Sharks in the Time of Saviors

by Kawai Strong Washburn

For Granny, who drove me eighty miles round-trip to get the next book in the series

Whatever was there, in that air, I can say it fed me. I’d go there and listen and even dance just a little myself. And when it was over and I went home I’d push harder, fly through the pages of my textbooks. Extra-credit science, I’d collect tadpoles from the culvert near our house. Or extra-credit math, right, I’d calculate dice throws or card games. People would find me after class and ask for help on their homework or always want to be my partner in labs and quiz bowl. And this was Kahena I was doing this at.

Way I figure, before the first Hawaiians became Hawaiians, it was them back in Fiji or Tonga or wherever and they had too many wars with too many kings and some of the strongest looked at the stars and saw a map to a future they could take for themselves. Broke their backs making themselves canoes to cut through forty-foot swells and sails big enough to make a fist out the wind and then they got free from their old land. Goodbye old kings goodbye old gods goodbye old laws goodbye old power goodbye limits. Came a time in all their salty tattoo-muscle nights on the water when they seen the white light of the moon over the new land of Hawai‘i and they was like: This. This is ours. All us, all now.

All the halls and laboratories and commons like they got fresh paint every other year, pretty little bookshop with all its way-too-fucking-high prices. But everywhere I swear except in the locker room the university was white as milk. I saw brown people on the sidewalk and I was like, Thank God, I was starting for think I was the last one left.

We nod our heads and wonder who that is on the radio, turn it up. We let the sun rain down on our brown bodies, get sea-washed salt in our hair and eyes, jump off the rocks into the torch-blue ocean like we’re young and tight-bodied. There’s aloha yet, to keep the rest of us alive.

Duvall Osteen has been with me from the jump. Intelligent, charming, fierce, family. Her and the whole Aragi Agency, a band of women small but mighty, including Gracie Dietshe. All good things for this novel came through the work of Team A.

My wife, Christina, and our entire life together. I was writing revisions when your contractions started, and you just kept breathing. We’ve been breathing ever since.

Carolyn Kuebler at New England Review, who sent me the kindest rejection letter I’ve ever received, saying: I see you, I hear you, almost, keep trying.

Katrin Tschirgi, Gabrielle Hovendon, and Catherine Carberry, who welcomed me into their unholy trinity of cool one summer. Forever grateful for the brief time with you baddest bosses. Those who came first: Lois Ann-Yamanaka, Kiana Davenport, Kaui Hart Hemmings, Kristiana Kahakauwila, Mary Kawena Pukui, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and all the other artists of the islands who preserve and amplify the truth of our land.

Just because I didn’t write it down doesn’t mean I don’t care, it just means I’m a parent and husband with two full-time jobs besides. Sometimes I forget things for a minute.