Lani dreams of sweet water. The kind that drips off leaves onto your tongue in the rainforest. The kind that leaves your skin clean. The kind that waters your garden, leaves glistening in wet, and clears the dust from your eyes. Lani wakes to dryness. The kind that swells your tongue in your parched mouth. The kind that cracks your skin bloody. The kind that shrivels your garden and gathers dust in the corners of your eyes. She rubs the grit away, scratching her thin skin raw.

She licks the blood from her knuckles, salt she doesn’t want to lose. Lani crawls from her mat in the corner of the coffee shack she shares with the husk of her mother’s memories. She’s so careful. She doesn’t want to upset them, each layer perfectly preserving a giggle held in at a funeral, a waft of perfume from a night out with a first boyfriend, the taste of the first guava stolen from a neighbor’s tree, the opening guitar lick of a concert snuck out to, wearing a best friend’s leather jacket, the sound, a deep-down tingle, spreading out from clove-stained fingers. Lani carefully steps around these memories, holding her breath, so tempted to take each one of them in, quenching her thirst.

She doesn’t lick the blood from her knuckles, saving her precious fluids. Lani picks herself up from the cot in the corner of the shed she shares with the husk of her mother’s memories. She’s not careful as she shakes her hands over each layer, drops blooming red in the sepia tones of waves carved into submission on the first surfboard, the ukulele played in front of a fire under a starry sky, the taste of tequila, burning an eager throat. Lani stomps around these memories, breathing them in, quenching her thirst.

She wipes the blood onto her shirt, adding to the clotted stains. Lani rolls over on her little bed, picked out special for her. She stares at the husk of her mother’s memories, rocking in the acrid breeze. She can see the layers of birthday cakes and candles blown, butterfly kisses over a sleepy face, bed time stories and cuddles under a sea of dolphins and whales and jellyfish, swimming above their heads. Lani drifts through these memories, soaking them in, quenching her thirst.

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Hennepin Review, Cheap Pop, Milk Candy Review, Lost Balloon, Five South, Cotton Xenomorph, Parentheses Journal, and Indiana Review. She is in Best Small Fictions 2021, Best Microfiction 2022, and The Wigleaf Top 50 2022. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.