The first and only time she is driven over the old Pāli road with a container of pork, Sadie smears blood on the back seat of her parents’ car. It’s well past midnight, and the stretch of old Pāli descends into darkness as they travel the bends of the mighty Koʻolaus. Sadie’s stepfather Lopaka is behind the wheel; her mother Kāhea a skeletal squirm of a woman taking up space in the front seat. They are fleeing the rural shadows of Kaʻaʻawa for Pālolo, where they have a cottage and unkempt backyard and civilization to confront. Lightposts splash a weak gloss on the asphalt, and with only a few cars still on the road, Lopaka pressures the gas pedal, wedging himself into speed as a cat nestles in tight spaces.
Sadie has just gotten her period for the first time. She uses the hem of her new dress as a rag to sop the blood.
As they veer down the Pāli, Lopaka rolls down the windows, gusts whistling old tunes through the old Nissan. Her mother’s car, though Lopaka insists on driving. Beyond the car’s rattling shell, the wind flutters against the glass. Swaths of dark clouds migrate slowly over the ridgeline. The road steers around the Pāli peaks, deprived of their pristine emerald sheen under the intensity of night. Sadie sees the seat drenched in the same darkness, nothing remarkable, so she skims two fingers over the wet lip of her underwear and brings them to her nose, inhaling a whiff of blood so sharp she bares her head out the window.
I’m dying, she is convinced. I’m going to die on the island’s most haunted road, tearing over ancestor bones like they are nothing.
Lopaka calls from the front seat, eyeing her horrified reflection in the rear-view mirror: Ey, whatchu doin back there, girl?
The car rolls down the Hirano tunnel that braids itself through the Koʻolaus, weak yellowed light blinking through the night just long enough for Sadie to see the blotches that’ve soaked the backseat, a deep burgundy beetling through the otherwise gray nylon. I’m bleeding, she says, too quiet at first. The car rattles through the end of the tunnel, emerging onto the tree-lined highway. Lopaka says, Say that again? and Kāhea says, Just let it go for now, and Lopeka snaps back, Girl needs to learn to speak up, no one can hear a damn thing she says, and Sadie sniffs her hand and says to her mother, I’m bleeding. She leans forward, presenting her stained fingers. Kāhea glances at the blood, which by now has cemented as a thin, flaky layer of crimson arcing her cuticles. She looks at Sadie with a flash of remorse, and then she is grinning.
Oh honey, it’s about time. Sadie is twelve years old.
Sadie feels around her underwear, and they are tearing through potholes and mislaid gravel, going seventy, seventy-five, eighty, eighty-two, when a murky, creature-sized figure emerges, straddling the lane divider toward which the car is gunning, and Lopaka slams on the brake. Their bodies hurtling into the seatbelts, screeching. Someone is screeching. Steam skims the asphalt, choking the car’s frame, the car is not moving, the person screeching stops screeching, goes quiet. They all go quiet. Sadie peers forward through the fog of the glass, scans the dark road, spies a creature the size of a—a cat, maybe? Or perhaps an oversized mongoose, something that snips and snarls but mostly leaves you alone. She squints into the dark and sees a wild puaʻa hunched low to the ground, its stiff-as-straw tail and charcoal snout accentuated by the car’s high beams, which Lopaka flashes and flashes, and Kāhea whispers, my god, and then Sadie draws a breath and sees its bristly blackened hog coat glazed bright with fresh blood. She stares down at her fingers, sees the same blood.
Fucking rodent, Lopaka says, shifting the car into drive and carelessly maneuvering around the wild boar bleeding or covered in blood or both. Hunting season can’t come soon enough. But Sadie would like nothing more than to rescue every single wild puaʻa including the bleeding one, which she knows for certain her new step-family would ensnare instantly with their arcane muzzleloaders and hunting rifles. As the car propels forward, Sadie glances back at what she’s just lost, a puaʻa standing firm on its quarters, painted in ribbons of blooming burgundy, wagging its weedy tail like a pup that’s been torn from its mother. She watches the puaʻa until its outline bleeds into the stretch of haunted highway braided behind them.
◆
By now Sadie has heard so many cautionary tales about the Pāli that the warnings coat her tongue like paste.
Because of this she thinks little of them, and maybe this is her first mistake.
Mostly the roots of the stories are knitted in antiquity, tales told by weary parents to ward off their kids’ bad behavior, bizarre legends the kūpuna cling to in some futile effort to restore their withered culture. Whatever. Sadie’s stepfather was never one to follow blind tradition; as for her mother, she is too blissed out on temporary love to regard anything or anyone besides her new husband. Though born Katherine, after Sadie’s mother married Lopaka she immediately dropped the English like excess fat and now goes by Kāhea. Kāhea Kahananui, a great work embodied in human form, one who really couldn’t give two shits about her island’s origin stories.
But Lopaka’s family, they believe in rotten luck. They believe in Night Marchers and Pele’s wrath, in the sanctity of lava rock and the White Lady who hitchhikes her way through the city, testing the tensile goodness of men. They never whistle at night, and they sure as hell do not sleep with their prostrate toes pointing towards the bedroom door. To them, the grounds of the demolished Waiʻalae Theater still bear a likeness to the Faceless Ghost. They wake to a pressure in their chest and claim it’s the work of the Choking Ghost, pressing up against their bones.
Funny enough, then, is that it’s Lopaka’s family who hosts them for dinner the night of the puaʻa sighting, the same family who packs the leftover pork in tupperware and sends them on their way. The pork is a batch of kālua pig; Lopaka’s father smokes it the traditional way, in a backyard imu dug by the family’s four sons. Two nights ago Sadie sat on the lilting lānai of her stepfather’s family home. Deep in the hills of Kaʻaʻawa, she watched the spring of muscles flex and yield under her step-uncles’ undershirts while they plunged their shovels into the dirt. The next night they spoon generous pockets of salted pulled pork onto paper plates, the oil seeping into the pliant paper, wetting her fingers. They eat around the yard in intimate factions cataloged by age and gender, by ʻohana and the mere hānai. Sadie’s mother eats on a step-stool hunched over her food—scoops of white rice and lomi salmon, spoonfuls of soured poi the color of lavender and long rice and of course the very reason why they’re there, Lopaka’s favorite kālua pig. It is Lopaka’s birthday, he is thirty-two years old. He eats at the rotting picnic table against the garage, surrounded by his brothers and a few of their wives. The young cousins eat together, cross-legged and submerged waist-deep in sprawling fountain grass. Sadie eats alone, her stomach curling in strange, aching ways. But the kālua pig tastes spectacular, and the more she eats, the better she feels.
When Sadie approaches the buffet table, all the brothers turn to examine her. Combing for seconds, of course. At this point they’ve come to expect it. Her step-uncles have grown fond of calling her the garbage disposal—she’ll mop your food scraps clean, if you let her. This isn’t the worst she’s heard.
Sadie considers what they see: a frumpy, chubby-kine keiki with haole skin and a bow-legged waddle cloaked in cargo shorts wide as bread loaves. Sadie wraps her fingers reluctantly around the tongs, dishing a second helping of the kālua pig onto her sopping plate. Sistah doesn’t need seconds, she needs fo run ‘round da yard couple hundred times. Her cheeks flush the bright red of a ripened Hayden mango; her mother pretends not to hear them. Lopaka’s mother circles the buffet, slaps the son who spoke on the back of his buzzed neck. Sistah can have all da kālua pig she likes, I going send her home wit more den I going give you. Tūtū holds Sadie’s round face in her hands and says, Eat as you please, honey girl. But the uncle’s words have already slaughtered her appetite.
So, the leftovers. If she refuses to eat a second helping then she’s responsible for the leftovers, and she doesn’t want to be responsible for the leftovers, does she, not if they’re commuting over the Pāli because doesn’t she know the tale? Hasn’t Lopaka taught this native girl right? He’s been in her life for over a year now, and shouldn’t she know her own moʻolelo by now?
Just take the goddamn leftovers, Lopaka says as they pack up to leave. It won’t make a difference.
The moon is an inky spill in the evening sky.
My folks believe anything they can’t understand, so long as the old aliʻi swear by it.
But Sadie hesitates to accept the Tupperware of kālua pig, so Lopaka makes the decision for her: he yanks the container from his mother’s hands and ushers them to the car.
Good luck with that! One of the uncles calls from the garage, sweeping the asphalt of crumbs and mothballs, and when Sadie glances out the window, she sees a strange man running a single finger across his neck, grinning.
◆
When they return home, Sadie reads up on blood. She scrolls through the internet and the old Hawaiian texts Lopaka has brought into their home, and then her mother sits her down on the toilet and shows her how to insert a tampon inside of her. Only got super plus, she says, peeling the plastic wrapper quickly, like it’s a candy bar. She hands Sadie the thing and it looks like the skin of a parachute someone’s forgotten to deploy.
Sadie learns a lot that first night. She learns that blood and tissues are peeling from her uterine wall, and she learns this will happen once a month for the foreseeable future. She learns that she has two ovaries but only one uterus, the lining of which is soft and porous like a wet sponge. She learns the first period marks the start of puberty, which is a word that boys in her class spit with laughter, along with other words like cunt, pubes, boobs, rack, sixty-nine, and cumload. She googles each one, finds her way back to menstruation every time.
She reads Lopaka’s books, or tries to. There is only so much she can understand. She learns too much about her culture, things she wishes to un-know. She reads that in the high days of the aliʻi, wāhine ka wā haumia, or bleeding women, were regarded with a reverence not unlike those of royalty. They were kāpu 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 mua for the duration of their monthly period. The separation between men and women was enforced by a strict kāpu—however long the menstruation lasted, the bleeding wāhine and their kāne were to exist in separate physical spaces. Anything less was shameful, haumia, but not because the women were indecent creatures, but rather because the women were gods.
Sitting in the swamp of her own menstrual blood, Sadie doesn’t feel so much like a god as she does a bloodied fetus, some feral creature being unborn again and again.
◆
Years later, and Lopaka proves to be a good man hampered by a short temper. He turns over like a wet stone as thirty-two becomes thirty-five, forty-one, and then Sadie is twenty-one years old and enrolled in community college but still living in the basement of her parents’ cottage. The home is nestled deep in Pālolo and is infested with feral chickens; Sadie bikes six miles to campus three days a week. She and her mother take turns cooking dinner, a rotation of stews and rotisserie chickens, hearty beef curries and roast pork slopped in savory brown gravy. All the while Lopaka spoils away in a peeling pleather recliner, pawn shop reality shows looping in the background. On the weekends, Sadie wrenches open the basement window and slips out into the night like a child evading her parents. She travels on foot, looking for Jason.
They meet in an entry-level biology course, a subject foreign to them both, chosen entirely on ease of fulfilling a grad requirement. Sadie studies Hawaiian History; Jason, an aspiring accountant, fiddles with numbers like he’s fashioning a new language. They peer at each other across the sterile classroom, and during their second lab together he approaches her quickly and tells her they should be partners. Lab, he clarifies, and Sadie feels the fault lines riddling her chest rupture and split, carving a space for him.
Two weeks later, and Jason has taught her how to hold his penis firmly in her hands and rub out his most sensitive spots. From Jason she’s learned to clench the muscles in her pelvis as if bracing for some terrible impact, and she’s also learned men can be things other than cruel and tired. When they are not exchanging scrawled notes from labs they’ve missed, Sadie and Jason are borrowing his father’s used pick-up truck to drive the endless loops of Tantalus, where the tree tunnel wools their shadows in darkness. So dark, Sadie can reach across the stick shift to hold him in one fist and feel him grow.
Her stepfather: That kānaka kid, ho I like him.
Her mother: Sometimes they aren’t always entirely who you think they are. You’ll need to wait and see what kind of man he is.
But Sadie needn’t wait long. She tests him first by disrobing her fat body under biting fluorescents and scanning his face for smears of revulsion. Nothing sticks. Instead he wraps his hands over her flop of breasts, pinches at the rolls that gather around her belly, kisses her anyway. Strange really, for how long she’s brisked past mirrors, terrified of her naked reflection, and for whatever reason Jason just can’t get enough. 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.
So one might understand that when Sadie gets her period for the first time in their union, she hides away. Feigns stomach cramps, a migraine, a bad batch of garlic shrimp from their lunch date at the campus café. For days she refuses to see him. There was never anyone before him, and so she loops herself in circles trying to mislead his impulse to fuck her. That month she bleeds through her super absorbent tampons and the panty liners she tapes to her underwear, and when she squats over the toilet she watches her own blood unfurl in clumped confetti that sinks to the bottom of the bowl.
He texts her, mostly late at night after she’s gone to bed.
I miss you, can I bring you anything, soup, I can get you soup? I’d like to see you soon. Please get better soon. I can’t stop thinking about you.
I think I might love you.
You drive me so crazy.
I’m so horny for you, baby, it’s been so damn long.
Three days pass, and then her blood inhales like a vacuum back into the caverns of her body. The biting crimson softens to a requisite rust, and then she peels down her underwear and there is only the gummy film of her own desire bleeding into the fabric. She smiles. Shaves her legs and slips on her favorite olive dress with the bulky pockets and runs to Jason. She visits the apartment he shares with three other undergrads, beach bums with kind spirits who pass her on campus, say hi to her by name. Their two-bedroom unit is cramped and unfurnished, situated in the back of Kalihi Valley at the top of a sloped driveway. Two flat mattresses are parked in the ewa corners of the bedrooms, bars line the jalousied windows like a jail cell, a ceiling fan pushes dust through the rooms. A cat with no name braids its body around the boys’ many legs. When she visits, Jason immediately ushers her into the bathroom, where she sits on the lip of the mildewed tub and takes him promptly in her mouth because there’s no time to waste.
He says, I missed you so badly, baby. He brushes the top of her head like he pets their nameless cat. She leans against the wall, swoons weary with love.
She returns home that night with semen smudged between her legs and an elaborate feast splayed out to greet her. Lopaka has decided to go back to work repairing the Pāli for the city, and so Kāhea celebrates by feeding the ʻohana until their bellies twinge with regret. Pork is pleasure in their hale, which means the crunch of lechon kawali, kālua pig, homemade spam musubi, and char siu pork are all on display. They pair the pork with the fluff of white rice steaming in the rice cooker, and somehow they do not argue but instead pinch crispy pork belly and stringy kālua pig between their chopsticks, not fighting. Sadie doesn’t even bother to count the calories, saving the mathematical gymnastics for another meal entirely.
Lopaka will work on the Pāli this evening, the dreaded graveyard shift. For the past five decades the road’s undergone significant trauma, its historical kāpu boiled over by speeding cars and potholes. It’s as her tūtū says, No one tells the old tales anymore. In school Sadie was taught basic biological principles and how to craft a persuasive essay. But there were no textbooks to tell the tale of Kamapuaʻa and Pele, of their torched love affair, and how Hell beat lava into his bones when Pele finally left him for good. How he roamed the historic Pāli centuries later on the soles of four bloodied trotters. How his ghostly presence curses those who dare to carry pork beyond the city limits. No, she learned the legend not from her kumu or her studies but in the gravelly tones of her tūtū’s tales, and so of course she hasn’t decided just yet what to believe.
It is the most haunted road on the island, a two-lane highway where atrophied gravel unfolds over the bones of dead ancestors, from makaʻāinana like her own late kūpuna to aliʻi as revered as Kalanikupule himself. Descending from windward Oʻahu to the bustling hub of Honolulu, the road hooks around the contours of the Koʻolaus, and it is in this place of transition where things start to get interesting.
The stories vary depending on who is speaking. For some, the Pāli is a channel of sanctity, where fire-goddess Pele holds in her heart a vengeful grudge against demigod Kamapuaʻa, her half-man-half-pig ex-lover. Take pork over the Pāli and you’ll find your car slowing under mysterious circumstances, the accelerator nothing more than an ornamental pedal on which to rest your foot.
For others, the stakes are simply too high as to be unspeakable. Dare to transport pork over the Pāli and you’ll face a lifetime’s worth of rotten luck.
The guys was talking about the cursed Pāli and its night marchers, trying fo scare the new haoles on the crew. Lopaka says.
Kāhea shakes her head, clearing the table of her dish and the bowl that once held lechon, now a slick foil of grease marooned in its place. You guys are a bunch of rascals, she says.
Is it spooky on the Pāli at night? Sadie asks.
No spookier than anywea else on island. No tell tūtū that, though. Lopaka forages through a half-eaten bag of chicharrón, licking salt from his fingers. She like one walking book ‘o ghost stories. But nothing bad eva wen happen to her. Go figure.
Sadie considers her tūtū, the tales she told and how she held Sadie’s face between her hands like a delicate eggshell. The stiff kitchen chair presses against her pelvis, amplifying all of the slop swimming in her cotton underwear, but it can’t be—she just had her period, right? She leaves the table, bolts herself in the bathroom and tears the underwear from her thighs and sees blood. The downstairs bathroom in which she locks herself is mostly reserved for Lopaka and his midnight shits, so of course there are no tampons, no pads, no pantyliners, only the toilet paper she wraps around her palm like a sheath of gauze and roots into the liner, where blood globs the paper’s flimsy surface.
Another pause, then. At least for now. Better to disengage from Jason for a while, better for them both.
She returns to the table, chews on a chicharrón, but it’s the tarnish of blood Sadie tastes in the back of her throat.
◆
Because they’re still so young, they don’t waste any time. Jason’s blind optimism ushers them through a particularly difficult finals season, and then they are wading in the sludgy waters of Waikīkī Beach, Sadie scooping sand by the fistfuls while Jason fishes a ring from the zippered back pocket of his boardshorts. He asks her to be his wife. It is an occupation voided of a frame, of hard edges and shadings, but what thrums low in her gut are vibrations of safety, and so how can she say no? So surprised, she hurls a fistful of sand at his face, and then she says, yes, of course, yes as he climbs up the shoreline, wipes his face with a towel.
They kiss knee-deep in wet sand. Sure it could be any man with any ring though Sadie is indeed grateful it is this man and this ring.
Her parents, too, are elated. The walls of their savings account have deflated like the skin of a balloon, and Lopaka grows to resent the graveyard shift and the women inhabiting his home. They’re running low on space and food, short on patience. The ring is a fake emerald gem studded with miniature diamond-like stones that glisten under the sunlight; it constricts her swollen finger like a corset. When Sadie brings her engaged body into the house, Kāhea yanks on her ringed finger, brushes her thumb against the luminescent stones.
Never again must I impress another man, Sadie thinks, rubbing the stones. She lets her Hawaiian studies slide and passes the summer season planning an intimate wedding to please no one but herself. To afford a moderate affair of sixty guests, Jason takes work on the Pāli with her father while Sadie busses tables for a mom-and-pop Hawaiian diner. She finds she excels at scrubbing dishes clean of lūʻau leaves and poi stains, but Jason can’t shovel gravel to save his life. Mediocrity leaks through his sweat, and when he brandishes a shovel he is reminded that, to his core, he is a feeble boy, not built for the work of his folk.
Eventually the excitement wears off, and the two slouch into the comfort of old routines. When Jason quits the construction gig, Sadie works double shifts at the restaurant to make up for their lost income. The owners enjoy her company so much they promote her to front of house, where she takes orders and jives with the customers, men with big-bellied laughs and construction vests who remind her of her step-uncles, her stepfather. She asks Jason to visit her at work someday, but he doesn’t want to make the drive.
The wedding is now three months away, and Sadie has resolved to lose at least twenty pounds. Her dress is a soft ivory sheath with a plunging back and a dramatic lace chapel train that she sees behind her eyelids as she slumbers. But they won’t be married in a chapel; it will be on the beach, blocks from where Jason proposed, and dirt will collect in the hem of her train as she pads barefoot through the sand. The dress hugs her pouch of belly like a clinging animal; no matter how fervently she runs, swims, the extra weight swirls around her.
So, no more pork. No more marbled slabs of beef or chicken thighs lathered in oil and fried with the skin on. No more sweets, and no more food that tastes good because that goodness is only a dimple on her tongue while the photos of Sadie in her dress will withstand time. During dinner with her family, Sadie skips over the pork chops slathered in gravy and brined from their own fat and the creamed corn and the white rice drenched in shoyu. She nibbles on raw vegetable sticks and rolls through the guest list in her head, her vision sharpening around all of the names with a man’s demeanor. She will look so goddamn good in her dress.
She’s trying fo make us feel bad, but I not going feel bad. Kāhea gestures toward her daughter and Sadie swallows a mouthful of carrot that dissolves like dirt on her tongue.
She’s trying to look perfect for the wedding, Jason says.
Always so worried about that kine stuff, Lopaka says. You supposed to enjoy da wedding, eat plenny kine food, dance all night. You know how fo enjoy, don’t you?
But Sadie doesn’t know how fo enjoy, not when men have been known to watch the folds in her body and the revolting way her fat arms jostle when she walks. How can anyone expect a bride to know how fo enjoy unless she resembles a skeleton of herself?
She stops eating meat, tells herself and others it’s for the wedding entirely, and while this is true there’s something else, too, a hesitation that’s walloped her since her very first period, when her parents passed off the bleeding wild hog as nothing more than an errant inconvenience on their drive over the Pāli. She feels as though time has suspended her in its invisible clutches, like her growth has been stunted since that evening drive. Something strange she left behind.
Later that night, they retire to Jason’s apartment and Sadie lets him take her in any manner he pleases because she’s sure his pleasure will be her own—what else is marriage than the infinity of a braided orgasm? When he runs a finger around the ring of her asshole, all she does is slip up with a low moan. Her stomach churns with hunger. He prods at her back and claws his fingers through her hair and after he comes he folds his head in the crook of her elbow and murmurs how beautiful she will look in that slinky white dress.
◆
The morning of the ceremony, and Sadie wakes to blood webbed between her thighs and the tip of Jason’s penis peeling sleep from her lips. He trembles above her, and she maneuvers in turn as though carving space for the rise of her chest. She wants to keep a piece of him close during the ceremony, so after he finishes she slips into her dress and smears a wet wad of his cum on the hem of her flowing ivory train.
They marry the old-fashioned way. This is what their friends and family murmur among their standing factions while waiting for Sadie to walk down the aisle forged of sheared grass and ʻōhiʻa flowers. There are no seats draped in alabaster cloth, no minister poised at the front of a chapel, no bridesmaids or groomsmen or special recognition of the couple’s parents amidst the swell of orchestral melodies. Just a bunch of people standing around under the broiling summer heat while Sadie walks barefoot to greet her new husband. The officiant is Jason’s roommate; his ordination license was emailed to him last week. Her bouquet, a simple collection of puakenikeni plucked from the flowering bushel in Lopaka’s family home.
And that dress. Sadie’s exceeded her goal, twenty-seven pounds lost in just three months, something magical. She surveys the shock of the men as they knead through what’s happened to her body, and for a short girl Sadie towers impossibly tall.
It was Jason’s idea to marry near the beach where he proposed, which is why Sadie shuts up about the south swells that billow in from the sea, leaving the air tinged with saline and must. She says I do draped in a sticky film of sweat, and she doesn’t mention the frantic myna birds’ warble in the swaying canopy of the monkeypod tree overhead, and beyond the tree, the chants and roars of a spikeball tournament rearing its ugly head on the shore of Waikīkī Beach. She kisses him fully and feels his tongue like a fat stone in her mouth. When they reverse directions down the aisle, she is married. He whispers something in her ear, but all she hears are the haole tourists and those damn myna birds. What’s that? she says.
Your dress, it’s all stained. There’s blood on your ass.
He flinches as though her body is braided in barbed wire.
She pivots and whirls, tugging at the lace hem of her gown, and it isn’t until they’ve sprinted to the car parked along Monsarrat that Sadie is able to shield herself from the wandering tourists, where she crawls into the backseat and tugs the waist seam of her dress to find a mottled, fist-sized patch the color of rust.
I’m bleeding, she says. She pokes the soft lumps of her inner thighs where the extra skin beetles through her underwear. While she bleeds, Jason weaves through lanes down Kalākaua Avenue, chauffering them to the wedding reception held in his family’s Kāhala estate, where she will dance and be married, filling her belly with nothing but booze and good cheer and she will bleed and feel something shift inside of her, something without a name but with a very vivid and awful face.
From the driver’s seat, Jason asks, What’s that, sweetheart?
◆
Sleep doesn’t come, that first night. Nor does it come the second night, when Sadie bleeds so bad it soaks through the tampon and the bulk of her cotton underwear, imprinting their sheets with a deep vermillion stain the size of a mango wedge. Jason sleeps through the stirring but not through all of her sounds, and when he asks her what’s happened, her voice shreds to sobs.
It’s true he comforts her. It’s also true that on the second night of their marriage, Jason slips into a deep sleep on the living room sofa.
The problem is, since the morning of the ceremony, Sadie hasn’t stopped bleeding. She unravels entire sleeves of toilet paper from the roll and sops up what she can, but by the first week in her new apartment shared among four grown men, Sadie has stained the toilet bowl in a dense ring of burgundy, and her cramps are intolerable, like they’re sculpting her belly into something foreign, feral. No matter the weight she’s lost and intends to stave off, because her appetite has all but withered to dust. From work she hauls home Styrofoam containers filled with tripe stew and squid lūʻau, lomi salmon and soggy pasteles and Jason’s favorite pickled ogo which he eats between mouthfuls of white rice drenched in chili pepper water, and don’t the men just adore her. In the kitchen Sadie sits beside Jason, her fingers curled around his knee, sipping from a guava smoothie she’s likely to puke up late into the night.
Hawaiian food, she knows well, was curated by bellies of the aliʻi, not meant for women on diets.
She faints twice in the shower, and Jason is quick to lecture her on the benefits of eating more, bleeding less, as if either affords her the choice. When she loses consciousness a third time walking from her unit to the stairwell, Jason snatches back with fear. He lifts her like a shell and helps her steady her way back home. The roommates make a big show of fussing over her, and then they leave for happy hour at Study Hall, where they recline under bamboo scaffolding woven in fake tropical vines, feeding on kālua pig tacos and cheap pitchers of Kirin. Back home Sadie lies belly-down on the floor mattress; Jason kisses her forehead, walls their bodies apart with the plush of an old pillow.
Maybe it’s time to see a doctor? he says, but Sadie refuses.
Not interested.
He folds over, doesn’t know what to do with his arms or how to help her. You could be anemic, iron-deficient, you could need medication, can you imagine what would happen if you passed out while driving? While running? If I wasn’t there…
Sadie turns on her side to face him. I don’t want to see someone and have them tell me it’s not going to get better. I’d rather not know than face that.
Oh honey, that’s just silly. He pets her hair, traces his hand down to the bristly, sun-choked tips.
But Sadie is unconvinced. During her last visit to the doctor, a pediatrician with sinewy, gristled skin and old-man eyebrows, not only was she diagnosed pre-diabetic, but she also endured nearly an hour of the old man lecturing her in his thick haole drawl on all the reasons why she was ripe for a diet. Her mother sat in the waiting room, staring at the face of her watch as though she could manipulate time.
Now Sadie is skinny and beautiful and goddamnit she is married, and doesn’t this mean she’s no longer embroiled in the business of being beholden to men who are not her husband? Doesn’t this tear the threads that once bound her as a single woman, now setting her free?
No, I don’t want to see a doctor.
Jason retrieves the laptop on his desk and returns to the bed, where he begins sifting through the infinite Google scroll. She rolls back onto her belly and presses her face against the pillowcase, inhaling the smooth calm of lavender detergent while Jason splinters the silence with his findings:
This article says vitamin C-rich foods help your body absorb iron. These include kiwis, red peppers, broccoli, strawberries and Brussel sprouts.
This one says to consume more foods that’re high in iron, like oysters. Do you like oysters?
Did you know blackstrap molasses is a good source of iron?
Some people recommend a uterine artery embolization. Last resort, I guess.
She holds her face to the pillow and imagines what it would feel like to stop breathing altogether, how long Jason would talk to himself before realizing what’s become of her. What is becoming of her?
The moment she feels something stir inside of her she knows she doesn’t want it. But then, life doesn’t work that way.
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The news breaks during their third month of marriage, when Sadie’s belly clamps shut in some permanent way that yanks a howl from her mouth and tears Jason from his sleep. In order to sleep in the same bed together, Sadie has started wearing adult diapers to bed, unsexy clumpy disposables that leave rashy red rings along her inner thighs. To have sex means to unroll her body beyond the bounds of comfort, and it also means peeling the elastic band of the diaper from her twenty-three-year-old waist, so they don’t do it. He’s bought her the most expensive brand from Costco, the ones with soft pink florals etched into the synthetic microfibers, as if that matters, as if she cares. She’s wearing fucking pull-ups. Her forehead is wrenched with sweat.
Dopey with sleep, they stumble to the bathroom where Sadie gags and gags over the toilet but expels only loose coils of saliva and a few pathetic tears. Jason holds her hair, rubs small circles on her back. It’s gonna be okay, he says over and over again, but only a woman has ever been sheared apart from the inside out. He says, I think I know what’s happening, and it’s a joyful thing.
She too knows what it is as sure as she knows her own name and that she’s in love with a man who’s mostly useless. She pees on four tests, and when two pink lines surface on every single stick, Sadie throws her head back, laughs and laughs even though nothing is funny and every new second carries with it a new, intolerable hurt.
It doesn’t make any sense, she tells Jason. I’m still bleeding.
We need to see a doctor.
They drive to Kāneʻohe to see someone new, not a pediatrician but a gynecologist who treated Jason’s older sister through two successful pregnancies and one unwanted one. The doctor is tall and smartly dressed, a Japanese woman in her mid-fifties with skin the shade of wet sand and a small, perky mouth. A charcoal stethoscope coils around her neck like a snake, and Sadie longs for nothing more than to be held by this woman. Reassured everything will be just fine.
After a series of tests, urine samples, blood draws, a needle that runs the width of her palm, Sadie clutches at her belly as the nameless something stirs and flops around inside of her, confirming everything she already knows, has known for quite some time, and the doctor says congratulations, and Jason squeezes her hand with some semblance of reassurance, and then Sadie loses consciousness.
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Something the kānaka maoli of old Hawaiʻi got right: remove the kāne from the bleeding wāhine waimaka lehua, for god’s sake. Let the women rest.
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The only ʻohana she’s ever known is Lopaka’s. They are messy, loud drunks grafted permanently to their Kaʻaʻawa seclusion, and when they learn of the news months later, tūtū insists on throwing a party.
It’s a nice gesture, but really not necessary, Sadie tells her mother, but Kāhea is insistent, mostly tired. She and Lopaka have stayed married for over a decade, a feat that’s worn on her unrelenting skeleton. Lopaka wants this, he wants to celebrate you. But Sadie understands this has nothing to do with her.
The four-to-be-five of them drive the Nissan over the Pāli, the car heaving its age all over the paved highway. Jason holds her hand in the backseat and says, Did you know before they built the Pāli, if you wanted to get from windward to town side, you had to either hike through the Pāli cliffs or canoe around the island? He enjoys shearing snippets of facts from his undergrad classes, weaving them into tales to impress people.
Who the hell wanted to make that trek so badly? Lopaka asks. His hands are sailors’ knots roped around the steering wheel.
It was actually for the windward farmers to bring their produce to people in the city. Sweet potato and pineapple and papaya. Poi and pigs, too.
All the while the thing expands inside of her like rice cooked in a too-small pot.
They park on an open field of grass, where the house is bordered off by a chain-link fence and fortified further by spikes of spare lumber Lopaka’s father installed himself. Two chihuahua-mixes come charging out of the garage and barrel into Sadie’s legs. They bark and howl, lap at her thighs. Ouch, she says, and Jason shoves them away.
You look so good! Glowing mama! Tūtū greets them in the front yard, honis them one at a time. A generous compliment, when Sadie is nothing more than a swollen alien, far too plump and engorged for someone barely through her first trimester. She knew so little about what it meant to be pregnant before all this; never did she think it could be this much of a burden. Already she’s braided elastic around the waistline of her jeans shorts, and the pissing, the dizzy spells, the gripping cramps, the sexual longing. She chases orgasms like a feral creature in the wild. For now she has reconciled to be this feral something, and tonight she smiles, says thank you to her tūtū and to all of Lopaka’s brothers and their children and wives, people she’s known for years, who’ve watched her unravel into adulthood with little more than grunts of acknowledgement and the occasional fat joke.
As always, tūtū has prepared an elaborate feast for a party four times its size. The gathering is held under the roof of the extension garage and across the run of fountain grass punctuated by thickets of dehydrated weeds. Plastic folding tables are draped in paper towels, their ripply surfaces obscured by takeout poke containers, bowls filled with pancit and pork guisantes, the crusts of lechon that always cut away at Sadie’s gums. Inside, an uncle deep-fries lumpia stuffed with ground pork, water chestnuts, the snap of fresh ginger. Overripe bananas sit in slices, waiting to be rolled into dessert.
Empty Heineken bottles amass around the legs of folding tables. The night is eerily still, the chirping of geckos echoing through the garage. The dogs chase Sadie all evening, sniffing out the meat she lumbers around under the veil of belly, scratching at her legs with their untrimmed nails. The smell of fried pork, ground pork simmering on the stove, pork folded into the sleeves of lumpia wrappers, it’s enough to drive her mad with nausea and also to instill in her longing—longing to be the young girl at the barbecue who’s left alone to consume as much kālua pig as her heart and gut desire. Now Jason sits beside her in the field of grass, his cross-legged posture wrinkling his khakis. He rubs her knee, leaving wads of grease streaked on her skin. Sadie eats from the vegetable tray, a tiny scoop of white rice and poke for the omega-threes.
They ask about her due date. She lies and says early March, though the doctor never gave them a date, not one she can remember. Strange, really, though something about the stir within her had suggested March, so this is what she told Jason, told her parents and now the extended ‘ohana and they seem pleased, a date that makes sense. They nod and eat their food, the air exhaling a curious chill. The dogs are going crazy now, yelping and hopping around, getting lickins from the uncles and from Lopaka, too. One of the cousins asks if she’s having a baby boy or baby girl. She says it’s impossible to know.
While the aunties clear the table, that same cousin returns, a pretty young thing with long, sleight arms and a beach tan coating her skin. She’s seven, maybe eight, and she fills her fingers with Sadie’s brown hair, wrapping coils around her finger. She asks Sadie if she can feed the baby a snack. Sadie shrugs and says, Why not.
The girl turns on her heel and sprints toward the house, the screen door slamming on its rusted track. Jason smiles at her. I hope we have a girl, he says, and kisses her forehead in a way that makes her feel safe. Safe, with a monster growing inside of her. A girl as sweet and playful as her, as beautiful as you.
I think it will be a boy, she lies. Lopaka’s mother brings dessert to the buffet table—two chocolate dobash cakes and a mango-haupia pie—and although the sugary frosting makes her queasy, Sadie serves herself a slice of each.
She picks at the crumbly chocolate cake, the pie’s brittle shortbread crust, and then something else falls on her plate with a little clatter. She chews the bite of cake, sends it down her throat like ash. The young cousin is staring at her, awaiting a response. But Sadie doesn’t know how to respond to a dried pig’s snout proffered on her plate like an offering.
For the baby, the cousin says. Sadie stares at the dried snout, its uneven shape, two pockets of nostrils staring back at her. She prods each hole with her finger, brings it to her nose. Smells the tinge of metal, rust, a little fishy. Blood.
She drops her plate in the grass, the cake and pie toppling, frosting smearing into the dirt. Jason reaches for her, and a few uncles rise from the table. She falls to her knees, a cry tugging from her lips. Her fingers comb through the grass and the dirt, searching for the awful dried pig’s snout. She cries, why is this happening, but no one seems to understand the question. She peels through the tall emerald tufts and all of the weeds, but the snout is gone. When she rises to her feet, the family is staring at her, at the dirt smudging her knees and palms. The cousin, she sees now, is cowering behind her mother’s monstrous calves. She holds a fistful of dried pigs’ snouts in her hand, and the dogs snatch them up, one by one.
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You will not leave this house, you will not leave this bed. Anything you need, I’ll get for you. But you must stay put. You cannot leave. Jason speaks to her like a doctor, which he assumes he is, now that he’s taken her temperature and poured medicinal fluids into her mouth. He works at the Hawaiian diner, acting as her temporary replacement until Sadie has the baby and can return to work. He comes home with grease stains blooming on his shirt, his awful khaki shorts, and nurses her to health.
Bed rest doesn’t last long. Within a week of her confinement, Sadie’s water breaks all over the sheets. In twenty minutes, they make it to the hospital. An hour, and Sadie is admitted. They settle her in a shared room in the crowded maternity ward, where Jason plays CandyCrush on his iPhone while Sadie doubles over in pain. Give it a minute, ten minutes, give it half an hour, give it a day, maybe. Who knows how long an agony such as this might last.
Twelve hours, and Sadie gives birth. She remembers nothing but the sweat and the blood, the room bending around her and her manic howls and all of the tearing. She assumes this is how it’s always done, in some fleeting flash of unkept memory, but her mother isn’t there for her to ask. Her parents will stay in Pālolo, wait for the baby to come to them.
But when it’s torn from her body, Sadie doesn’t recognize it. A baby, she says, over and over again, while the nurse rips something bloody and disfigured from between her legs and races it to a table nearby. Sadie’s left hand aches; she looks down and sees Jason’s fingers coiled around her palm like a cobra constricting its prey, and for the first time since their union she feels embarrassed to be with him. When he lets go, her hand throbs with violet bruises.
Congratulations, the nurse says, approaching them. In her arms she slings around a bundle of ivory towels, spots of which are flecked with dark blood. You have a healthy—
What was that? Sadie asks.
You’re the mother of a healthy—
Jason is grinning now, and because the nurse is still offering the bundle of towels to anyone who will accept it, Jason leaps forward, opens his arms, takes the towels. He brings them to Sadie, and her eyes swim glassy before she can see what’s folded inside of the bundle, and her breathing grows haggard, soft, then loud as crashing cymbals, then quiet again. Still. Her head tilts toward the bruise blooming on her hand. She sleeps for 32 hours while they stitch all of her tears.
In her sleep, she dreams of the dried pig’s snout. The snout is still lost somewhere in the grass of Kaʻaʻawa Valley, and Sadie is her little cousin, holding a fistful of snacks for the dogs. There is no something that’s peeled itself from her body. Still, her pelvis aches heinously. She claws through the grass until she feels the cool sop of dirt beneath her fingernails, claws through the dirt until her hands touch something soft, slightly porous, slightly moving. It breathes, and with every breath, Sadie’s stomach contracts. She reaches between her legs and pulls her fingers away so the smears and crumbs of earth leak into her own blood. With blood and dirt and soil and earth on her fingers, Sadie gently gathers the buried thing in her arms, where she finally learns where the dried pig’s snout was hidden. This can’t be real, she says, but what does it matter when there is no one there to listen.
A baby, she says. The mother of a healthy—
When she wakes up, Jason is asleep on the recliner beside her hospital bed, snoring loudly. Sadie reaches between her legs, but all she feels is the torn elastic of her own interior. No blood. The thing is gone, too. An empty plastic basin and rumpled sheets teasing her in its place.
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Let the women rest.
Sadie sleeps for days, for weeks, and this is not a dream—no more blood.
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It takes eight weeks for Sadie’s tear to heal, for her stitches to be removed by the doctor’s swift hands. It takes less than five minutes from the moment they return to the apartment and shut their bedroom door for Jason to squander any progress her body had made to heal itself for the benefit of his own lonely orgasm. He peels the clothes from her body like rags and bends her face-down onto the mattress and fucks her from behind, coming quickly like a released spring. Just the way she likes it. Something awful about the clipping sear of pain fills her with a warmth she’s always reserved for fucking, something good. They lie in bed for hours, touching each other’s faces.
We have a—, he says, and Sadie no longer tries to understand.
We have a—
Oh, and then there’s the living thing in a bassinet. Always screaming, always frightfully alive. When Sadie goes over to examine it, a curious fog envelopes all of the empty space, and she must sit down to keep from toppling over. A woman enters the apartment, holds the thing to Sadie’s breast and instructs her on getting it to latch. Dip the head here, lower its lips away from the nipple’s base, compress the areola; this is as much your job as it is the living thing’s. Something sharp clamps down on her nipple, and Sadie yelps freely. At some point the woman leaves, and still the thing does not latch. Sadie leaves it to howl itself to sleep in the bassinet while she fixes herself a ham and cheese sandwich on seeded bread.
Sadie eats and sleeps and learns to tolerate the cacophony around her, but when Jason returns home from work, he does so with gales of lust swarming around him, and then her job transitions to lover, wife, bad woman. She is such a nasty, bad little girl. He lies on top of her and clenches her jaw in his hand so tight she tastes blood. Falls queasy with lust and terror. Let’s make another little—, he whispers one night, but Sadie only hears the enduring cries choking the corner of their room.
The blood, oh how it once lived as a companion in her body! Now just a smear of sludge she holds inside of her when Jason fucks her too hard. No other part of her bleeds, at least not in ways that’re visible to others. Would it be better, she wonders, in between the living thing’s vocal lamentations and Jason’s new insatiability, if she simply continued to bleed in the same extreme fashion? Would she be more like herself, the person she always intended to be?
It’s a loss, then. She runs her fingers along the cotton lining of her underwear and feels only fabric and thinks, yes, a loss. A loss she is far too young to understand, won’t understand for years and years.
That’s how long it feels as though she’s slept. The next time she wakes up, she does so to her fists curled around the sheets, a stiff cotton fabric wilted dank with sweat. In the dark corner of the room, the bassinet glows as though someone’s kindled it to life. She hesitates to sit up entirely, and when she finally does, when she swings her legs over the edge of the mattress, her steps come slackened, almost timid. The bassinet is five hundred miles away and just across the room. When she peers her head over the frame, the living thing is gone, and only a muted breath leaves her chest. She reaches into the bassinet, clutches a miniature wild hog, a puaʻa she knows, its coat soaked in blood that stains her dress, her arms, and then her neck as she hugs it close to her chest, ignoring the bristle of its hair on her bare skin, its animalistic shrieks, listening only to the orchestra of heartbeats as the creature stills in her arms.
This can’t be real, she says, blood clutching at her legs as the living thing sleeps and breathes.
She turns to see Jason fixed in the doorway, color seeping from his unfamiliar face, staring at her. She stands there and waits to see what will happen next.