Ascending

This was written for Mackenzie Davis' Ekphrastic Challenge (Below) based on the allocated photo (above, "Clouds in a blue sky in Settle, by Mike Singleton).

"I reckon its a plane."

"Na, its a cloud."

"There's no cloud makes lines like that."

"How do you know, are you a scientist?"

Billie hunched his shoulders and turned his face away. Kye had won and they both knew it, but the argument was small, and the afternoon was long.

"I bet I can beat you to the top of the hill" he said, nodding towards the crest, two fields away.

"Couldn't." Billie followed Kye's gaze up, out of the shadowed valley. "You run faster but I climb better."

"In your dreams" Kye taunted, but neither boy shifted his tucked limbs and made to set out.

"Can't though. Mum'd hide me if she saw, I'm not allowed past the gate."

Kye glanced at his friend, mirroring his red cheeked pallor in the cold air. "Wuss." He threw the word at Billie, but aimed low. Both of them knew not to cross Billie's mother right now.

The frigid winter afternoon had failed to soften the ground much after the frost of the night, and the stone of the garden wall was achingly cold against the slimness of their buttocks. Kye turned his head to the side, his eyes again glancing over the tightness of Billie's face, his hands resting on his folded knees, white knuckles pressed to his lips, warmed, slightly, by the breath from his nose. Perhaps there was something in the promise of blue skies beyond the ridge, or perhaps there was something swelling inside of him that pushed him to move, but with the thin clatter of a loose stone, Kye's trainers hit the ground on the field side of the wall. "Last one to the tree stinks of poo!" The declaration made it fact, and Billie shoved hard off the stacked stones, landing well forward of the wall as Kye started running.

The hill was steep and slippery, and the boys were panting ten strides in, the cold air searing their throats while their stiffened toes numbly pushed them up the slope. They were level at the first wall, and scrambled over laughing, feeling the rough of the rock against palms and frozen finger tips, launching themselves like streaking joy from the top, the thrilling wind of imagined angry adults at their backs. On up towards the blue they sped, breathing hard, slowing to little more than a stumbling jog as they neared the ridge, and the bare branched tree, from where they knew they could see the world laid out before them.

Kye got there first, by a whisker, and both boys collapsed to the ground, gasping, the white plumes of their breath like the smoking puffs of baby dragons.

"Stinky poo." Kye sent the statement into the sky on an exhalation, and they watched it dissipate into the blue. Sitting up, they squinted out across the valley below, the rooftops and fields, the two-room school, where Billie hadn't been last week, the road, winding away towards Town, and behind them, the shadowed side of the hill, where Billie's house squatted in afternoon gloom.

Billie pulled his hand from his coat pocket, opening his palm to show a tiny scrunched sock in pale pink, an offering in this moment of brightness. Kye did not look away.

"I'm gonna bury it under the tree."

"Ok."

Kye searched for just the right digging stones while Billie circled the tree, seeking the perfect spot, snug between the branching roots. Together, their backs to the sun, they worked to scrape a shallow divot in the hard soil, before Billie laid the sock in its grave, smoothing it with grimy finger tips. A quiet settled for a moment, and Kye felt the squeezing crush of his friend's heart ripple across him from where their shoulders touched. He waited, keeping his own hands planted on the ground, while Billie scraped the fragments of soil back into place.

"You could put a 'P' on the tree." offered Kye, passing Billie the sharper of the stones, watching him carve the letter into the skin of the root.

They didn't dally, when they were done. Billie stood and brushed off his hands. "Beat you back!" And he was away, Kye streaming after, down the hill, over the wall, tumbling, rolling, hoping they weren't seen. At the last, Kye pulled back, slowed on scaling the garden wall, a little, just enough.

"You won! You're still a wazzock though!"

"You're a bigger one."

"See you at school?"

"Not tomorrow. Funeral. Probably Tuesday."

"I'll save your place."