This week I am late writing due to me being in Dunedin for the NZ Young Writers Festival! I was chosen to attend a wānanga at the Puketeraki Marae in Karitane outside of Dunedin for two nights which has been so good connecting with other young writers and learning about the whenua land around us.

As a part of the festival there was a flash fiction competition which I won! I’m really proud of the story and am told it will be displayed in the window for the duration of the festival. I’ve included it below as well as this issue’s short story.

Love always x

I had come outside to cry when I heard it. A chirp with descending pitch.

I followed it around the side of the house and knew that I was close when it stopped. In the dark I held my breath and waited. A car drove past. Something fluttered in the tree above. Then a chirp. I put my phone light on half-brightness and started a systematic sweep of the grass. Leaves took the shape of mice and bent blades of grass wētā.

I didn’t hear the sound again and the familiar feeling of failure reminded me why I’d come out here in the first place. I felt a crunch and pop underfoot.

Eyes wide against the darkness I stepped back to shine the light on what I’d stood on. Fragments of white and speckled shell surrounded a small lump of pink flesh. I crouched down. Wet, fine feathers were slick on its head around shadowy, bulbous eyes, still closed. Its bottom half was covered in bits of a half-shucked shell still held together. I gently kicked it under the tree and went back to the veranda.

I sat on the stairs with my knees under my chin like I was stuck in a shell – like I’d fallen and been left to die, too.

Mum found me crying. I couldn’t tell her about the bird, but I told her why I’d come outside. She held me tightly, dried my tears and lead me to my room.

I woke up early, just before the sun, and found the nest. Three eggs sat unprotected in a bed of feathers, hair and bark. I took one.

It grew and I watched. In just over than a handful of days the window was opened, and it flew over the bones of its sibling.

From this vantage point I knew he would’ve seen where I’d stood inside the chapel. Might’ve even seen me watch him from the corner of my eye – if he’d been looking, really looking.

The top of this hill was secluded despite how exposed it was to the elements. We donned our garments, walked, prayed, ate and slept here, watching the world shift below us. So, the first time I saw the glint of blond beyond the entrance, I could’ve been convinced it was the sun glancing off the windows of the valley below.

I crouched against the outer wall, my feet avoiding the flowers where his had not. Inside, the sun stretched diagonally across the pews and rippled over the stone floor. The altarpieces shone gold against the dark wall where thousands of candles had scorched its surface. Our bible sat open for the nuns’ readings. I wondered what he looked for when he stood here, almost hidden. Was it the painting on the far wall? A condensed blur at this angle. Though I knew it was Saint Theodora, I couldn’t see her eyes from here.

An effigy stood at the end of the aisle as if to preside over a ghostly congregation. Many times over the years her soft form had tensed as if she were about to take a breath and speak. She was of an ancestor of ours, from a before time when the residents in the valley had made the commute to join us in worship. The story goes that one day a different god had presented itself to these people and they’d begun to pray in another tongue. Saint Theodora had banned them from practising another faith in our chapel. Our congregation became exclusive. Only those who had dedicated their lives to this God were permitted to worship and inhabit this land.

I couldn’t reconcile someone from the valley coming here. Visions of flames and damnation accompanied the consideration that they might. At least they did until I saw the boy with the blond hair standing in our flowerbeds, watching us prepare for prayer.

I eventually confessed to the nuns that I’d seen this boy many times and thought nothing of it until I’d gone to stand where he stood. I’d realised that from his vantage point, he could see less of the inside of the chapel and our Saint Theodora and instead had a clear view of the sisters preparing for our prayers. He wasn’t curious about the forbidden chapel, he was curious about its occupants.

Walking the grounds, I tried in vain to find the path he took from the valley. The old paths had been left to rewild themselves, forming a religious impasse. The route the nuns took to buy food and wine was closed off by a gate with a tall latch. To navigate the uncharted land in between would be treacherous.

The next time I saw blond hair in my periphery, I neglected my prayer preparations and walked towards it. With my movement, the blond hair disappeared and with it any evidence of the boy.

I didn’t see him again for a long time. Not until he was nearly a grown man. He was apprehended walking the grounds by one of the sisters. I was called it identify him as the boy who’d trodden our flowerbeds all those years ago. I recognised his hair before the rest of him. Like an angel expelled from heaven, light refracted off him like he was made of it. More than that, he was peaceful despite the nuns’ suspicion.

They asked me to question him. To ask him why he’d continued to violate the banishment of his people after all these years? What was he looking for? I stood at the door taking him in, and he considered me. When neither of us spoke, the nuns looked between us and asked if there was something the Lord had been keeping from them – we don’t keep secrets here, not when we’re this close to God.

‘This woman is my mother,’ his voice, so familiar, made the nuns step back, the clouds part outside and the sun break through the window.

Another boy, so long ago – blond hair through my fingers. Spied through a window at sunset, bidden to leave but had returned night after night. Getting to know him in the moments between sleep and dawn. The baby that God had hidden from me until the day he arrived like the blessing I’d sworn I’d never ask for. The next evening, giving the child to his father and asking God to forgive my transgressions, to never let the blond man find his way back up the hill again.

And then my transgressions had trodden the flowerbed, and I’d seen the blond head of the boy fated to live halfway up the hill and pray to two gods who’d instead chosen to walk to the top.