3:AM Magazine

By Nicolle Elizabeth.

Before I tell you about the painting I need to tell you about the myth. The myth was that the man went down the middle of the pineapple plantation and hung himself in the fences, but that isn’t what happened. What happened was that he wasn’t in the fences, he was windward three miles. What the painting shows is an arrow pointing to a hutch that says God House, and it exists, I’ve seen it. Two monks sell ice out back, they’ll greet you at the screen door. Their heads are shaved and their eyes are bluer than the water at Waimea Bay.

The Wahine drive into town with the ice on Highway One when there aren’t any lights to remind them what real is while the people are sleeping and the animals are alive. So they’re stuck in this van driving down the coast along the island under the stars with the lights out in case there’s Haole out surfing at night, with the windows down, real slow. Like the waves humming or the sands pushing. They roll so they can hear for the whistling from the lookouts perched on the top of the hill. They only think they’re stuck when it’s quiet in their houses, not when they’re in the truck sneaking down the hill. The hill is where you’d go hiking during the day, at night it’s country.

They started the myth because one day the painting was leaning outside the museum door at dawn and the next it was hanging. Somebody from New York on vacation bought it. This caused the ruckus. The painting can’t reach the coast because people will want to know about the monks. Explorers, academics, they’ll all come running and these monks have been here before Cooke and before the amusement parks and it’s going to stay that way so the Wahine they say ‘that man broke his neck and somebody said Jesus’ instead, but it wasn’t that.

At the left hand corner of the painting you can see a signature but nobody knows who it belongs to, or at least, the painter hasn’t surfaced up yet. I know about this because I saw him three miles away when I was looking for rocks on the North Shore. He walked by me with an easel and the painting and then two weeks later I saw it in the newspaper. He might have been there sometime and that’s how he knew about the monks, but he wasn’t there that day they said he was. That’s not where he disappeared from.

I was paying attention to something else, I was looking for the rocks and listening for the owls which is how things happen, when you’re not listening for them. I heard the monks send the owls looking for you, I heard that’s what they do. I heard they’re evil but I don’t know how much I believe it’s a myth and that’s part of the point, it’s the type of thing you tell at a bar, over dinner, on a plane out of wherever you’re running to or from and we’re all running from something. I think if he’s alive he must know the painting’s heading toward New York and he must feel good about that. If you can get off the island you’ve done something right, if something you’ve made can get off the island you’ve done something better.

I’m telling you this also because I’ve been cursed and I can’t shake it, no-matter how hard I try to. I had an affair with a man and his wife went to a Wahine and had her put a curse on me. Forever my good chance at this life will be ruined for what we’ve done, but I’m not worried about me, I’ve accepted it. I have one eye and things were hard already.

Who I’m worried for is the painter. The hills know everything and they’ll send you down hell particularly when you’re feeling like you’ve outrun it. Maybe you know what I’m talking about, maybe you sent in a car payment late once, maybe you’ve had your favorite sports team lose a title.

The thing I can’t figure out is why they said he hung himself because the animals at night don’t actually have hands and part of him would have stayed on the fences if he were out there. Somebody would have seen him. Or maybe they wouldn’t have, which makes it worse, those pineapples don’t talk.

So I’m sitting on the wall next to the place to get dumplings when a man with two eyes comes up to me and says they want to see you. By they, he means the monks. I tell him I don’t know what he’s saying and I run toward the beach.

I was recording the church bells. I’m trying to make a remix project of the church bells and then I’ll put some drums over it on my computer keyboard. All our sadness is in the beats between the chime.

He must have been wondering what I was doing out there with a recorder given that I’m already a wanted eyeless woman. I’m always wanted but not in the right ways. At the beach I sat and looked out to the coast, can you hear me, California? I can’t hold it in my hand. It isn’t anything and neither can you.

Marta’s been here for six years looking for a husband so she doesn’t have to hook herself out anymore. We live above a liquor store now, I hate how it sounds when she brings work home. “They never want to marry me,” she says down into her glass of gin. I watch the condensation on the glass and try to think of a better way to get a green card for her. I would have left, I probably should have been dead twice by now but I can’t leave the owls.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicolle Elizabeth is a fiction writer, book critic and MFA student in creative writing. She was a music journalist and editor in Boston for six years, though she has been writing fiction her entire life. The recipient of a long bloodline of documented European mystics, she will be pursuing a PhD in Mysticism, which she will apply to fiction, and is currently at work on a novel, entitled Aloha, With Love, of which this is a partial opening.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, November 13th, 2009.