17th April, 2019

Short Story of the Month | ‘A Legend of Flight’, Kate Kelly

Our new Short Story of the Month is ‘A Legend of Flight’ by Kate Kelly.

‘The night you didn’t answer.

I tried to call but each time your phone rang for a while, then went to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. I’d already texted you twice…’

A group of bored teens spend the summer smoking, drinking and laughing, gathered around a statue in their dump of a town. Their fun ends when they realise this lifestyle has consequences. 

Kate Kelly is a marine scientist by day and a writer by night, with short stories published in a number of magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, Red Rock, a Cli-Fi adventure for young adults, was published in 2013. A collection of her short stories, The Scribbling Sea Serpent, is also available. Kate and her family live in Dorset and when she is not writing she can be found wandering the remoter stretches of the South West Coast Path. You can find out more about Kate’s writing at https://scribblingseaserpent.blogspot.co.uk

A Legend of Flight

The night you didn’t answer.

I tried to call but each time your phone rang for a while, then went to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. I’d already texted you twice.

“Is he coming?” one of the others asked. Meg, the Goth girl, face bristling with piercings. “Did he score?”

Of course you did. You’d never let us down before.

The tall boy was scratching. He looked strung out. Face acne pock marked. Jeans torn. He lolled on the raised bed by the side of the road – crushing the dry feeble flowers, worn thin and summer-scorched.

We met as we always did, as the night grew humid and the dusk gathered round. There wasn’t much else for us to do in this dump of a town, so we came together, desultory, drifting, to wash up by the monument they had built on the edge of the High Street; the only thing this town had to be proud of.

It was simply a landmark to me. Somewhere to meet. Until I met you.

It was a plane, made of brass.

Did you know that this town is the home of powered flight? You told me as we sat together that first night. I didn’t know. The plane was part of the fabric of the town, the way the shop fronts, or the parking bays were. I never thought that it might be here for a reason. You made me look at it in a different way.

In 1848, you said. They built an aeroplane – they built it in a disused lace factory. An aeroplane powered by steam.

I laughed – That’s just crazy.

But you pointed to the statue we were sitting beside, the long tail and weirdly ribbed wings, like some freaky prehistoric bird. This is it, you told me. The first steam plane. Kind of crazy steampunk.

I looked at the statue and thought about nutty nineteenth century inventors building their flying contraption in amongst the cobwebs and lace, dreaming of flight. Maybe something meaningful had once happened here.

Maybe.

Sally had brought me along that night. This is where all the cool kids hang out, she said. But it was you who told me about the plane.

We were all bored. We were always bored. There wasn’t a cinema in this town and the youth club was full of little kids. We were fifteen, bigger than youth clubs, ping pong and orange juice. And yet not big enough to join the older kids in one of the town pubs, dated décor and loud live music on a Saturday night.

We watched the people come and go, and listened to the throb of the music in the dark. We didn’t dare try to go in. They all knew us.

Sally often stole cigarettes off her mum and would pull them out of her jacket pocket with pride. Sometimes they were slightly crushed and we’d straighten them out and pass them around, each trying to inhale as much as we could before passing them on. At first I coughed, but after a while I got used to it. Then I knew I was one of the cool crowd.

There was a shop opposite where we used to sit, gathered around that plane. Sometimes a fat girl from the year above us worked there. We would pull faces at her when she wasn’t looking and laugh and laugh. She wasn’t one of us. She wasn’t one of the cool kids. The tall boy handed round some menthol cigarettes. I don’t know where he got them from but they were foul.

We smoked them anyway.

Continue reading ‘The Walk’ for free here.