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Tidal Wave Crimson
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Night No one could see Clayton, almost as if his skin of black silk hid in Hawaii’s night sky, his bright white eyes with their ebony irises matching up perfectly with the constellations, his life rotating around with the rest of the planet, but his heart seasick from the motion of the waves that brushed on shore, a tainted tidal wave of crimson that stained him and his callused hands red, making for a local motion of those who just noticed his typical Molokaian mistake turned tragedy that resulted in him being painted with a magic marker, coloring him invisible.
I could claim the identity of nothing more than that mysterious white girl from mainland, a foreign concept to the sun kissed bronze and brown bodies that crowded around the sea-rusted vehicles cresting the side of the road closest to the beach. My Californian accent had already slipped from me, as the mahina crept out from its shelter behind the violet clouds in the night sky. A bonfire blazed near the low tide, roaring up with flame and fury at the countless branches it consumed with its hellish heat. My eyes glanced to meet his, then strayed to the massive cast that enveloped his leg.
"Hey, how’d you break your leg?" I ignorantly inquired.
" ‘s not broke, torn tendon, Mon." His Hawaiian Pigeon echoed thick in my ears, comparable to that of a Bob Marley compact disc.
"Oh, how’d that happen?" Before he had time to answer, his melancholy coffee eyes danced around wildly in a flurry of frantic memories.
"Car accident." With those two words, I quit my questioning, detecting more than a simple car accident hidden behind his dark marbles. But, roaming rumors of the island fulfilled all that I needed to piece together the rest of the jumbled jigsaw puzzle.
"Yea Mon, you best leave dat Clayton ‘lone, he’s some serious issues, Mon."
"He gone drove drunk, lost his best friend in the wreck."
"But what more’s dat I hear his otha’ friend Aioli gone killed ‘self aft’ Kona died."
"Right into the cliffs ‘f Rock Point, Mon, ‘at poor boy, gone hurt he leg, two other East End Molokai boys dead. He an’ gone got lucky."
Suddenly, the flowers that flailed in the wind by the roadside made sense, the narrow road careening around a steep cliff of ominous shards of rigid, unforgiving rock. The next time I wandered past, I stepped into Clayton’s shoes, mimicked his mind, and held his heart as I found myself revisiting the accident. If he had swerved to the right, he would have made a harmless splash of sand and salt water, but it was fact he had instead leaned left and caused a splash of stone and marred metal and permanent ruthless regrets.
I don’t know how I, a curious Californian girl, ever made a mark on a steel-skinned and numb-hearted Hawaiian in ten days, but we witnessed more than enough flawless Molokai moons and starburst sunsets to serve as backdrops to our whispered words and deep dialogues that admitted our greatest fears and saddest secrets, a promised policy of silence made without speaking a syllable. I knew everything the island did not, emancipated from colorblindness, perceiving more than shades of black, gray, and white; my eyes overflowed with the hundreds of hues of exploding color that filled up every inch of Clayton’s existence, his shades of gravely grim darkness along with the paintbrush strokes of neon yellow that went to match the Hawaiian sun.
The island’s eyes, crammed with clouding cataracts, recognized only the two lives lost in the accident, while I set eyes on a severed soul in the sole survivor, his every breath used to plead mutely for an escape from Molokai, an island blind to him, consuming him in its condescending, blameful eyes of loathing as everyday the island grew smaller, the waves inching over the beaches to chip away at more of the land mass and more of the memories in Clayton’s mind, claustrophobic from the countless reminders of the past, chasing him to insanity and crowding his miserable, Molokaian heart, but his blatant misery of imprisonment in an undersized jail cell of sweeping waves and palm trees went unseen due to the blinders worn by the island folk. Invisible, Clayton slowly dissolved into a mirage of part of the Hawaiian tidal wave tainted with crimson.
