Flash fiction, Sumitra Singam

You-and-Kate in a Field, Loving Me

You and Kate are you-and-Kate with no interruption and that is how you love me. You-and-Kate found me, a mouse hiding in a hole and enticed me out with bits of cheese and memes of wet cats. You-and-Kate laugh like the earth is yearning for your voice and you-and-Kate make me open my throat with your smiles like staves waiting for my notes. You-and-Kate make dinners of bacon-baked bean-avocado-toast and I suggest vegemite to round it out, and you-and-Kate smack your foreheads and say, of course, the very thing! Like my idea has completed an unfinished puzzle, my mouse body nestled within you, the perfect filling to the sandwich. You-and-Kate say it is time to explore now that we are fed, and you-and-Kate hold my trembling, saying I’ll be okay because I’ll be with you. You-and-Kate lift tiny, empty travel bottles from the chemist for our road trip to the Big Banana, and fill some with vodka, and I fill some with hummus so we can be drunk and also responsible, and you-and-Kate hug me and thank me for my mouse sense. Me, and you-and-Kate drive across the vast, red country eating banana-shaped lollies, making banana jokes, singing banana-themed music that is mostly Bananarama. Halfway there, in a field at dawn, the grass thigh-high, none of us thinking of snakes, you-and-Kate run zoomies around me saying you love me like the field loves the burrowing of small animals. We collapse onto the grass, bindis seeding our skin, me, and you-and-Kate. The sky is ink, waiting for our story to unspool into the night. And the story is this. It is you-and-Kate in a field, loving me.