it was just a fling, we tell ourselves as our brains ramp up and spiral down, our hearts shooting blood through our veins, racing past our hyperventilating diaphragms to our toes and back around to our heads, and we can’t believe our bodies can feel so high and so low at the same time—telling ourselves they won’t call or text or send smoke signals no matter how much we stare at our phones or out our windows, hoping for some hidden message in puffed clouds
but all we see are a scattering of dead black flies on our windowsills, and we want to join them: our legs up in the air, our bodies, empty husks, drained of fluid and need.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in The Rumpus, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gigantic Sequins, Cream City Review, Cincinnati Review miCRo, Indiana Review, The ASP Bulletin, Craft, swamp pink, Pinch and Moon City Review, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story melissallanesbrownlee.com.
Header photograph by Holly Pelesky
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
Vast 