Ghost Parachute

A Literary Magazine

There’s a Dead Cat in the Installation

By

There’s a Dead Cat in the Installation

I want to scream at you but I know you don’t want to hear it as you wander around the abandoned drug store turned found art showcase, old boxes of meds, the kanji, hiragana, katakana in red, blue, white, green, black, arranged in concentric circles, next the altar with the skeleton of a cat the artist found, and I need air, but I stand in front of the altar, my own bones also locked in rigidity, my mind wondering about decay, about smell, about the years it took for this cat to become merely a mummified remain of its former glory, and you tap my shoulder, point to the cat’s permanent grin, and whisper if only we all could die this happy.

About Melissa Llanes Brownlee

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Moon City Review, Redivider, and The Adroit Journal, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and check out her new collection, Bitter over Sweet (2025), from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.

Artist Credit:

Amy Marques grew up between languages and places and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She’s been nominated for multiple awards, longlisted twice in Wigleaf 50, and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fictive Dream, Unlost, Ghost Parachute, BOOTH, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is editor & visual artist for the Duets anthologies, author & artist of the chapbook Are You Willing? and the found poetry book PARTS. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.