It’s waiting to reach its impossibly long arms for the shirt you ripped at recess, the one you
weren’t supposed to wear to school. It wants to trace its knife sharp fingers through
notebooks filled with the hundreds of I won’t draw in my notebooks during class lines you
had to write because you were caught drawing in your math, English, social studies, science
notebooks again and again. It’s ready to drool over the jeans you bled through, nestling its
heart shaped head, veined and bumpy like the red anthuriums in your mother’s garden, in the rusty bloom. It craves the tears you’ll shed when your mother finds these things under your bed. Its spindly arms and legs ready to grab you and hold you safe among your hidden things.
weren’t supposed to wear to school. It wants to trace its knife sharp fingers through
notebooks filled with the hundreds of I won’t draw in my notebooks during class lines you
had to write because you were caught drawing in your math, English, social studies, science
notebooks again and again. It’s ready to drool over the jeans you bled through, nestling its
heart shaped head, veined and bumpy like the red anthuriums in your mother’s garden, in the rusty bloom. It craves the tears you’ll shed when your mother finds these things under your bed. Its spindly arms and legs ready to grab you and hold you safe among your hidden things.
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, The Razor, Milk Candy Review, Cotton Xenomorph, and Atlas + Alice. She is in Best Small Fictions 2021, Best Microfiction 2022, and the Wigleaf Top 50 of 2022. Read Hard Skin, her short story collection, from Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.
Lost Balloon 