Sharks In the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

My tits swung in against his left biceps and my hair fell down across his shoulder and even though I was scared I felt sexy and almost wanted to pull him into me, right there, never mind the danger.

My tits swung in against his left biceps and my hair fell down across his shoulder and even though I was scared I felt sexy and almost wanted to pull him into me, right there, never mind the danger.

Only now can I guess what you’d been dreaming about—whose was the death, our bodies or the sugarcane. In the end it didn’t matter. You’d seen the end coming before any of us. That was the second sign. There was a voice inside you, wasn’t there, a voice that was not yours, you were only the throat. The things it knew, and was trying to tell you—tell us—but we didn’t listen, not yet. Just one of those things, we said.

Only now can I guess what you’d been dreaming about—whose was the death, our bodies or the sugarcane. In the end it didn’t matter. You’d seen the end coming before any of us. That was the second sign. There was a voice inside you, wasn’t there, a voice that was not yours, you were only the throat. The things it knew, and was trying to tell you—tell us—but we didn’t listen, not yet. Just one of those things, we said.

But that’s the problem with the present, it’s never the thing you’re holding, only the thing you’re watching, later, from a distance so great the memory might as well be a spill of stars outside a window at twilight.

We stepped out into the blare of all the traffic headlights, the night so strangely quiet in a pure way, the tap of the drizzle on our jackets, smell of pine mulch spilled from the pickup truck bed, the pink-orange blossoms of the road flares lit by the police. We approached the car.

I’d dream of what must have been Hawaiian gods. Women as large and distant as volcanoes, their skin dark like pregnant soil, dolphin-kind bodies thick and slick and full of joyful muscle. Their hair tangled and tumbled down into the trees until I couldn’t tell the vines from their locks and their eyes were golden or blue or green without white and smoldering. Everywhere they touched the land, the land grew into them, skin blending with earth, until you couldn’t find where one ended and the other began.

people think force and power is the same thing, but really force is what you use when you don’t got power.

I am still here, I remind myself.

God, these men. Why is it they always pull their hurt up inside themselves, gulp it down into the quiet corners of their soul, clench it like a muscle?

“We never getting that house,” he says. “No no no, chicken shit, we only getting this chicken shit”—he has his shirt off, and he flings it toward the closet doors—“closet, tiny bed, this stink, old, beat-up chicken-shit house. We gonna die just like this.”

So much space and air it’s like the world’s taking a breath.

if the one thing you are, the part you always figured would be your best, if that gets taken away, the next day . . .” I shrug. “The next day it’s like you’re carrying around your whole future like a dead body on your back. Right in that place on your neck, between your shoulders. Hard for anything to feel right, when you’re like that.

A weight of failure, of leveling off, of climbing to the peak and seeing there’s nothing next but descent.

You only had to see him from behind to get horny. That ass.”

“Whenever I’ve made a choice in my life, a real choice . . .” She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder just for a second. “I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.”

I can feel the clear moon like a mother watching me from a house that someday I must return to.