell.

It went down past the blue box kite, past the yellow fish, a bright scrap turning over and over like a dropped ribbon, and landed in the mud at the bottom of the hill with the string gone limp beside it.

Tansy came down and picked it up and peeled the wet grass off its torn tail. She smoothed the crumpled edge, turned back toward the hill with the string in one hand and the kite in the other, and waited for the next good gust to come and lift them both.

The wind carries kites, not speeches.