BY MELISSA LLANES BROWNLEE
Grogu chooses his ass-kicking, space-faring father over the kooky religious space monk, green lightsaber flashing, past, present, future, across beskar chainmail.
We buy sippy cups as a joke, red wine on a white leather couch is not a good look, we joke to our friends online. I pose cute and yearning for wine, orange bears and yellow bees dancing in pink flowers in my grasping hands.
Grogu is older than his space dad but doesn’t look it, able to float space rhinos and calm rampaging building-high beasts.
We build a shelving unit to hold all of your Lego. We decide to share our interests, your Millennium Falcon and Star Destroyer forever locked in battle below my ukuleles, a constellation of colors and sizes, hanging along the wall.
Grogu shares the trauma of war and genocide with his father, his kind, mainly children, slaughtered to protect a burgeoning empire, his own father a victim also, parents murdered by empire instructed droids.
We choose adventure, our lives entwined since childhood, escaping a life on an island too small for our galaxy of dreams.
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, Milk Candy Review, Lost Balloon, Atlas + Alice, Fictive Dream, Maudlin House, Five South, One Wild Ride, and Sugar Sugar Salt. She is in Best Small Fictions 2021, Best Microfiction 2022, and Wigleaf Top 50 2022. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.