The Kilu Game

Once I wrote a novel. It started like this:


The smell of sulfur is the smell of loss. It overcame the chief Kahavari at Puna and left only his wife and his pig; it overcame Keoua’s army and left only their footprints; it overcame Kalapana and left nothing, nothing at all.

On the east side of the Big Island stand the trunks of palms, their heads eaten off by the volcano’s acid rain. The spirit of the palm resides in the crown. Without it the palms continue to stand, but they are dead inside, and when they have stood long enough and their bodies finally acknowledge that their spirits are dead, then they will fall into the sea.

So the volcano goddess Pele extends her reach: What she cannot reach with her tongues of fire she scalds with her sulfurous breath.