Fia slept in the soil (flash fiction)

Fia slept in the soil and rested teacups on the tree roots. roots and branches; those strange tree limbs seem so much more solid before they get dizzy and break in the wind. the sharp twigs scrape. 

the leaves told Fia stories; always the same poetry of colours and floating and clinging until the final moment when story and leaf are taken by an unknowing breeze. they drift downwards and die and decay into Fia's earth bed. (these leaves are like little wings without a body; too small to fit her shoulder blades.) Fia liked the way the leaves changed; whilst her skin stayed pale and breath stayed soft, she could watch them grow and die. 

she watched the people from the city too. she watched the boy. he'd spoken to her once or twice. she'd made him laugh and maybe he would have stayed to see the place where the clouds watched her but he couldn't understand why she slept in the soil. 

Fia had forgotten why too. some days she longed for a bed, but she didn't know where to find one. 

buildings in the city grew out of stone and sighed unmoving and regimented along the high street. Fia didn't belong in that place but she wanted to know the boy who did. she took some leaves in her purse so she wouldn't be lonely, tucked her bottom lip under her teeth, and unlike those leaves which headed to the soil, that day Fia escaped. 

inside shopping centres the sky didn't change colour and Fia noted that cement is firmer than soil and that it doesn't like your feet as much. no one else seemed to mind so Fia pretended that she didn't either. but whilst the leaves were crumpling and ripping apart in her bag and she couldn't dispute that she knew how they felt. 

so she went back to the woods and talked to the insects instead. they never talked back. 

the end