You Think You Don't Like Capers
but the truth is you never tried them, not until the tapas dinner party at your friend Raquel’s house, the one where you bring Patatas Bravas in your mother’s oven dish which you forget to take back home and never see again, and Angie brings a salad and her older brother Zach who you’ve never met before, who has a moustache with waxed ends you think looks totally ridiculous because it’s not the 1800s, and Raquel’s boyfriend Owen brings a bag of Doritos and a six-pack of beer which he drinks by himself and you wonder how he gets away with making zero effort when you spent all that time parboiling potatoes and chopping chillies and now you can’t even touch your eyes let alone itch anything down there without wishing you hadn’t and you think that men with moustaches have never been your thing but by this time you’ve had several tequilas whilst you wait for the food to come out and Zach is looking pretty hot from where you’re sitting and you can tell he’s looking at you too, over the salt-encrusted rim of his shot glass, and then finally Raquel serves up her baked halloumi dish with capers in the sauce, and by this time you are starving and you load up your plate and don’t even think about the capers until you bite down on one and it’s only then you realise that capers are great, they add a juicy saltiness all of their own, and you wonder what else you might like that you never tried before.
Rebecca Field lives and writes in Derbyshire. She has work in several print anthologies and has also been published online by The Phare, Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, Milk Candy Review and Ellipsis Zine among others. Tweets at @RebeccaFwrites
A version of 'You Think You Don't Like Capers' was previously longlisted by Reflex Fiction quarterly competition in winter 2020.
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