Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn

I don’t think you can hear my memories, no, so this won’t be so pilau, and anyway, I like to remember. We unrolled our sleeping bags in the bed of the pickup, over the gravel-smelling foam pad your father put down just for me, and once the last teenagers were gone-the thick buzz of their reggae bass fading into the forest-we took our clothes off and made you. Then a jarring road of silt and waist-deep mud puddles at the bottom of the valley and we reached the beach and parked the truck right up against the freckled black eggs of rock that rimmed the sand your father made me laugh until my cheeks prickled with heat and the last shadows of the trees were pointing long toward the horizon. And there was Waipi‘o Valley: a deep cleft of wild green split with a river silver-brown and glassy, then a wide black sand beach slipping into the frothing Pacific.Ī slow descent to the bottom of the valley in your father’s bust-up Toyota pickup, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, a sharp cliff to the right, cobbled tar underneath, the road so steep it caused the truck cab to fill with the smell of the engine’s burning guts. How could we not? Our skin rubbed dark by the sun and your father then with his football-days body, me with mine from basketball, the two of us feeling our love like the hottest habit. We’d come down into Waipi‘o Valley on a Friday, pau hana, with Auntie Kaiki babysitting your brother at home, and me and your father both knew we were going to use this childless night to screw our brains out, were run dumb with electricity just thinking about it.

The first came when your father and I were naked in his pickup truck in Waipi‘o Valley, and we witnessed the night marchers. In our first days I saw so many signs, but didn’t believe. And that the gods were hungry for change and you were that change. The kingdom of Hawai‘i had long been broken-the breathing rain forests and singing green reefs crushed under the haole fists of beach resorts and skyscrapers-and that was when the land had begun calling. The myth people tell about us might start on that liquid blue day off Kona and the sharks, but I know different. When I close my eyes we’re all still alive and it becomes obvious then what the gods want from us.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn