Weekly Writing – April 22 2023

The first kingdom on the stair was little more than a foothill, green and sparse and drowsy with endless summer. Its residents hadn’t set out with any ambitions, and so weren’t bitter to live out their days in those low, lush, mortal climes.
The hundredth kingdom on the stair, they said, was heaven. But that was above every cruel, disappointed realm hewn from ice or lashed together from cloud. Past the sparse, rocky domains where breath was thin and wheezing and death had no guardrails and the citizens were so furious about falling short that they would kill anyone who tried to climb past them.
But if the only way to heaven was up, horizontal life, spent lazily in the plains and valleys, couldn’t be worth much. A green purgatory, a burial and eventual decay into hell. He shouldered his pack, craning his neck and still unable to see as high as the fourth kingdom of cliff and pine and limestone. And from the meandering slope of the first kingdom, he began to climb.