Flash Fiction

      I am twelve years old and I am full of sky. I can taste it in mama’s mashed potatoes, in a glass of sweet tea, in a quick lick of brown sugar, something so wild and blue and spicy that it stands on my tongue even after I’ve swallowed. I can smell it on the walls of our house, every brick tingling my nose and scaring up the  hair on the backs of my hands. Molly didn’t even know hands had hair, when I told her she couldn’t stop laughing at her hands, didn’t look at mine with trembling fingers and electrified hair follicles. When I stand outside I can smell taste feel hear see the sky and that’s when I know deep in my soul that sky is what I’m made of. I hold tight to the grass so it can never take me back, and when I sleep, I tie my wrists to my heaviest books just in case my ceiling isn’t strong enough to keep me in. But I know if the sky wants to swallow somebody, it could swallow the whole world to get to her.