Kathryn Reese & Sumitra Singam- Brewer's Choice

Editor's Note: as part of the Brewer's Choice feature for Flight 3, we asked authors Kathryn Reese and Sumitra Singam to respond to interview questions about their collaborative process. This interview is paired with an example of their collaborative writing. We invite you to watch their interview and then read the work within that context.

Interview:

We Rename Mondays and Rainstorms

My mother says I was born in a rainstorm, that her waters broke on the hospital steps, but she can’t remember what time it was, only that it was dark, and she hadn’t slept for months. So when I ask about your birthday, I am thinking about the weather.

I was born on a Monday, and this has set me up well for life. I arrived ready for the work of life. The weather was not discussed as it was irrelevant to my labours. I am not the heart of anything but lists, chores, errands. You, you are the heart of a storm. The only still point in turbulence.

I am a week late, at least, out of sync with the calendar’s dates and the predictions of astrologers who said I would be a boy. I should be a boy. There was a boy, once, and I am supposed to be him, but I have spent too long at sea, gathering myself, before heading for land. 

I ask for your birthdate as a way to land. To find a point in time in which you started, without me, and to count the steps between then and now. I ask for your birthdate as a way to name the time of you, though I hope it will become the time of us.

My name was plucked from the air, chosen for no reason but that it felt good in my mother’s mouth. You, with your lists of who we might have been, are drawing me into an existence I have never known: bone, flesh, home.

Your mother held you in her belly, why would she not wish to hold you in her mouth ever after? And wish for you to hold a taste pleasing to her? My mother named me after a third wife. I cannot believe that my mother wished to hold a third wife in her mouth, more that she wished an effigy of herself into the world. One she could retreat behind, to her own private dreamscape. This is neither bone, nor flesh, though I will argue that it is a home of sorts.

What our mothers birthed were not the creatures of their desires. My mother named me and then said I was a foundling, I tasted too much of salt and sugar cane ash. She put me in a long white dress and gave me back to the church, where I could be taught to be air.

White is for widows - she killed him before he could have you. I applaud her for this, though you have become rarefied air. Will I seek you in the blue of a summer’s day, or the purpling dusk? Or will you simply be - tasteless, odourless - and essential to my life?

I will seek you. I will rush in with the late afternoon, find you with your cup of tea and wrap myself around your skin, bringing honey and the sea.

Am I to know you by honey, then? And salt? You started in your mother’s mouth, are you to end in mine? Will I be a fit home for you? And how, with you inside me, will I fit inside you? The task is to tesselate ourselves - to form a pattern that may be repeated infinitely, to leave no air, no breath, no room for doubt.

I want to give up this affinity for air, this habit of making myself light, this repeated way of disappearing and returning: sea, mountain, sea. The same storm swirling, the same three o’clock downpour, the same shower on the hospital steps.

We will make each other anew with touch. Through my skin, you find yours. Through yours, mine. We rename ourselves today - blossom, honey, salt, love, love, love.

Kathryn Reese and Sumitra Singam are shapeshifters writing from lived experience on Peramangk and Wurrundjeri land in Australia. They’re widely published and were issue buddies in Non Binary Review’s “Old Friends” issue. They’ve both been nominated by Miniskirt Magazine for Best of the Net.
Bluesky: @kathrynreese.bsky.social and @pleomorphic2.bsky.social