by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

fishing coolers engorged with freshly bought beer, uncles smiling and laughing, stroking cigarettes and ukuleles, playing for aunties shoo shooing flies away from the buffet tables, laughing and yelling at kids screaming and tagging around the edges, your friends waiting and talking story, their necks laden with maile, ti leaf, flowers, fake and real, money, candy, yarn, their necks and chins hidden from each other, as you drive to the end of the world, throwing all the leis, including the money, into the pounding surf beneath you, wishing you could join them, escaping the promise of tomorrow

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has work published or forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Reckon Review, The Hennepin Review, Cheap Pop, Ruby Literary, The Razor, Syncopation Literary Journal, Cotton Xenomorph, Milk Candy Review, Lost Balloon, Best Small Fictions 2021, and Best Microfiction 2022. Read Hard Skin, her short story collection, from Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.