Memory is a reluctant meadow

fiction by Kathryn Reese & Sumitra Singam

I’m holding a baby…or maybe I’m being held, when I was a baby. There was a baby and she was held in a hand-knitted blanket. Pink threads, lace, holes like stars scattered…

…back to our rooms - it’s not time for lunch - crabby nurses, the smell of cabbage limp over everything - this is no home of mine.

I was holding a toddler, and she gummed cucumber and rusty nails, and mother came to soothe the sting.

An abrasive hand at my wrist feeling for a pulse–white uniforms, white sheets, starched hard. There has been hardness and desiccation. My skin has not felt the skies emptying onto it in years. 

These lips feel like a drought riverbed. Have they ever been kissed? 

There was a schoolgirl and she was pushed into the mud. Remembering is like any other bodily function. Mother used to say I should relax and take deep breaths. It’s because I was born a girl - 

my belly so big and hard and round, a white sheet on the washing line in a windstorm, billowing with nothing at all.

I am holding a baby, or being held, lying on a pink knitted blanket and there are no stars, only eyes.

There are pills and pills and pills, and tea and biscuits at eleven. There is a piano and jaunty folk songs, a circle of rheumy eyes staring into the distance - clouds billow like sheets in the wind, and the music swells and swells

There was a girl, maybe, it was me, maybe. She was in a meadow in full spring, the feeling of it in the runny nose, scratchy eyes, a glory of buttercups and snowdrops  - she loved this meadow like a friend. This girl ran and as she ran, her fingers brushed the grass and each individual blade kissed her.

There is a thermostat - dry and too cool. There is no magnolia or eucalyptus. The birds do not call in their secret language.and my reply chafes at my lips for the birds won’t hear it and the nurses won’t hear it and the baby, the baby, will the baby hear it? 

There was a bride and she thought she would soar with happiness.

And she still has green fingertips, that girl, she never could get quite clean, even with all the bleached uniforms and starched sheets and bloated belly. 

Wind and rain and thunder, and now there is none.The baby wrapped in pink hand-knit lace and held–or left crying under a mosquito net in mid-afternoon magnolia shade, dark, cloying, tasting of storm. 

Kathryn and Sumitra are shapeshifters writing from lived experience on Peramangk and Wurrundjeri land in Australia. They are both widely published and were delighted to find that they are issue buddies in the Non Binary Review “Old Friends” issue and have both been nominated by Miniskirt Magazine for Best of the Net. Find them on bluesky: @kathrynreese.bsky.social and @pleomorphic2.bsky.social