Sharks in the Time of Saviours by Kawai Strong Washburn

Author:Kawai Strong Washburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144777
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Eventually, the man speaks. Our stomachs are full now with the heat of the pasta, tang of tuna. We’d said few words about ourselves while eating, talking first about the trail. They’d started out days ahead of me, their intention to cross all the valleys to Pololu, except about a day’s journey farther up the trail its condition became so degraded and unstructured they were certain it would kill them if they continued. They were Germans, on the island for another week and a half before visiting bits of the mainland as they made their slow way home to Munich. As we talked now the woman, Saskia, loosened up, she mentioned how much she wanted to see the volcano, asked me about my “child-time” in Hawai‘i. She talked with her mouth open and scratched her armpit, she was blond, and yet when I saw Saskia it was Khadeja that was there, not because they were at all the same but because of the way I could feel her presence on Lukas, as if the very air between them was filled with invisible threads that stitched them to one another. They could stand and carry plates away to the dilapidated shelves, or step outside to relieve themselves, and yet you’d feel each one’s attention to the other tugged along. In it I recognized what I had, too, Khadeja and Rika, and memories tumbled down and stacked on each other so that I was playing pool at an ashy bar with Khadeja just before closing time, watching her lean over the pool table, the way her lips parted just slightly while she focused and her fingers delicated the cue, those same fingers she’d use to brush an eyelash from Rika’s eye when we were all on our way back from a picnic at the park, smelling of sandwich turkey and lazily full of afternoon sun.

I had a feeling there would be more of this, that their absence was something that would rest inside me, like the salt underneath my skin, rising out of my pores to sting my eyes when I least wanted it to.

“Something is out there,” Lukas says suddenly, and I’m pulled from my memories.

“What?” I say.

Saskia says something gentle to Lukas in German, Lukas replies almost playfully, his voice going up an octave. “The land is something,” Saskia says, turning back to me. “It is a person and an animal and other things, I don’t know.” She leans over, places her head on his shoulder. “We don’t have religion,” she says to me, “but we both say this place is somehow like that.”

There’s a queasiness of happiness that starts then, quickly, inside me. If these two could feel something, if they think this place is special. “Yes,” I say, “there is something here . . .” and I start talking, too fast, the words don’t touch my mind before they leave my lips, all the things I’ve wanted to say about what I’m feeling here. By the time I catch up to myself, I’m saying “.

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