By Marie Alohalani BrownThis short story is based on traditional understandings of moʻo akua and includes key motifs found across moʻolelo and kaʻao. The dream of bones is based on a reoccurring dream that my mother had when I was a child. My wife tells me that she has, yet again, dreamt of bones buried beneath the mango tree in our front yard. She has been having this dream for several nights now. With each dream, the bones are closer to the surface. She worries. She says that in a few more nights, they will be freed and that something terrible will happen to someone in our family. Mangos lie rotting on the ground. Neither of us go near the tree now.
While my wife dreams of bones, I dream of . . . of other things. Disturbing things. A beautiful woman calls to me. Her call grows stronger each night I dream of her. I don’t know how much longer I can resist it. * * * A greenish froth covers the stagnant brackish water of the shallow pool, the summer remnant of a seasonal stream bordering the beach. The surrounding growth, usually verdant, is a sickly yellow. During the rainy season, the pool quickly turns into a rapidly flowing stream that swallows up its sandy banks and cuts a deep path in the dunes as it rushes down towards the winter surf. In the middle of the pool, a glossy moʻo ʻalā, nearly a foot in length, lies sunning itself on a dense water-worn volcanic rock whence it takes its name. Before long, another lizard joins the first. Others follow. Soon the archipelago of moss-covered stones teems with moʻo ʻalā. On the largest stone of all sits a young woman with her feet immersed in the water as she strings delicate ʻilima blossoms into lei ʻāpiki (the lei that attracts mischievous spirits). The woman’s face is hidden beneath a cascade of long dark hair, which tumbles past her hips into the water. A few hours later the lei ʻāpiki adorns her head and neck. Emitting a chirping-clicking sound, “Kikikiki,” she calls the moʻo ʻalā to her. She laughs as they crawl over her. Suddenly something plops into the water. The ʻoʻopu have leapt from tide pool to tide pool to join them. Hers is the power to attract fish . . . and men. A breeze arrives, and the woman pauses to scent the air. The man approaches. She visits him in his dreams while his wife dreams of bones. The woman begins to chant softly, and the lizards fuse into her skin. Her face shimmers like radiating heat; wavering briefly between human and reptilian before settling back into the guise she has chosen—human. Large black eyes watch as the man draws nearer. She leaves the stone and wades through the water to meet him. His eyes widen when he sees her beauty, but then . . . she smiles, revealing sharp pointed teeth. He steps back, confused. She quickly moves forward and grabs his hand. The moment she touches him he becomes docile. She leads him deep into the valley to her dwelling. Hours later, they arrive to her thick grove of ferns that hide the collapsed roof of a lava tube. She gently pushes the man through the narrow opening and then follows him. * * * The rainy season has come and gone. Within the cave, the moʻo woman lies next to her human lover, caressing him. Her hand leaves a trail of slime along his body. His skin, cold to the touch, is pale and water logged from prolonged contact with her skin during the months she has held him captive. His eyes stare upwards, but in death, he is sightless. The moʻo takes his hand and lifts it gently to her mouth as if to bestow a kiss. Instead, she bites the hand off at the wrist. She delicately peels off the flesh with her teeth into small strips and swallows them. She reforms the little bones into their former shape with the help of a fine cord made of olonā fiber. Finished, she dangles her creation, then gently shakes it. Pleased with it, she smiles and caresses the large mound of her distended belly. The man has served his purpose. * * * It is late summer. The moʻo ʻalā surround the moʻo woman as she sits on her favorite stone in the stagnant pool with her infant daughter on her lap. She dangles the hand bones of her daughter’s sire. The child, pleased with the rattling sound it makes, smiles.
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By Marie Alohalani Brown One late afternoon, a pristine, white GMC Sierra pulled into the parking lot at Hirano’s Store on Volcano Highway. Bubba and Bobby Ray, two middle-aged vagrant brothers formerly of Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, now squatters in Fern Forest who subsisted by thievery, sat at the green picnic bench to the left of the store’s entrance. They were regulars. The brothers watched the truck arrive as they sat drinking cheap beer from bottles concealed in brown paper bags. When they saw who stepped out of the truck, they immediately sat up straight, sucked in their bellies, and ran their hands over their unkempt grizzled hair and beards. She must have been about six feet tall they reckoned, and she was a beauty. She wore a black sports top and short yoga tights. As she walked towards them, their eyes roamed the curves of her body framed by her thick, hip-length, dark-brown hair.
She noticed them staring and winked at them. After she entered the store, they relaxed their stomachs and grinned at each other. “Her pants were so tight I could see her religion!” said Bubba with a low cackle. “Butt like a forty-dollar mule,” replied Bobby Ray, nodding his head. They sipped their beers in silence after that, each lost in their own thoughts about the woman, all of them inappropriate. Sometime later, two employees made several trips to and from the store to load the woman’s groceries and other supplies in her truck. Bubba and Bobby Ray noted that she had purchased a good amount of hard liquor, wine, and beer—none of the cheap stuff either. She had several propane tanks, which were goods they often stole to sell for cash. After the employees loaded the groceries in the truck and returned inside the store, the woman walked back to the entrance, but instead of going back in, she stopped at the picnic bench. “Hey guys. I just bought a place in Fern Forest. By any chance, could I hire you to help me unload my supplies—twenty dollars each for an hour’s work?” “Throw in a bottle of whiskey and drink some with us, and you got yourself a deal, lady,” said Bubba. She laughed, and agreed to their terms. The brothers couldn’t believe their luck—an opportunity to earn easy cash and maybe even get lucky tonight if they could loosen her up with some liquor. It wouldn’t be the first time they had taken advantage of a drunk female. In fact, they were registered sex offenders. The brothers put their old bicycles in the back of the woman’s truck, and climbed in. They slapped the side of the truck to signal she could go, and off they went. Fern Forest was a sparsely-populated undeveloped subdivision seaside of Hirano’s. Property was cheap there for a reason. A good number of odd folks lived there, a few of them downright creepy. It was a haven for antisocial preppers, meth dealers and addicts, and registered sexual offenders. Screams and gunshots occasionally disrupted the normally quiet nights, but Fern Forest’s inhabitants rarely called the police—they either had something to hide or feared retaliation for snitching on their neighbors. Moreover, buying land could be a hit or miss purchase. People might buy and then clear land only to find it riddled with lava tubes, and thus unstable for house construction. Forest old-timers were fond of saying that if you ever killed anyone on your property, there were plenty of places to hide them. The woman, whose name was ʻĀpiki, lived in the most secluded area of the subdivision, off the dirt road named Jungle King Avenue. Her home was on the edge of Kahaualeʻa Natural Area Reserve, less than five miles from the Puʻu ʻŌʻō lava cone on the eastern side of the Kīlauea volcano crater. She had bought five adjacent three-acre lots, but had only cleared one, and then half of another, the latter of which, according to the man who had cleared her land, was full of horizontal and vertical lava tubes, including one with no discernable bottom. For the moment, she lived in a twenty by forty canvas tent. She wasn’t afraid of living alone there. Although she had two extra-large brindled pit-bulls trained as attack dogs, they were not the reason she was unafraid. Simply put, she was scarier than anything anywhere. ʻĀpiki kept her word. She gave the brothers twenty dollars each and drank a bottle of whiskey with them. When that one was finished, she opened another. When the second bottle was nearly finished, ʻĀpiki didn’t seem to be affected at all, but Bubba and Bobby Ray were slurring their words and seeing double. At one point, the brothers thought they were seeing things. More than once, out of the corners of their eyes, ʻĀpiki’s face seemed almost lizard-like, and once when she yawned, they thought they saw sharp triangle-shaped teeth. Unfortunatelty for them, they weren’t imagining things. As Bubba and Bobby Ray were about to discover, much to their dismay, she was an apex predator. Men were her favorite prey and her beauty was her bait. Because she was cautious, she only hunted the dregs of society, men no one would miss. The last thing Bubba and Bobby Ray saw before they died was ʻĀpiki’s transformation into a huge Komodo-like reptile, which then opened its jaws impossibly wide. Sound travels far in Fern Forest, and although residents heard screams that night, no one called the police. A few weeks passed before the owner and employees of Hirano’s Store realized that they hadn’t seen Bubba and Bobby Ray for some time. As more weeks passed, they noticed something else too. Across the store was a small park where the local riff-raff of Fern Forest, nicknamed the derelict crew, hung out day and night. The number of men who hung out there had dwindled. But because the derelict crew were a mix of drug dealers, addicts, and thieves, no one wondered or cared what had happened to them. |
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