The Letter from the Home Office

First prize, Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction 2022

It spins up on a thermal, fluttering in a sparrow-brown envelope (second class) and when she reaches to catch it, her hot-air balloon lurches. Eleven years aloft in a brittle basket of willow, a moth-wing billow overhead. A hailstorm might send her plummeting, a hurricane spiralling stratospheric. She longs to land — but she is not allowed. When gravity pulls, she feeds the hungry burner forms and proofs, fistfuls of cash, until the firebox burns bright. It’s hard work, staying up — but the view is striking. Green quilts hemmed in hawthorn, ruched with oak and ash. A molecule of sheepdog moves a puddle of milk between meadows. She counts hours on a clock of standing stones. From this height history’s hard edges are buried. Children wave as she floats overhead. Adults squint up, shielding their eyes. ‘Are you on holiday?’ ‘When do you go home?’ Their tinny voices fizz her ether. There are days she wishes for the storm that would blow her far away from this place. But now, sliding her thumb under the brown paper flap, reading the words inside, the seams of her rainbow silk start to shred. Down she goes: through clouds, past radio towers, pigeons dodging. Past bored office-block faces, tumbling through horn-blasting, flag-waving air, the street rushing to meet her in a stink of bins and wet and diesel. Belonging here, she knows, will be a new kind of distance. This is the price of the ground beneath her feet.

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‘The Letter from the Home Office’ is published in ‘Beached’, Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards Volume 4, 2022