Melissa Llanes Brownlee

The Mote In God’s Eye

She digs herself a hole in the yard, under a blanket of night, under a sky littered with stars. She remembers her mother telling her once that the stars were motes in the eyes of God. She had imagined, as she prayed, her hands held in supplication, that those motes, were angels, or saints, or little children who had died and gone straight to heaven, asking them to bless her and her family, to give her gold stars on her spelling tests, to stop the neighbor boy from teasing her about her wig, to one day be rich and famous. She knows those were selfish prayers, but she doesn’t know what else to pray for. She guesses as her hands begin to bleed, the blood dripping into the hole, smearing her skin as she continues to dig, she could have prayed for world peace. That wouldn’t have been selfish. Then again, maybe it would have been.

Melissa Llanes Brownlee                            

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, 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.