You used to run down hills with me, do you remember? Even when the ground was still damp and the sun was still being desperately persuaded over the horizon.

“Why do you have to be so slow?” she drawls, a smirk forming behind the cracks in her dry lips.
I shrug.

“Lethargy.”

“I don’t even know what that means!”

The sunlight forces me to squint at her, a dark grey paper cutout of a girl, accompanied by the shadow longer, even, than the scarf that she loops round her neck.

I find looking down from a height of 37,000 feet settling, because when everyone is semi-torpid but you and the pilot, and your mouth still tastes of slightly off pasta, it feels as though life has blended itself into some surreal dream. You hate airplanes though; they made you feel kinda ill. From all the way up here, I can’t even spot people because they are too small. I can spot shadows though, the only monochrome in a landscape drenched in marigold. Ant-like humans create grotesque parodies of Typhoeus. More at 6.

I watch her as she stands amongst those long September rays, the ones that have a habit of yawning their yellow-ochre across the fields and streets, as the sun droops slowly, lazily, below the horizon.

You said you felt as though they were filling your whole body with orange cordial and hope.
I feel as though my body is slightly hollow, but your words echo round, and I am satisfied with some semblance of contentment that I find.

I look down at the jumble of sloping almost-squares full of grain, their hedge-borders lines drawn by small children in smudged green felt-tip.

“They’re are so haphazardly arranged. If I was planning fields I’d map them out with a ruler, and make them all equal and matched; they’d be better than way.” I say.

“Of course you would,” is your answer, and you laugh, low and jolting, an echo of the plane’s engine.

By Olly M., 16, Cheltenham