HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2023
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY MICHAEL KAUKEANO SONRAY-KELLY
The ghost of my first dad gnaws on chicken bones and titles himself makuakāne. He roamed childless for years, but his nightly procession brought his flesh to his flesh, and he now crouches beneath the bus stop awning like a figure in prayer.
“I have three little boys,” he proclaims. “Dicky boy. Then Rich, then the baby.”
He throws a bone to the chihuahua curled beside him, a skeletal thing on a frayed beach towel. One ear torn, short fur matted and patchy.
The dog yawns.
Makuakāne’s long fingers scratch and pull at his own skin, relentless. Scabs bleed under his crooked nails. Musk and decay envelope his sunburnt frame, looser than my own. Joints jut, skin sags, wrinkled and weathered.
Spit dribbles when he talks, food falls from his mouth. He grins with rot between his teeth and says he missed me. Like it was me who came back from the dead.
My other dad ran up and scared him away. “Shoo,” he said in the drawl of a mainland country boy. “Get.”
I picked up the dropped photograph and hid that picture on my bookshelf for years: a man with a scratched-out face, hugging a pit bull that had died before my birth. I kept it secret from my siblings. Selfish.
Rich found it in a book of myths. “Who’s this?” he asked. I eagerly tried to force my recollections on him, but he refused to remember. “He’s just some asshole,” he said. “Not my dad.”
We threw our fists hard enough to break each other. We scrapped and tumbled through the house with no love between us. Holes in the drywall. Mother in tears.
I yelled a lot, in imitation of remembered yelling.
“You look like your dad,” Mom cried. “Don’t be like him.”
My first dad died that day, long before he died for real. I dug a hole in my early years and buried him there.
Years later, he marched toward me on a crowded sidewalk.
Pō falls, the moon rises.
My makuakāne does not see me anymore. He rambles and mumbles. He coos my name in a memory.
The night brings headlights and car horns. Mainlanders stroll and keep their distance from us. They whisper and speed up. Eyes high, straight ahead. “Someone should do something about the homeless,” they grieve.
As if they live here.
Drums beat nearby. Dancers chee and dancers hoo and tourists take their children to the buffet. They avoid the poi. They eat the pig. “Now this is a luau.” “Such hospitality.” “Such generosity.”
“Such Aloha.”
Makuakāne cannot sleep with the noise.
He unfurls his sleeping bag across the still-warm pavement. He wraps it around himself and covers his face with his arms. His breathing slows.
There used to be wilderness here. It was quiet, but useless. We razed it to grow sweet things; when we got fat enough, we drained the fields and hid ourselves indoors. When I was a keiki my dad took me fishing near here. If I had caught anything I would have eaten it proudly.
Makuakāne was a good fisherman. If he had been here when it was wild, he could have made something of himself.
He rolls over. His steady breath beckons Kū or Kāne or Lono or whichever god blessed us with anxiety.
I watch over him for minutes. Hours. Weeks. Mahina shines over streetlights, above the high rises where someone yells at their kids to be quiet. Go to bed. I’m warning you.
Dad rises. Jumps to his feet. His ear cocked upward, searching. He finds my eye-shine and he roars.
“Who the fuck you?”
He beats his chest. A challenge. A drumbeat.
Memories of fists surface.
He chants again, “The fuck you looking at?”
I lower my eyes. Hands up, palms out. Calm.
“I’m your son,” I say.
But he searches me with unfeeling sight, and to those who avoid walking too close to us, we could be any of a thousand kanaka who scramble from forest to pavement to beach.
I am not a stranger here.
My younger brother bruised under my fists day after day as I taught him of our father. I led him to the trail of our blood, and he followed it. Kids left behind. The true heir to the family legacy.
“Don’t be like him,” Mom warned the wrong son.
Tears fall from my cheeks, and I want my makuakāne to know that I grew up okay without him.
He bellows and pulls at his hair. His little dog yips and barks. Dad’s dark skin tightens as his limbs work themselves into a frenzied cadence. The thumps against his red chest stress stronger and louder rhythms.
The dog spins in circles. Blue lights flash.
He summoned his flesh to his flesh, and I answered. I will try to answer.
“I won’t be like him,” I told my mother.
“Na’u,” wheezes the ghost of my first father.
His shoulders loosen a little. Waves crash unseen beyond the dinner shows and resorts.
I blow air from my lungs, and he receives it.
“Mine,” he inhales.
Mine.
Michael Kaukeano Sonray-Kelly lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is of Native Hawaiian descent. His childhood was split between Hawaii and Montana, and he graduated from the University of Montana in Missoula. He is an avid traveler, a self-proclaimed outdoorsman, and a perpetual novice surfer. He spent two years in the Peace Corps working with subsistence farmers in rural Panama. Currently, he spends his days with his wife and 11-month-old son, wandering everywhere from mountain to beach. He writes often for his own enjoyment. “Night Marcher” is his first published work.