The afternoon the kite would not come down

We had been warned the rain was coming. You can always tell, where I grew up, by the way the afternoon turns the colour of weak tea and the swifts begin flying low over the field. My niece is nine and does not believe in warnings. She had a kite shaped like a swallow, paper stretched over a frame of split bamboo, and she had worked it higher than I would have allowed if anyone had asked me, which nobody did.

The wind that arrives before a storm is not like ordinary wind. It is in a hurry. It took the swallow and kept taking it, pulling the line out through her fingers until the reel ran thin, and the kite became a small dark mark against a sky that had stopped being blue. She was laughing at first. Then the rain came, the heavy kind that lands one drop at a time and leaves a coin of wet on the concrete, and she stopped laughing and turned to me, because the kite would not come down.

I knew what was going to happen and I did not say so. The line went tight, then tighter, and then it did the thing a line does when it has decided: it gave, somewhere up near the top, with a sound almost too small to hear. The swallow hung still for a moment, as if it had not yet been told, and then the wind had it completely, and it went over the trees and was gone.

She cried the way children cry when the thing is genuinely gone and not merely delayed. I did not tell her it was only a kite. It was not only a kite. We had made it on the kitchen table over two evenings, and she had chosen the paper, and there is no version of that afternoon where losing it does not matter.

What I told her, once she was ready to hear anything, was that the best kites are the ones you fly too high. A kite you keep close is safe and it is also a little boring, and some part of you always knows it. The swallow had gone exactly where she sent it. It had simply kept going.

A kite you keep close is safe, and some part of you always knows it.

We made another one the following week. It was not the same, and I was glad it was not the same. She gave it a longer tail and a worse temper, and when she flies it she lets out a little less line than before, though not much less, because she is nine and the whole point of her is that she does not believe in warnings.

I write for readers her age, and this is most of what I know about it. You put something up into a sky that is bigger than you planned for, and sometimes the wind takes it clean out of your hands, and you stand in the rain feeling the exact weight of what is missing. And then, because you are the kind of person who makes things, you go back to the kitchen table and you start again. The second swallow is flying as I write this. I can see it from the window, too high, exactly as it should be.

If kites fill your afternoons too, A Kite for the Quiet Between Storms follows Sivi and her mother's unfinished kite after the wind between the sky islands goes missing.