CREATIVE NONFICTION
KIMBERLY ENCE
KIMBERLY ENCE
pau (finished)
I am the breath of
saline oceans floating
into hinges &
fringes.
He runs an index finger across the hood of his pickup truck and scowls. I am gritty and moist between his rolling fingers. Last night, like every night, I licked and smothered the green lacquer of his truck with my opaque stickiness. He hollers to the keiki about being late for school and they come running. They climb into the truck as he turns the key and pumps windshield washer fluid onto the glass; the wipers lick at my salty residue. Yesterday he unspooled the garden hose and I was awash with suds and Armorall. After a scrub like that, the truck looks clean, but fresh water and chemicals aren’t the prophylactics he was hoping for because I am vast and relentless. I settle, wave after misty wave, night after humid night. His bubbly carwash is always too late and it is never enough.
This guy is a haole. He moved from the mainland to the North Shore a few years ago. Rather than buy a gently-used minivan from Oahu’s Craigslist, a vehicle that I’ve already chewed on, and rusted, and busted--well, rather than doing the smart thing, he brought this new pickup truck along, deliciously loaded with chrome accessories and vanity plates.
“It’ll be perfect for the sand, and surfboards, and snorkels,” he told himself as he swiped his AmEx to pay for trans-Pacific shipping.
“Typical haole,” I said, “you will learn.”
So the haole and I go head-to-head most mornings. Him, frustrated with rust, and me, stubborn and corrosive. Before iron and chrome invaded the islands, I was vastly generous and uncomplicated. Back then, Hawaiians thatched their roofs with palm fronds, carved canoes from coconut trees, and turned conch shells into shovels or toys or jewelry. I gave them pearls, fish, and music on the sand. We shared the rain. My breath was saline and warm in their nostrils as they greeted each other, forehead to forehead, nose to nose, inhaling and sharing ha--the breath of life.
Ha-ole means “without breath” and it probably acquired new meaning in 1778 when everything changed. Hawaiians laid eyes on the explorer, Captain James Cook. He greeted them with handshakes, not the intimate nose-to-nose inhalations the islanders were accustomed to. He was a pale figure without breath, a European brand of chilly standoffishness, a pasty-skinned ghost carrying iron currency in his pockets. Natives traded coconuts, puka shells, and sex for his iron nails. And just like that, a piece of pointy hardware created our modern day enmity.
The haole’s first stop this morning is Laie Elementary. As he pulls up to the carpool lane, keiki play barefoot soccer on the bermuda grass. They’ve taken the slippers off of their feet and wear them flat against the palms of their hands, fingers wiggling where toes should be. The morning grass is cool, damp, and spongy. I accumulate between naked toes.
Some students ride their bikes to Laie Elementary along a walking path, their crankshafts singing with rust. The pedaling children are innocent. They do not understand my longing, my desire, my willingness to destroy. The keiki do not have memories of when the mountains and I were one, sharing our misty exhalations, the red dirt blending onto my golden sand. The bicycle’s rusty music and the unassuming children make me melancholy. They remind me that decay is not the worst I will do. Not even close. If I have a bad day, I mean a really bad day, and go all tsunami on these folks, the keiki are trained to run toward the mountains. He will keep them safe. While the greater part of me is bent on destruction, the transcendent part of me runs with them, uphill, toward desire. Their lungs take me in and we run.
This year the fourth graders are immersed in Hawaiian history, so every nine-year old learns about warriors like King Kamehameha. He measured seven feet tall and 300 pounds. In 1810, after many years of battle, King Kamehameha finally conquered the disparate tribes of the six Hawaiian islands and united them under his reign. The children recognize his name because the narrow highway running past their school is called Kam Highway, a nickname given to the king’s modern-day asphalt and yellow stripes. The road represents progress. It is the only passage between urban Honolulu in the south and the rural, windward side of the island. It brings busloads of tourists and international surf seekers to the North Shore. The highway has changed the ancient meaning of mauka--toward the mountains, and makai--toward the sea. Over here, in the country, the locals might ask a newcomer:
“You live mauka or makai”?
Because the highway divides mountain and sea, a translation of their question might be: “Which side of da road you live, Brah”?
Kahuku High School is mauka. At morning drop-off, the haole deposits his two daughters at the curb. Reddish brown stains bleed from the metal grates covering the windows and run down the school’s cream-colored stucco. Nobody plays soccer. Nobody goes barefoot. A few teens mingle on what used to be the tennis courts, now cracked and weedy. They lean against a sagging net, pulling one last vape before the bell.
On the way back home, the haole passes the Laie landfill. An acrid smell reminds him of his expensive contribution to this cemetery of plasma televisions; most electronics in Hawaii go kaput with corrosion before their warranties run out. A litter of junkyard piglets, black and fuzzy, wander into the road and he stops to let them pass. They follow their sow mother down the middle of Kam Highway. I dampen their wriggling noses as they sniff the air. Mother veers right and they all disappear into the jungle. The haole would usually enjoy the piglet parade, but his rusting truck, and the High School windows, and the vaping, and the stinking landfill--they’ve put him in a foul mood.
He takes a sharp right at the only stoplight in Laie. Chickens scatter across the parking lot. A wild-eyed rooster crows into the open door of Taco Bell. The haole parks his truck and disappears into Ace Hardware, a gathering place where locals hang out and talk story. They debate paint colors, pulleys, and insecticide. An avalanche of advice from inside the store must have boosted the haole’s confidence this morning, but his advisors have imbued him with a false bravado. Deep down, he knows it. And they know it. A thousand years of battle have taught the Polynesians, a patient people, that no amount of hurry or harangue will improve their chances against me. It’s ironic, really, that a warrior tribe will let me settle into the cracks of their tectonic paradise.
This town will rust and ghost without
Ace Hardware buzzing
with sandpaper, polyurethane spray
& Polynesian people.
As the glass door swings closed behind him, the fool unsheathes his weapons from a paper bag and picks a fight with me right in the parking lot. This is embarrassing--for him, not for me. I expected him to wait until we got home. It’s been over a year since his truck’s paint was struck by a rogue pebble off Kam Highway. The paint has been peeling for months. What’s his hurry?
He tears open the paper bag. I see that his purchases at Ace signal a white flag of resignation more than a call to arms. He has come to terms with my saline breath pocking, bubbling, and oxidizing the paint between the truck’s windshield and roof. By the time he’s taken me seriously, I have done enough damage to bring rainwater, seeping and dripping, into his cab. Before leaving the parking lot, he fills the holes around his windshield with foaming Loctite and stretches strips of duct tape over the yellow, expanding filler. It’s a temporary, ugly fix but strangely enough, he feels relieved, suddenly hungry for some fresh poke’ and a surf sesh.
As he trolls for a parking spot at Foodland, a friend of his points at the duct tape repair.
“Hey, sweet patch on da ride, Brah”.
The haole smiles and lifts his hand from the steering wheel. They exchange a lazy shaka.
“I know Brah, my car’s junk now, yeah.”
“Shoots, Brah! Catch you on da swell” calls his friend as he drives away.
You would not think that I could inspire this kind of good will, but I like to take credit for the aloha spirit around here--people lifting their shaka hands out of car windows and waving each other cheerfully into the flow of Kam Highway traffic. This shaka, aloha, and pidgin, they are a feel-good band-aid, like the duct tape and the Locktite. It makes islanders feel united, protected even, while living in a state of perpetual decay.
Ace can’t repair Kamehameha
when he falls away with tidal moons--
the King skinny dips
while his ‘ohana shipwreck
between mauka and makai.
I can’t say exactly how long I pounded on that piece of Kamehameha Highway, sucking pebbles from the crumbling shoulder in easy tide and dislodging larger rocks during big swells. The Corps of Engineers placed a barricade of giant boulders between me and the road, but I splashed easily over their handiwork and onto the asphalt, leaving sand and rocks strewn across the pavement. The mess I made should draw attention to the fissure I’ve created in the road, but aloha-soaked drivers ignore the inevitable. Bicyclists notice it. They have to. As the crack grows wider, their slender tires skirt its toothy edges.
Above the fissure, palm trees dance hula on Ko’olau mountain. Below the fissure, surfers ride my swelling, blue skin. They play while I work, wave after wave, lapping and crashing against the architecture of the King. I want to breach the road, stretching my fingertips into the hungry mouth of mountain streams that tumble toward me when it rains. We will kiss again some day, mauka and I, because at this windward spot of the island, I rise and break.
I rise and
break.
With foaming lips,
I suck his shoulder down
to a single bone
of asphalt and oil.
Kamehameha finally gives way and tumbles into my waves. His people wait in pickup trucks and convertibles on the remnants of the highway.
Says the Hawaii Department of Transportation:
Reconstruction depends on
Aloha the Bus,
patience in a hard hat,
fluorescent DOT & tribal tats
repairing the fault--
warriors talk story and vape
while island children dance to Timberlake
in truck beds, waiting for passage.
The keiki have a sunflower garden at school. It has grown over six feet tall. Every Tuesday afternoon, during recess, music crackles to life over the loudspeaker and it’s a dance party all over the playground. The sunflowers and I watch as little bodies, every single one of them, jump around with sunshine in their pockets and good souls in their feet. They can’t resist a chance to take off their slippers and jam. There’s a mom watering the yellow garden. She and I are invisible in the forest of flowers. She hums along, holding the garden hose with one hand, fresh water tumbling toward the ground. She snaps the fingers of her other hand. She shakes her rump. Without complaint, she lets me frizz her hair.
Her son digs the Tuesday flash mob, but otherwise dreads Tuesdays. It is Hawaiian history day. I heard him complain this morning over a breakfast of banana pancakes.
“Ugh! It’s Tuesday. Kapuna comes today,” he groans.
Kapuna is a white-haired, Hawaiian grandmother who plays the ukulele and weaves Ti leaves into green crowns. Her father was a pearl diver and she used to accompany him to work in their hand-hewn canoe. She teaches the boy her traditions but he finds them irrelevant. Her language is dying. Undeterred, she teaches him that puka means hole; ohana means family; he’e is octopus; mauka means toward the mountain, makai means toward the sea, and ahupua'a is the mountains running to the sea. Pau means finished. The words twist his tongue. Frustrated, he will not remember her songs.
The children return to their classrooms after the dance party, expecting the weekly lesson from Kapuna, but their teacher has bad news.
“Kapuna won’t be coming today. Our grandmother has died.”
The class looks down at their bare toes. The room is quiet, except for the rotating fans in front of the open windows. This is what Kapuna had been warning them about. Silence. Puka.
They feel badly, now, for complaining about Kapuna. A replacement white-haired grandmother will be hard to find. But I am still here.
I will teach them pau.
Shipwrecked, they wait for contraflow
to Ace Hardware
and home maintenance.

Kimberly Ence is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. She won the 2018 JuxtaProse Nonfiction Prize for her essay "Chewing Thistle" and her work has appeared in the Columbia Journal. She writes mostly about her time growing up in the West and working in her family's beef jerky business.
Kimberly Ence is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. She won the 2018 JuxtaProse Nonfiction Prize for her essay "Chewing Thistle" and her work has appeared in the Columbia Journal. She writes mostly about her time growing up in the West and working in her family's beef jerky business.