[Travel Writing] Local Color

Read the winning entry for our May 30, 2025 prompt, "Geographic Reflections"

Neurodivergent Narratives Presents: Local Color (Colour!) Contest

Write where you are. No, literally.

She Wants Her Floodplains Back
by Hedda Asklund

My home is an active crime scene.

When I step out the door, it is onto land stolen from the river, from the Mersey. It’s not long now until she gets it back, I think.

Mersey is, at least for this small island, a great river. She has three mothers: the Irk, Irwell and Medlock. They drain down rainfall from vast moors, the Limestone Peaks that hold the North like a spine.

Mersey is a great force on the verge of death. Like most rivers, she is being killed. By sewage, fertiliser runoff, the constant spite slowly suffocating all life within her. But also constraint. Dikes, levees, and dams slow her flow from heath to sea. They deny her dancing. Prevent her from bending, changing course, growing new curves where she needs to. These constraints protect the golf courses, the shopping centres, the housing developments, sure. But they kill her all the same.

So I cannot leave my house and not think of her. I walk across reclaimed floodplain, past the increasingly neglected yard of the cereal factory, always rumoured to be closing. Through industrial sprawl and towards our city’s finest monument to overstimulation. The Trafford Centre. And though I am sad for Mersey, I can see she has allies and agents everywhere. Sow-thistle’s greasy spines, Thale-cress stubborn and nodding. Butterfly-bush, willowherb, cats-ear. Glorious so-called weeds that defy estate managers’ attempts to erase them. They refuse the logic of concrete, erode the edges of the Control Cult that has seized the land here.

The Cult’s order is a desperate one, a fleeting, unstable one. They want things normal, inert, neat. Life resists them in all dimensions, you need only crouch down to see. Crevice-growing herbs don’t accept it, we don’t have to either.

Though I live on a reclaimed floodplain, I choose to love Mersey. I don’t welcome her death, and I don’t welcome her constraint. I will do what I can to reduce the harm done to her, but I also know full well that she will, whatever happens, be born again, whatever cruelties are done to her. As floods become more regular and more destructive, this reclaimed floodplain will become harder and harder for humans to monopolise. Did you know that levees cause the reclaimed land (a.k.a. polders) to sink over time, thus increasing their vulnerability to flooding? We cannot truly beat the river, only delay our own learning process. The levees we set against the rest of the world will not hold. So why not honour Mersey? Why not learn to adapt, to live together, to sacrifice the things that we don’t need, that we really don’t enjoy anyway?

I look at these places, at these boxy units identically clad with the colours of a forced smile, at the signs in drive-thrus warning me ‘do not leave your car,’ and I dream of it all under water, washing downstream. Patiently eroded by Mersey, into something conducive to life again.

Home Is Where The Heart Is
by Ryan Gillis

Home is here, home is now,

The water’s clear, but don’t ask how,

Familiar smells, and often sounds,

Of skies so clear, we brought them out,

Home is there, home is then,

If homes a place, then why’s it when,

People grow, emotions mend,

But then they go, our bitter end,

In their place, there lies a hole,

A daunting face, a mindless soul,

An empty sound, they take their toll,

I guess for now, I’ll pay in woes,

Home is here, home is now,

The skies are clear, but don’t ask how,

A gentle touch, a subtle town,

My heart is near, so home is now. 

"A Qallunaat in Inuit Nuangat"
by Rebecca Rogge