Volcano by Garrett Hongo

Author:Garrett Hongo [Hongo, Garrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Snails and Star Trails

Early on the morning we were to leave, I woke long before dawn, wriggling out from under our heavy bed quilts, and opened the back door so I could walk outside to the toilet. A small swarm of jungle slugs was making its way across the lit-tie deck in the back. I’d noticed their slime trails from the start, lacy dribbles appearing overnight across the smooth wood of the deck. Showing themselves now, these were large, hummocked things about the size of wrens without their wings. Without feathers. Without skins. Raw flesh on the move, pasty gray and mottled red and orange. Their fresh slime trails shone like Stardust. I took a breath and picked my way past them to the john, then turned away and stood at the edge of the decking instead. Already naked, I hissed at the dark. I wanted to feel the night.

Stars were out, necklaces and bracelets glittering across the maroon velvet of sky, the smooth neck of Pegasus and pelted shoulders of the Bear. Fragments of their stories flickered dimly alive in my thoughts. I felt bathed in the chill, drenched and stained by the night’s dark zenith, mottled in starlight. I could hear my own breathing and the plash of runoff dripping from the trees onto the fern-thick understory around me. I turned back.

The slugs had moved. There was a hole in the deck where the house opened itself up to the bottom of the earth. They came from that. It was a kind of open well of junk our host used to store plastic milk cartons, soda pop cans, and other scraps and leftovers. There were empty boxes and crates down there, carefully folded pieces of cardboard alongside the torn and dissolving. I saw a few child’s toys, a rake and a hoe and the aluminum tubing from either a television antenna or a Sears clothes palm for hanging wet laundry. Either one was useless in wet and remote Volcano. Dampness is all, I joked to myself, twenty-nine miles from Hilo and cable television, toes soaking up the dew. I had yet to confront one more ghost.

Inattention had put me at risk. The slugs had moved past the refrigerator and the woodpile to the decking around me. I was cut off from my path back to the house, and the shining skin on the backs of my bare heels raised up invisible hairs. The slugs trooped along to the forest swelling in from the dark.

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