I got to meet the cold thing living inside my dad that June I turned fifteen. I don’t know how long it’d been hiding in him. Maybe always. Or maybe he’d caught it, the way you catch a cold, that night he dove to the oyster beds. All I know is, on that blanched coral beach all those years ago, my dad showed me what magic really was.
Back then I was still taking over the wheel for Dad, because he’d check out midway on our drive to the shore. The second school was out every June, he and the twins and I, we’d pile into the 4×4, turn sharp at that painful cliff striated with monstera. And because Dad couldn’t focus, swerving dangerously at times, it was up to me to take us through that final dirt strip to Weka Bay.
“Home, sweat home,” Dad said when we wheeled to the edge of the coral, and the twins rolled their eyes.
Was supposed to be a week. Time for Dad to recharge, unwind, rewind. Add a dash of snorkeling for us three girls, and it was textbook summer fun.
The twins wasted no time. Damn the tent, the cooler, the sandwiches I’d packed for dinner—they dove in at the first glimpse of ocean. Twelve-year-olds. Left Dad and I to lug tent poles out under the palm grove, sand eating our toes.
When I look back now, I think: my sisters didn’t see it, how Dad was different from all the other dads in the world. From how dads are supposed to be. They weren’t paying attention. It’s why what happened, happened to them.
But I noticed. Because we were close, Dad and me. Once upon a time.
And what I noticed was the way those summers at Weka seemed to slide around him, like he didn’t quite belong. The way they brought whatever was in him straight to the surface. I saw it in the wistful way he looked out over the bay, to the black sea stacks at the far-off tip of ʻAwe cape, curling inward like a sickle.
It was why we were there in the first place. And why none of us ever really left.
On an island, Dad always said, there are a thousand rules, and a million ways to break them. It’s a balanced ecosystem of prey and predator, ebb and flow, cause and effect. A cow dies in a mountain stream, and a swimmer picks up leptospirosis in an estuary two miles down.
The rules: Don’t whistle at night. Don’t fish out of season. Never remove a stone from the island. And if you break a rule, who knows what ancient law you’ve upset. Who knows what comes bubbling to the surface.
Was Dad who taught me most of that. It’d slip out, on long drives through cowboy country, twins dozing in the back. “Momi,” he’d pipe up from the passenger seat. “Momi, you know what? Get a million ways to break tings. But, fixing them? Make pono? I dunno. Some things you just can’t fix.”
But dads are supposed to fix things. He used to be like that—fixing everything from leaky faucets to torn stuffed animals. We used to call him Gandalf. A real wizard.
I’m not sure when he started to slip, but that cape had something to do with it. Every summer we’d go, he’d get a little smaller, thinner. Like Weka wrung out the best of him, left the rest to shrivel under the sun. The rest: earth-scoured knuckles, a boney knee that hadn’t mended right after a roof-fall, eyes gauzy with the beginnings of glaucoma.
And I tried to be patient. Tried to understand why he kept himself out of reach, like not wanting to be known. Like I didn’t deserve to know him. But—though it’s been thirty years since that awful summer—I can say I still don’t.
When we got that tent pitched, Dad and I plopped on grass, munching on crackseed. Sparrows darted in the sugarcane sky and the afternoon loam licked the coral bones, and I remember thinking, This time, this time, he’s going to stay.
But he said: “You’ll be alright, Momi?” Flicking his beer hand to the reef, where my sisters were shriek-laughing and skidding water into each other’s faces.
“Ah. Yeah,” I said, shrugging, because I knew this dance by heart.
“Just a few days, yeah? Like before.”
You can count on me, yeah.
Then he brushed the sand from his calves, armed himself with a mini-cooler crammed with a six-pack and koozies, and walked out to ʻAwe cape alone.
See, part of the recharge, unwind, rewind was that Dad would head out, all by himself, to the tip of that headland. Spend the whole day out there, come back only at sunset. What exactly he was doing, he’d never say.
The twins never asked, and part of me hated them for it. Hated that giggles came so easily to them. That it didn’t seem to affect them, Dad being gone. They didn’t seem to feel it, the way dads’ absences can be heavier than the real thing, the way deadweight is heavier than a living person. But I could. Couldn’t fathom not feeling it. Could even see it sometimes, bobbing in the surf like a bloated air sac.
When I’d asked him once, timing it post-couple-beers, he let slip that out there on the cape was his way of going back in time to the good ol’ days. Back to old Hawaii. When you could sleep on the beach naked as the day you were born. When fish were more plentiful than now. When he knew who he was. When the world made sense, before things got muddled. Before us three kids.
Okay, he never said that last bit. But kids pick up things, all the same. Especially kids who read too many books and who, even at fifteen, look for small ways that maybe—just maybe—they could be magic. Magic was: Hearing the words, the real ones, in the undercurrent of what dads say out loud. Of what they want to say but can’t. Of what’s lurking below the surface.
And sometimes, if you hold your breath and count to four, you can hear those unspoken words gurgling around in their larynx. A strangling in the making.
So whenever Dad was gone, we three made the best of it.
Or, the twins did. They’d slide on their snorkel masks, shirk away to the labyrinthine reef. Dare each other to hoist those prickly, purple sea urchins from their tidepools, little pin cushions crumbling in their grips. They’d snatch fat sea cucumbers, squeeze them tight until their jetstreams squirted everywhere. Real charmers, those two.
I’d set myself on the beach. Shifting my butt because thin pineapple pareus are useless against bony coral. Hala hat pulled low on my forehead, and reading my book—or pretending to, anyway. Eyes trailing out to where Dad was. Wondering what he was up to. Skin-diving deep for oysters? Somersaulting into the water like Maui? I’d picture him toeing across the rocks, their eyelets glinting with saltwater. The lava was so prickly out there, your feet had to make a thousand minuscule shifts to get to the edge.
And whenever I spied a dark spot on that edge way out there, I’d imagine it was him. Picture him standing there for hours, milk eyes staring out from a hollowed face.
And at sunset I’d catch sight of a shadow detaching from the cape. Passing through a cluster of four-armed wave breakers that reminded me of stars crashed from outer space. And by the time the shadow became a silhouette, the planets were in full bloom.
I’d always ask, like clockwork: How was it? And, like clockwork, he’d flinch away, make like he was dirty, Don’t get it on you.
He always made it in time for the green flash. We’d eat our sandwiches together in silence by the fire. Venus blinking in the sky, and Jupiter trawling along his arc. And in the tent that night, Dad tucked his legs under him, like a shrimp–makai, oceanside.
And the next morning, the inevitable sound of Dad’s slippers against sand. A sound defined by its diminishing.
It was the third morning, maybe the fourth. That’s when it started, that’s when I set things in motion. It’s why, on my worst days, I blame myself. You swim too close to that undertow, don’t complain when you get pulled under.
The thing was splayed on the crumbling stone wall, arms shoelacing out like lichen. All moisture evaporated from its flesh. Tough and gritty, like rawhide. Shriveled tentacles puckered with traces of deep violet. Its translucent body unfurled over gray stones like a sacrifice gone wrong.
“What’d you find, Momi?” Leilani called out from the reef, her toes doing that bob-bob thing they do when you’re not tall enough to keep the sea slinking into your throat.
“Dead octopus,” I said.
And when I picked it up, it slid into my palm like it was home.
“Gross,” Leilani yelled.
“You should bury it,” Maile said.
There was a hint of a pulse. Somewhere deep in its papery folds, it shuddered.
A heartbeat.
That’s not right.
It was dry as tissue paper at that point, so what was keeping it going?
Like running on empty.
And my fingers went searching for that empty, the source of that pulse. Pinched every inch of its underside until my nails came to rest on a tiny sac in the folds. The ʻalaʻala.
Thrum, thrum.
“Show it to Dad when he’s back,” Leilani yelled. “He’ll love it.”
And that’s when my fingers switched to autopilot, and I squeezed.
Hard.
A weak pop, a fizzle that erupted—shrill, like the last breath from a dying lung.
Then a wetness, silky and cold. Ink, so violet it was almost black, dribbled out over my fingers.
And now, nearly thirty years later, on those cloudy nights when I can’t see any stars from my tent—just one me in all that empty—I still wonder, was that the moment? The moment I broke something? Because a rule needs a person to break it.
See, sometimes if you bury things, if you toss ‘alaea salt in the four corners of your tent, sometimes the transgression curls back in itself, becomes nothing but a harmless mistake. An accident. You wake up the next day, give honi to your dad—never knowing how close you came to losing everything.
But if you squeeze the life-ink out of an octopus and string it up by its tentacles on the flap of your tent, like it’s a trophy for all the celestial sphere to see, well, that’s not an accident. That’s an invitation.
And that evening, Dad didn’t come home in time for the green flash.
I’d fallen asleep with my hair jackstrawing through a tear in the tent door. The twins clung to each other like ‘opihi, and the moon shone one night shy of full.
Dad crouched by the campfire, his cheeks sallow. And for a moment, I didn’t recognize him. I don’t know if it was the trick of the flames or something awful already at work, but for a minute he wasn’t any dad I knew.
Dads have a way of shrinking when you’re not looking. If you’re not careful, they can age in a day. The ones who get unmoored. Who let disappointment chip away at them, little by little, until I’ll do it one day loses all meaning. They shrivel into themselves, like kindling on fire. And Dad, who used to dash over tidepools nimble as a goat, his bare legs were now thin as stripped hala leaves discarded under the sun. His spine stooped, and his chest sagged, concave. It happens to everyone, I guess: one day you wake up and see how weak your dad really is, really was, all this time. Clear as aquamarine.
He murmured: “Something out there.”
And we both gazed out to the cape, under the moon.
When I asked him what, he shook his head. “I saw . . . saw these two big eels. Came up right behind me. I caught one. Woo-hee, she was thrashing about. Wasn’t sure where all that strength came from. I got this urge to . . . bite her. Tear right into her.”
He bit his lip, like almost revealing a secret. And I found this so strange I nearly didn’t catch the slow trickle of blood from his ear.
“Auwe, Dad, you’re bleeding!”
But when my hand flew up to his ear, he brushed it away, muttering about burst eardrums and oyster beds in the murk and Why don’t you leave it alone.
And an image flew into my mind then: his waterlogged lungs, ear-blood suspended in a cloud underwater. The weight of his bloated body dragged with the undertow out into the impenetrable Pacific. And I wondered, Would I look for him?
It was like I’d been tiptoeing on a bedrock for years, struggling to keep my head above water. And all that I had left to hold onto was this gray, dwindling father-thing sitting across me in the flickering dark, and the best reassurance it could offer was: “I’m tired, why are you doing this to me, Momi?”
I kicked out the fire. And that stain where my fingers had kissed his earlobe, it was silky smooth.
Dad and me, we always slept makai, closer to the ocean. Because on nights when the moon was full, if you were lucky, you might catch the surf in your hair. In summers before, he’d stay awake with me for hours, whispering things like how to find the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye, and why Venus is the most beautiful orb in the sky.
It doesn’t matter anymore, I guess. Any of this.
Bad memories become prophecies, and good memories? Good ones are worse. Look at them long enough, and you see them for what they really are: pitiful buoys bobbing in a dark, limitless ocean.
Dad slunk into slumber on his hala mat, didn’t stir when I lay down beside him. The twins together mauka side, like soaking the moisture from the mountains. Like “safe and sound” were more than just words.
And they were lucky—they were all luck that night. Because they never woke up. They’d sucked the fortune from the tidepools and hogged it for themselves, and I was the only one awake for it all.
And for a while there I was listening to his wet breathing, to the twins’ soft giggles, to the waves crashing onto coral. Pretty soon, everything was quiet but for the steady inhale-exhale of the water.
I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew the moon was glaring down through the top flap. But it wasn’t the light that woke me; it was a cold tickle around my shins. I froze. For a minute it was Dad, here to whisper again, to finally spill all his secrets about why he was so shuttered inside himself, and what he dreamed about there on the cape. Because he owed me. Because we were close, once upon a time.
Because both of us, we were magic.
But when I sat up, Dad was still sleeping, curled in on himself, his skin glinting. When I set my fingers on his chest, it was damp, viscid. A mucous line stretched from his lips to his belly.
And then a thing detached itself from the darkness at my feet and shuffled up over my thighs, too agile. I gasped, shoved it off, drawing my knees in close.
Its skin was dark speckled with white, pale suckers and bumps on its head, all gleaming with a sick luster like it’d just emerged from the sea. But it wasn’t the sea it’d come from; that wasn’t saltwater coating its delicate limbs.
No bigger than a cat, its two wet tendrils reached upward toward me, like seeking, like it could pluck shapes, colors right out of the air. And maybe it could. Maybe it could see every surface of me, every pore. I had the creeping sense that it peered into my every cell, and the gaps in between them.
It slunk over to the sleeping form of my dad, unfurling its tentacles, resting on his cheek, like tasting him. Those tiny feelers slid over his moist lips, gently prying his teeth apart.
And I couldn’t move, couldn’t stop it.
And with one swift, awful spasm—awful because it was so graceful—it eased into my dad’s mouth. I remember the bulge in his throat, the heave in his chest. I remember the sigh he made like it was home.
He choked and writhed, and bubbles foamed at his lips, and that’s when I grabbed him, shaking his shoulder, sobbing, Wake up, Dad, wake up! again and again like mad froth on my lips.
Then my dad, he woke up.
Did you pick up that thing on the cape, Dad?
Or was it inside you to begin with, something you grew up with, carried like a pregnancy?
He lurched up like half-dreaming, like possessed. Shuffled over sideways on his knees to where the twins slept.
Was it you, Dad, or something else that laid a hand softly on each mouth, like you were shushing them, going to tell them a secret?
Their chests rising, and falling, and I thought: Don’t.
Then he thrust three fingers deep into each of their mouths and—in one irreversible act that has fixed all past, present, future in place—yanked out their tongues.
Their heads bucked in protest, clunked to the ground, and an awful shower of thick blood rained down their cheeks. I thought they would wake up then, but they didn’t. Abnormal rivulets of blood coursed from their mouths, and they coughed, sputtering flecks of red to the ceiling. Air fighting to get out, get in, keep those small bodies going. Fighting, and failing.
Don’t.
And their tongues in Dad’s grip, all sleek in the moonlight, longer than I’d ever imagined tongues could be.
He really could do anything, change the very nature of things. Like a wizard. Make dead things live, and live things dead. Turn a tent into a slaughterhouse. Make even the moon complicit.
Daughters, too.
Don’t wake up.
He ate them then, the tongues: first the left, then the right. He tore the flesh off in slow bites, easily, like they were carrots that’d gone bad and all soft. The slowness telling me he enjoyed every minute of it.
Was it you? Or was it me?
Maybe I could’ve stopped him, shoved him aside, screamed myself hoarse trying to wake them, broken the spell. But part of me figured this was it. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. The moment I’d see who he really was.
Real magic.
Don’t ruin this.
Because the truth is, what happened, didn’t happen to them.
They hadn’t even been paying attention.
No, it happened for me.
Right, Gandalf?
He scraped the hala mat where he kneeled in between them. His shoulders deflated, like whatever had been propping him up had leaked onto the tent floor. Like the stars had pressed against the mosquito net and sucked out the meaning behind it all.
And it enraged me, how defeated he seemed then, in the moonlight. How any explanation of what he’d done slipped off his shoulders as easily as foam slips off wet sand.
His lips parted, saliva dribbling from them; words formed but with no breath to back them, pitch them forward. So what I heard in the shadow of the tent can’t be called speech, can’t be called sound:
The slime . . . which created . . . the earth
But dads, they’re not supposed to be like that.
They’re supposed to be the immovable rock in the surf. The stocky palm tree weathering February storms. They’re supposed to fix anything.
But my dad, he was diminishing, right before my eyes.
His feeble murmur twisted into a low, faltering chant, like the words were splintering in his chest. In mine too, because something was here after all. Something unknowable was swimming in my dad, and I couldn’t stop the tide from coming in.
The slime which created the earth
The source of deepest darkness
Dots mottled his skin, dripped like sweat from his pores, in droplets first, then in trickles. The ink snaked off his body, weaving tiny rivers across the mat, all the way to where I crouched in the corner. Like it wanted to share.
It tasted of brine. Of something found and forgotten.
Dawn brought a bruised sky and clarity of what the night had wrought. Violent splatters of ink on the polyester walls. My bare legs brindled with streaks. And him, the dry husk of a threat in between the twin figures of his murdered daughters.
His breathing dry and tattered, eyes closed and crusting over. He was drying . . . he was dying. And it came to me without question, what was needed.
I dragged him by his armpits out to the shoal. Sunk his legs in the saltwater. The morning waves nuzzled at them, plumped them with life. I cradled him in my arms while his strength slowly returned. While the sun rays crawled over the mountains and glittered in the blood on his chin and throat.
He lifted one finger, weakly, to my cheek.
And I bent close to his blue lips, ready to listen, to hear, to take it all inside. I was an eager sponge waiting.
But then his eyes glazed over, and his hand dropped to his chest, a hollow thud.
A smile tucked like li hing mui in his mouth.
Like that was all the explanation I needed.
All I deserved.
And I’ve hated sunrises ever since, and green flashes too. Because even the changing of the light grants no gifts.
And before I could gather enough strength to speak, my dad slipped beyond me.
His arm slid over the sand, pulling his body into the foam. The morning current welcomed him, bore him to where the spindrift ravaged the lava rocks, and he submerged, slunk below the foam into a crevice much narrower than himself, folding his body like he was made of silk, and I was left alone, shin-deep in the cold of whose fault it was.
It’s been thirty years, and I’ve never seen him since.
They took my sisters away in a jeep because the ambulance couldn’t risk the road. Stripped the tent too: evidence. The papers dubbed it murder-suicide.
I got a new tent, a two-person. I have to drag it closer on the coral every year. Later and later summers means receding shorelines, dwindling schools. From the tent flap I can see the ocean and the stars.
No one gets it, why I’m still here. Anyone else would’ve left long ago.
I break open black-needled wana and crabs and leave them by the tidepools. He must be a kupuna by now; I don’t know if he can still hunt by himself. I don’t know what steals the carcasses either, but they’re gone when I look out every morning.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. I’m a bit scared to; time and water deepening his changes like they’re something to celebrate.
And every time my stomach rolls, my chest tightens, I wonder if that thing is inside me too. If it’s hereditary, like all bad compulsions.
Time has brought new shacks and sinewy dogs to the shore, and baggy-shirted kids who chase sea roaches from palm to palm, who still squeeze sea cucumbers until they squirt. They snap photos of my silhouette, and it doesn’t bother me anymore. I stamp my feet to scare them off, beat their legs with palm fronds when they’re about to dive, but I don’t have enough mouths to warn them all. And I know one day soon, I’ll be gone from this shore.
And sometimes, when I dream of soft nibbles on my face, tugging at my tongue, my hands bolt up, like shielding me from it all, like if they were just quick enough, they could catch all the colossus of a celestial body.
It’s never him.
And worse than the fear it might be him looming in the hole of my tent flap—his hourglass eyes finding mine—is the realization it never will be.
Originally published in The Off-Season, edited by Marissa van Uden.
