Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare

by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

The moon is goddess Hina, arms outstretched to the inky spill of night.

She reads that in the high days of the ali‘i, wāhine ka wā haumia, or bleeding women, were regarded with a reverence otherwise reserved for royalty. They were kapu in a different way, a way that safeguarded their menstruation rather than debased it, so much so that the bleeding wāhine were isolated in the hale pe‘a for the duration of their monthly period.

The separation between men and women was enforced by a strict kapu—however long the menstruation lasted, the bleeding wāhine and their kāne were to exist in separate physical spaces. Anything less was shameful, pīlau, not because the women were indecent creatures, but rather because the women were gods.

It’s silly and it’s sad, but also terribly true the force with which she cries after he calls her beautiful and maybe she even believes him.

They say She is a beguiling young thing with tendrils of seaweed for hair and two rows of cuspate teeth like upturned blades wedged in perpetually bleeding gums. Her closest companion is the inimitable tiger shark, Galeocerdo cuvier; Her lover is the spindly wana concealed in the dark coral landscape. She emerges often and at random; a harbinger of death and storms, of illicit activity, of doom. A product of young boys who refuse to brush their teeth before bedtime, boys who defy their mothers or speak ill of their absent fathers.

Description of the Madwoman in the Sea

In the first months of Toby’s life, our baby secured firmly in the back seat of the car, he circled the perimeter of our tiny island for hours and hours, if only to show our son what it meant to attend to a world stained with luminescence, a world that glows.

What, then, ultimately drives a good man away from his family? Not power or fame, lust or cowardice, ennui or opportunity. A Madwoman, that’s who.

“Remember what I told you? We don’t kill moths in this house.” “Why not? They’re bugs.” Then his whole face crunches inward. “They’re disgusting.” “They’re our ancestors. This is how your grandparents and great-grandparents and everyone who came before you pays us a visit.” “Gross!” Now his whole face is a plane of punctured tin. “I don’t care.”

The brine webs my eyes ruby red. I think, We are most beautiful here, where no one can see us and no one can ever, ever find us.