Life Is A Long Walk
Photography by George Priniotakis
“A human figure in a dystopic forest scene. Shot on the mount Dirfys in the island of Euboea, Greece.”
Happy Meal
Fiction by Sumitra Singam
CW: Mention of abortion
The ghost of my aborted baby appears in the passenger seat somewhere between Glenrowan and Wangaratta.
“You should be in an appropriate restraint,” I say, trying to keep it cool.
“Oh, now you’re worried about my safety?” she says. Her voice rasps, like she has a three-pack-a-day habit.
The bland stretch of bitumen is empty apart from my car, and whatever has just materialised inside it.
“Are we there yet?” she says.
“Really?”
“I just want to know where we’re going.”
“Home. Sydney. Well, to my parents.”
Why isn’t she the size of a fifty-cent coin? Why are her eyes so well-formed, and how can they stare at me so fixedly?
“Ow,” she says, “Where did this cactus come from?”
It’s a potted ferocactus, bulbous and bristling with needles; the one my mother gave me when I moved to Melbourne. The one I killed by overwatering. The core has rotted into a crater and gives off a musky, earthy stink.
“I don’t want it next to me. Move it somewhere!” she says, her voice setting my teeth on edge.
“I didn’t put it there, it just appeared! You probably brought it with you from… wherever you’re from.”
“I’m not from anywhere, except your womb.”
I think of my flat belly, how it always feels hollow now. I think of a man with a kind face. A third date, the woody scent of him, the surprisingly tasteful décor in his home. Him holding me tenderly afterwards, asking if I wanted something to eat. Me sliding away from the wiry hairs on his arm, saying I had to go, I had work in the morning.
Peaches comes on, singing about fucking the pain away.
“What’s fuck mean?”
I turn the music off.
“Wanna play Eye Spy, mum? I spy with my little eye, something beginning with… A!”
“Air con.”
“Nope.”
“Antacids.”
“Nope.”
“I give up.”
“Aborted 8-week-old foetus! And also, an almost-mother!”
“Jesus. Why the hell are you here?”
“Aren’t you supposed to work that out? And I disappear when you do?”
I wonder if it’s time to stop for a petrol station pie.
“Full of preservatives. And it isn’t real meat.”
“You can read my mind?!”
“Not really. You had a lot of pies in those eight weeks.”
I remember having just enough energy to pull in to the petrol station on the way home, buy three of the pies festering in the warmer, scoff them in the car, then get home and collapse. I remember puking in the morning, then immediately feeling ravenous for the things again. I remember wishing I had someone to cook me something wholesome and nourishing.
“It’s cold in Melbourne,” is what I say in reply.
“You don’t have to live there, you know that right?”
I think of how easy it had been to leave Sydney for this shitty job. How I thought I needed space to really be me. How my parents fussed, throwing me a million going-away parties. How I rolled my eyes at it all.
“Why are you driving a thousand kilometres just for a weekend? You’ll have to turn around and drive back the minute you arrive.”
“It’s for Mothers’ Day,” I say.
“Riiight, Mothers’ Day,” my aborted foetus says.
I put the radio on. Stevie Nicks sings about bells in the night.
“Wow, she’s amazing, would you have played this for me as a lullaby?”
“It’s not exactly sleepy.”
“So, what would you have played?”
“I don’t know? Classical?” Why am I answering these questions?
I think of the kind-faced man texting me about the Melbourne Symphony playing Ravel, and whether I wanted to go. I think of how I never replied to him. I think of how, alone in bed at night, I still draft texts to him, deleting without sending.
“I wonder if you would have taken me for long drives to get me to sleep?”
“I don’t know, maybe. I love driving.”
“Why?”
“Well, there’s nothing else you can do but drive.”
I think of taking a mifepristone tablet, feeling like I was swallowing a bomb. How I had to hold my nerves in like a bag of chittering birds for the two days before the misoprostol tablet. How I just got in my car and drove and drove and drove.
“So, what happens when you get to your destination?”
I think of how I have moved house three times in the ten months I have been in Melbourne. How I have changed my regular coffee shop, gym, supermarket repeatedly, trying to find the right one. I think about the word ‘destination’.
“Mum, you’re crying.”
I think of the other things that should be in the car with us. The ghost of my first friendship with Jiying, whom I sacrificed to be besties with Mackenzie Allen. The ghost of my first real relationship, which ended when he wanted us to move in together. The ghost of all my mother’s texts to me these last few months. I think about what it might be like to just stop for a minute.
“Hey kid, how about we have a real meal?” I ask. And I pull into McDonalds, order a Happy Meal. We sit for a bit.
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut writing in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?).
sumitrasingam.squarespace.com
BS: @pleomorphic2.bsky.social
sumitrasingam.squarespace.com
BS: @pleomorphic2.bsky.social
