You and I

A flash fiction Substack exploring the profound one-on-one dialogue between everyday people. It should evoke something mundane, if I’m anywhere close to normal. Otherwise, enjoy judging the things I consider usual for what they are — strange, vulnerable, and honest.

You and I #1: Into the Looking Glass

Down in the underworld, time fell still. Only you and I marched forward in its stead. Wilty leaves ambled about in a perpetual cycle, a bashful dance between them and the winter’s stiff whisper. Our fashions disturbed the shy corners of its vignette, prying earthy sepia into technicolor.

You took offence to its existence, hunting imperfections hidden in the greenery. You sought for litter, dogshit and used syringes. The trees didn’t care.

“Since when was this here? How come no one’s ever told me about it?” you asked.

“I’m telling you about it right now,” I said. “I thought you knew.”

Hidden out of the sight lines of the main road, the sunken pathway snuck far into the horizon. I couldn’t blame you for being taken by surprise, but I also couldn’t resist having one over you.

Nicotine prickled dull in the air behind me.

“You’re smoking right now?”

“Christ, this isn’t a fucking nature reserve. It’s a garden off a forty mile road. The gardener’ll come down and give it some Glade if I stunk up the place too much.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, give me a break anyway. It’s bloody cold.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have worn distressed jeans.”

As we toiled for a bench, the conversation dove into your paradoxical love for Primark. For someone who claimed to despise the class divide, you didn’t seem particularly conscious of the oppressed class when they were across the world. You painted grandiose philosophical strokes about the illusion of consumer choice.

Normally, I’d rebut you with vigour. However, the ambience made every argument seem small. We had given up on the bench and stood below a mumbling waterfall, which occasionally lapped at us with its middling pressure. It drowned you out.

“Do you seriously think no one maintains this place?” you asked. “Like it just came to be off weeds and crisp packets?”

“I’m not so daft that I believe it grew in like this. But even if it was created, that doesn’t mean it’s someone’s job to maintain it.”

“You’re mental.”

I took my last puff of your cigarette and handed it back to you.

“It wouldn’t look like this if it was just left on its own,” you continued. “It wouldn’t look like fuck all. It’d be an overgrown mini-tip and you wouldn’t even see the footpath, forget walking down it.”

“People have a non-monetary incentive to take care of it — it’s a nice public space. There has to be a handful of people out there who in the work to keep it like this.”

“And you’re one of them?”

I scratched my cheek.

“No.”

“Me neither. So whoever these people are, let’s hope they keep picking up our slack.”

The waterfall fed us back in a wishful portrait. Your head towered over the jagged canopy behind us, prising your eyes open, gluttonously white. My limbs elevated me to twice my height, closer to heaven, and the rush of water at the mouth of the fall dashed a halo behind my crown. Really, the waterfall was bigger than it had any right to be, and it didn’t want to be alone.

“Can we make a move? I’m freezing my tits off.”

“Yes please.”