Mine
- Oct 29, 2021
- 2 min read
by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
My lover left me when our twins died. His tusks dragging across the blood red mud outside my home, furrows of anger and loss, marred by the passing of his stamping hooves. He knew I hated the boar shape of him, full of black bristles and roughened skin. Our twins had the fiery glow of my skin and hair, the darkness and cunning of his eyes. I had loved him from the first moment I saw him flowing from bird to boar to fish to man. His being as flexible as my own. He hadn’t been mine then. I had stolen him from my younger sister. It was easy. She was cold and brusque, her beauty, chilling, her shapes, the falling snow, the white owl. She could not offer him the fire, the tide of living rock that I could, and he came to my arms willingly.
I found him with her one day as I carried his children inside me, overripe and painfully distended. Her freezing touch was a balm to his hot and sweaty skin. I knew she loved the boar shape of him and he welcomed her coldness, a salve to my constant heat. I exploded with lava, blasting their ardor in my rage and jealousy. My sister hooted, flying high away from me as he ran to the ocean, knowing it would stop me. I stood on the edge, my bulging belly hiding my feet as they continued to pour myself in his direction, the ocean lapping at my cooling skin. I welcomed him back to my bed when he begged because I really did love him.
Our twins came bursting forth in fire, a girl, and animal screams, a boy. I wiped them clean of their gore and nestled them on my breast, my body, a safe haven. I fed them and rocked them and we fell asleep. I awoke to a keening of grief, piercing and long. My lover had transformed into a patchwork of shapes, fish scales and stripes, hooved tipped hands, boar snout over swollen human lips, brown and red feathers cresting his head. In my arms lay the cinders of our love, I cradled them and smiled as they were now mine more than they would ever be his.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has fiction in Booth, Pleiades, The Citron Review, Waxwing, Milk Candy Review, Claw & Blossom, Bending Genres, (mac)ro(mic), Necessary Fiction, HAD, The Birdseed, Bandit Fiction, NFFR and Best Small Fictions 2021. Hard Skin, her short story collection, will be coming soon from Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.
