“Look at this,” said Daniel in a general invitation to everyone around as he stood on top of the hill in the middle of nowhere and then fell down the hill, all the way from the top to the bottom, in a series of strangely inelegant rolls.

“Any idiot could do that,” Claire thought to herself, distinctly unimpressed but too hot to actually bother articulating her unimpressedness.

Ethel, who was on her best behaviour today because her birthday was approaching and she didn’t want to give anyone any excuse to not buy her all the things she was currently dreaming of them buying her, somehow stopped herself from replying to Claire’s unsaid insult, “Well why don’t you, then?”

“Because,” Claire would have replied, but she was still too hot, and also now too thirsty. “I’m not an idiot.”

“She never said you were,” Tina didn’t even say to herself, let alone the others, because she was composing a poem about something, anything, that wasn’t the hill they were standing on, or the sun they were standing beneath.

“Yeah, but she thought it,” Agnes soundlessly mouthed to herself while she unpacked the picnic and swatted imaginary flies away from the food and put plates over the glasses of juice to ward off potential wasps.

“We all thought it,” said Daniel, out loud, and out of breath, having followed up falling down the hill, all the way from top to bottom, in a series of strangely inelegant rolls, with falling up the hill, all the way from bottom to top, in a series of surprisingly elegant rolls, which everyone had missed because they were too busy bickering, or dreaming of bickering, at least, because it was too hot and too close to their birthday and too boring and there were too many flies around for them to actually bother bickering today (or at least until later, when they were no longer in the middle of nowhere, but approaching the edge of somewhere instead).

“Anway,” said Daniel. “Look at this!”

__________

Notes:

1. Written on May 23rd, 2026

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