Fiction – Issue 8

We like to think the Maestro believes in something—we like to believe everybody believes in something. Perhaps he sees his temple in the Kaka‘ako construction sites at dusk, its chorus as the interminable traffic down Ala Moana Boulevard and Nimitz Highway. . .

You couldn’t look like a black Harvey Fierstein in drag, live to be in your sixties, and not have learned a thing or two about surviving. . .

These foreign Creepy-Crawlies colonized his mind. They rubbed and kissed and caressed him. They whispered notions into his root hairs and his stomata. “Don’t be ashamed,” they seemed to say. “There is no shame in being a tree.”

His coach had asked José to stay and help him train new riders. But working around the animals, inhaling their earthy, rank salty smells, hearing them snort and bellow, and not being able to mount and dominate them became excruciatingly painful to contemplate for him, much more so than any aching in his knee. . .