by Eleanor Marsden
FIRST PLACE in September 2025 Competition.
There was no sound quite like it, that summer: a drowsy, beating buzz that hummed in the ears and serenaded the luxuriating hillside. Shards of mediterranean shape-shifted beyond the olive trees, cutting the heat with a glistening clarity.
Everything was alive with song. Ochre-striped bees spiralled between petalled heads, marshalled by hoverflies, ignoring beetles shuffling amongst the stamens. Butterflies flirted for position, too, myriad wings susurrating through the air. I stretched out my fingers until the pads brushed the uppermost reaches of the bank next to me, caressing grass-tips and petal-edges with the whisper of the breeze. I felt the sun heat my face; brushed away the tiptoeing of flies on my skin and ducked from the whining plea of a mosquito.
The unmistakeable helicoptering of a masonry bee faded in, a bauble on wings, careening left and right until the black-blue berry of a body hurtled into view. I watched it scout out the patch of wild flowers alongside me, before defying gravity back towards its hideaway. Startled by this beat-boxing interloper, a cloud of insects rose up as one, leaving behind only the quivering beetles.
I had just recognised the whirring of a hummingbird hawk moth, a velvet blur crossing the mid-morning sky, when something landed by my feet with a rattle. The grounded cicada proceeded to chirrup indignantly, its pride wounded by the constant shushing of its fellows.
No, there was no sound quite like it, that summer… At least, that’s what I imagine it was like. It’s what I hear, in my head. What we all hear, deafened by the quiet. We wiped out the insects a generation ago, and now, in my short life, in the unfeasible silence, I fill my head with the sounds of the life we lost.
Judge’s comments: LUSH AND OPULENT WRITING, WITH A REAL SUCKER PUNCH ENDING. WELL DONE!
