Flail Not by Elisabeth Gray

“Your soul has left your body, lady! You better find it out ‘dere on ‘da beach!”

The kahuna manning the gate yells this to me every time I flip-flop past; I have been walking this beach for months now, looking for it. I make pilgrimage to the lava rocks at either end without ceasing. Commemorating every lap with mild compulsion, I touch my big toe on the same spot of lava — sharp — a holy altar celebrating that something riled this place into a spewing fury a few hundred million years ago. I like it. I like that the ocean hasn’t been able to erase this artifact of rage.

In Hawaiian mythology, this island belongs to Pele, goddess of the volcano and the Prima of the Hawaiian pantheon. She’s worshipped as Creator and Destroyer — of islands, lives, relationships — “she who shapes the sacred.” Legend has it that as Pele provided fire to the islands, her family chased her away; when she was destroyed, her restless soul came to reside in the volcano. She killed her own daughter here. Her spirit occasionally pops off to other islands where she climbs into the body of a beautiful young woman and sleeps with men for a few days. When she disappears, they die of broken hearts; otherwise, here on the island, she shows up as a white-haired old woman or a white dog, howling at the moon to grieve and rage for change.

My walks have become ritual. Six miles a day. Back and forth, back and forth. I look forward to the usual suspects. I’ve befriended many a piece of driftwood so ironically staid I can predict where they’ll be one day to the next. There’s a carcass of a sea turtle that the visitors mistake to be living. He’s been here for weeks, and every day the fresh crop of tourists amaze and take photos with him because they believe he’s sleeping. (He? She? It? The turtle must have had a gender, but what do we call a dead turtle? A dead anything?)

We daily peripatetics acknowledge one another — Smile and wave! Smile and wave! — and shake our heads with bemusement at these idiot tourists who don’t know death when it’s looking at them. There is Susan, an energetic, anorexic alcoholic who powerwalks with her chilled sippy cup. “I’d rather get my calories this way!” Honolulu elite, she was adopted at birth, lifetime-wounded that her biological father was a Tennessee senator who didn’t want her. “Can you imagine the life I would have had?” There is Billy, a dilapidated surfer with plumpening tattoos, the most recent of which reads SAGE over his heart in tackily bright colors. He was fishing with his son in Maui when Sage had a seizure, fell in, and drowned. Billy was napping next to him at the time; it haunts him. There is the man who looks like Popeye but bows his head when we pass one another, his loss a mystery to me. We walk our prayers disparately but recognize the gait of a fellow straggler.

It’s August. The jellyfish have moved into the bay. Bluebottles, mostly. They have no hearts and sting mercilessly. The willi willi trees are blooming, which means the sharks are closer inland, swimming the shallows, chasing daintier prey. There’s a pregnant tiger shark here at Hapuna, about 12 feet long and bulging with a readiness to reproduce aggression, eating to keep the future alive. Sometimes she swims into such shallows that the fish are frightened onto the shore.

Last week, a pufferfish beached itself in an effortful escape from her. Several children had approached to poke the puffer with sticks, roll him ’round the sand, but I could see him huffing and puffing. I didn’t speak to them but commenced a rescue operation with the seriousness of an EMT, collecting palm fronds like a stretcher to usher him back into the water. When I returned on my next lap, the pufferfish had washed up again, still puffed and breathing. My friend Yuri, a scrawny, pot-smoking Russian misanthrope bearing a striking resemblance to David Lynch, stood over him. (Him? Her? How could I know the gender?) “Leave it to die in peace. Pufferfish die of their own stress. They can only puff up so many times. And then, their own toxins kill them. Why won’t this happen to my wife?”

I am compelled to keep all creatures living, especially those whose deaths go undetected — the miniscule and the doomed. Geckos, roaches, minnows, you name it. If it has a heart, I’ll save it. Last month, I even rescued a scorpion. (Yes, arthropods have hearts. Very different blood, of course, but beating hearts.) I’ve been performing these rescue missions since I arrived here last year. I take solace that I’m the only person who knows why.

When I walk the beach, I wear a giant sunhat. I am sure this sunhat can be observed by satellite in space. If my soul has indeed gone wandering, my body will be easy to identify. I imagine my soul like some lonely lost child on Aisle 7 being interrogated by grocery store security guards. “Who do you belong to? Just tell us.” “The lady with the giant hat.” Check. Identification and reconciliation will be plausible. While I wait for my soul’s return, I mostly think. (Thankfully, my mind has not also left my body.) I think about hell. I think that hell must be the absence of God. And I think that God must exist on the beach, and there will be no beaches in hell when I wash up there.

Today, a little girl has been tracking me up and down, up and down the beach, weaponized with pigtails, a pail, and an aquamarine one-piece that makes the belly bloat of little ones look like power. “Where is your daughter? I want to play with your daughter!”

“I have no daughter.”

“Yes, you do, you do! I want to play with your daughter!”

“You’re being silly!!” (I am a teacher. I make kids comfortable.)

“You-have-a-daughter! You-have-a-daughter!”

“Silly, silly, silly, silly, silly!” (Smile and wave! Smile and wave!)

Finally, her mother calls her back to her sandcastle kingdom, 50 yards away.

What are these clouds cataracting my eyes? And why am I walking faster? Am I running away from a 3-year-old? I am. I am literally power walking away from a small child. How does she know?

I am terrified my unborn child has grown into a toddler in some parallel universe and now follows me here. Follows me everywhere. And all this time I assumed the children were marking me as some whimsical Mary Poppins, they were actually tracking this playful ghost who begs and clamors for a breath of life. Would a child of mine do any less? Is there anywhere else on the planet where it is more wondrous to be in a body than on a beach? To know sand between toes and butt cheeks, and the pliancy of water, the sureness of one’s own mass being buoyed by an inversion of land’s laws? Can I blame such a spirit who, according to some other woman’s daughter, is a girl?

A girl? A boy? A what? I know that when I fished that interrupted blob out of the toilet and peeled back the placenta, I was struck by the impossible smoothness of that little body, no near sign of a gender. And that I would have to content myself with never knowing anything with certainty ever again.

I am so stuck in the guts of this memory that I fail to notice a fish right in front of me. I almost crush it. This fish, some inbred cousin of an anchovy, flails in the no man’s land between water and earth. Perhaps it was the chase of the desperate pregnant tiger that landed him here, or perhaps it was some elliptical thrust of recurrent possibility. Regardless, he flips, flips mercilessly, as though popped toward the heavens by an invisible fishing line. But there is no hook here, only his panic that the swell of what he needs will not rescue him. They say to fathom a fish’s anguish of being outside of water, one must think pure bleach being breathed. Can you imagine?

In an instant, when he’s settled into his gasping, I catch his vacant eye, the panic of it. I see the tiny grains of sand clogging up his gills, his labor to rescue some oxygen from a source that does not serve him. We have gills, too, when we are in the womb. Apparently, they transform into our voice box and our ears: our own sound, our ability to listen. In the moment of abortion, when human gills lose all oxygen in the womb, do they sting? Or do they make a cry that only they can hear? I have an instinct to rescue the fish from my discomfort of his situation. He breathes the bleach, the anguish of unknowing. Every now and then, a flush of wave drags him an inch or two closer to his ease, offers a gulp of something breathable. At those moments, he remembers what it is to be immersed in what he needs, remembers that when he is in it, he forgets it. The water won’t return to him for jumping higher: flail not. He settles, waiting, gasping, exhausted, strategic. I do not attempt to expiate my sin with his outcome, only observe as the tide slowly scrapes him back into the order of things, into his life or his death or whatever awaits in the unfathomable sea.

STORY IMAGE CREDIT: Giuseppe Milo/Flickr Creative Commons

The post Flail Not by Elisabeth Gray first appeared on Hippocampus Magazine – Memorable Creative Nonfiction.