Melissa Llanes Brownlee
I tell my best friend from church as we sit by the baptismal font, a deep little pool, perfect for two, with all of these haole boys from the mainland trying to convert us, their elder name tags, their fair skin, their white button up short sleeved shirts, so eager to talk with us, to explain the Book. I don’t know why my mother decided to go back to the church after we’d been out for four years, but I like these boys. We lick our lips, pull our dresses a little higher over tanned legs, tricks learned to lure white boys like them, watching their eyes linger and then pull away, but our gravity is too hard to resist and they circle us, still talking about God and Jesus, asking us to pray with them, and we kneel, pulling our dresses tight against our bodies. There is something in me that wants to see how far they’d be willing to go with a girl who was willing to listen.
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Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Quarterly West, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Matchbook, Bluestem, Sunlight Press and Cutleaf Journal, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and look out for Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.