Dead Horse Summer. An Autobiographical Short Story. By Sumiko Saulson. Word Count: 1151

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1 Dead Horse Summer An Autobiographical Short Story By Sumiko Saulson Word Count: 1151 The things that frighten us most are those that remind us of our fragile existence and the terrible ways we can die; like the frozen grimaces on the face of a peat bog man or the ashen screams on the faces of a child found under Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii. Kilauea is the most dangerous volcano in the country according to the US Geological Service yet thousands of tourists walk on it every day, as though nothing bad is ever going to happen there again. My father didn t think anything bad would happen there in the summer of my twelfth year. We moved to Hawaii from Los Angeles, and after a brief stay with his mother on Kaneohe, on the island of Oahu, we moved to the Big Island, where he d found cheap land for sale. He took us on a tour of the subdivision, driving us down the pitted and dusty, unpaved and rust colored roads made up of ground down red volcanic rock. The weight of his car bore down onto the already grooved dirt road, deepening the pair of tire tracks left by the vehicles that traveled this way before us. It was during our first summer when I came across a pathetic festering corpse of a dead horse in Kalapana, on Black Sands Beach. It was lodged within the rough, onyxcolored sands made of lava rock. The sand had only arrived on these shores mere hundreds of years earlier; they were still sharp and rocky, not smoothed by erosion. My toes poked from rubber-heeled plastic thong sandals called zoris. Hard rocks protruded Dead Horse Summer by Sumiko Saulson 1

2 from the sands, and I smashed my heel painfully against one, causing me to shrink back away from it in pain, blood oozing out against hot skin. I stumbled away from the rock and landed almost directly on the dead horse, partially hidden beneath a palm tree the kind that grew out of the tide pools, and were bent sharply inland through some natural force. The crook of the low, bent palm hid the corpse until the last moment, and then I saw it. The water had come up over this dead horse several times, and receded, and what the low tide revealed now was skeletal, with a few places where the hide covered partially protruding bone. It didn t smell. I had the sense that sea creatures had torn away at most of the flesh, leaving bone with flaps of leathery skin waving over it. Although the horse s life was gone, the bones were nonetheless reanimated with teeming life of the tidal pool: green slimy mold-like seaweed, plump brown seaweed, happy little hermit crabs in stolen shells with ambitions of making a new home here in the reclaimed corpse of this horse. The creatures were cranking away, creating this whole new aquatic ecosystem. But I was only twelve, and unconcerned with the joys of the under denizens of this dead horse suburbia. My pre-teen mind would not absorb the entire ecological gestalt of this thing in my mind, it was gross, disgusting, nastier than stepping in a pile of dookie. I was just a kid, not some teenager in the throes of an experimental philosophical phase where I was interested in examining the brevity of a jaunt with a livid life condescending into a sleepy death in a fantastic realm of either amazing or horrific possibility where even a horse might sleep with the fishes. Dead Horse Summer by Sumiko Saulson 2

3 I threw death out the window, and instead turned and ran screaming! Screaming, running, far, far away from the death of horses into the life of a safe public restroom with its comforting public showers. I left behind pomegranate waving colors of sea stalks taking root in wet spots on yellowing bones in the red rocks covered in rusty blood into the cold concrete square encasings of cubicles, stalls, with closing casket doors but water hot and cold water, descending in rainy rivulets from the faucet. Warm water and lily-scented shampoo poured over me, enveloping me, caressing me like love. They washed away hard little black pebbles stuck to my heel by hot gushes of blood, and terrible memories of a dead horse, all down the shower drain and back out to sea. It is a motion the earth itself would repeat over the years, as the lava eventually poured over the beach, the showers, the streets and the houses, destroying them all. Five years later, the angry volcano came to wash it all away, burying the dead horse beach under fifty feet of lava. A dead horse wouldn t have angered Pele, for her battle was with Kamapua'a, the wind god, who looked like a man-pig. He was in love with her, and wouldn t leave her alone. My aunt told me once when we were traveling from Hilo to Kailua-Kona over Saddle Road never to cross Saddle Road with any pork in the car, because it would anger Pele and she would cause the car to stall. We were to throw any ham sandwiches off to the side of the road as an offering to Pele. My aunt by marriage is Hawaiian and Portuguese, and she was the one who told me about Ka wahine ai honua, Pele, the earth-eating woman. She taught reverence of her heritage and her ancestors. Not all who lived in Kalapana in the time of my Dead Dead Horse Summer by Sumiko Saulson 3

4 Horse respected Pele. My dad is haole. That means stranger but is used for Caucasian. He and his friends grew marijuana, or pakalo. Back then the high quality weed of the area was known as Puna Butter because it tasted so smooth. My brother and I were called hapa meaning half. We were called hapa-haole or hapa-papolo. Papolo, meaning purple, is the name of a plum - we had a tree of these small, very dark purple plums in our yard in Kalapana they always splattered down on the hood of my daddy s Lincoln Continential. Papolo was also the name for the color of the plum, and for African American people. I don t think that my dad s friends growing the marijuana awakened Pele, but I could be wrong. The marijuana plants attracted many loud helicopters that were part of the police drug enforcement program called Green Harvest. Maybe it was these copters, swarming over the top of the hillside like flies over a rotting guava that disturbed her? They were generating wind against the hillsides. Hawaii legend says that a huge battle over control of this area took place between Pele and Kamapua'a,. Maybe the helicopters made Pele think Kamapua'a was back to sexually harass her or try to pressure his way back into her favorite home? Or maybe she was awakened by another thing: My dad and his friends hunted wild boars in the forests but they never left any pork for Pele. Maybe if they had, she wouldn t have grown angry and taken back her land. Dead Horse Summer by Sumiko Saulson 4

5 Pdf Entry Information Exhibitor Name: Sumiko Saulson WEN: 94FC30 Division: FA Memoir Class: 01 Personal Memoir Title: Dead Horse Summer Description: An autobiographical short story about my childhood in Hawaii. Notes: