It’s 5am-ish, and my father tells me a story from his time in Singapore
by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
7/11/2020
I am riding along with my father in a too-dirty pick-up truck, in a pair of grey sweat-pants, in a bleach-stained Bruno Mars t-shirt, and there’s a bonnet on my head that keeps the hair-rollers underneath in place, still.
He says, “When I was in the Navy, over there in Singapore, there was only two things the people ever asked you—”
It is 5am-ish in the morning, and the sky is just beginning to become.
I note how not-sleepy I am, how if I really wanted to get up at 5am, every day, to achieve some semblance of the success that folks who wake up at this hour have, I probably could.
“They ask,” and he assumes an accent. One that I should reprimand him for, but I tell myself that I’ll get to it later. I forget to get to it later. “Have you ever been to California? Do you know Michael Jackson?”
He has been telling me these Navy stories since I was a kid.
His first time getting seriously drunk in Japan from something called Red Monkey.
His religious transition from Christianity to Islam, and how when he’d wanted to study the Quran, it always had to be done in a locked room, away from the rest of the texts deemed safe enough for free, public domain.
His relief in being a young black Mississippi man, and finding similar souls on the ship who too were young, black, male and hailed from states like Alabama, Georgia, and The Carolinas. Y’all, being the common pronoun.
As an almost 28-year-old, this story is very new.
“And I told them, Yeah, I been to California. Yeah, I know Michael Jackson...know him personally!”
I don’t ask him why he lied about the Michael Jackson thing, mainly because I am in love with the why that I’ve created.
It’s nice to be nice, and it’s very nice to feel like you know someone who’s been to all the places, who’s shaken hands with the world’s most influential people.
It’s nice to preserve some small inkling of the child that lives inside of us all, where believing in the impossibility of every story is safe, and wonderful.
It is 6am-ish, and the sky has become.
The cantaloupe cream orange pours into the angel-whipped white.
The iced-baby-blues, the blackened-seal-teals, serves as their bowl.
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a Blackhawk, Mississippi native. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a B.A. in English, and Mississippi University for Women with an MFA in Creative Writing. Exodus has been published or has upcoming work with Electric Literature, Cosmonauts Avenue, Barren Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Parentheses Journal, Booth and more. She has a healthy adoration for the color green.
