Fruit of the morning

Daybreak in the Schofield Barracks* tastes like a stolen mango, lifted from the yard of a tiny dark-skinned woman who rolls her own cigarettes and smokes as she keeps watch over three mangy dogs in her yard and - I thought then - over us.

From time to time, in bursts that seemed to coincide with the final puffs of each cigarette, just before she ground it in a tray by her right elbow, she would wave the machete that seems to have been a constant fixture in her left hand, waving it like a prayer or a curse - I never could tell which - over the dogs, over the empty yard with half a dozen rusting cars on blocks, over the land that I later learned, in brochures printed on the continent, was paradise.

An anonymous volcano smoked too, in the distance, with the portent of God waiting to strike, or maybe just fuming, and the light refracted off the machete like angels cast out. I remember hoping that was the case, as the hot daycare room steamed and children who seemed unaware of anything but one another and of the combined forces of velocity and volume, commingled in a torrent like shrieking harpies, and I knew that it was a long time until lunch, and longer still until my father would arrive, in his crisp button down shirt, quietly shining with starch and certainty, to lead me home by a hand.

On the way, we would pass again by the fence of our neighbor’s yard, and help ourselves to a low-lying fruit, a smooth weight whose cool promise would be placed on the kitchen counter, not to be opened until the next morning, tasted over the sound of honeycreepers and before the altar of Kolekole Pass bleeding pink with sunrise. Then, chin and chest covered in illicit juice, the impossible sweetness brings my mother, with a gentle washcloth and a goodbye kiss. She leaves only a thin coat on the insides of my cheeks: to be sucked at, poked and prodded with a tongue, as I watch the woman with the machete roll her cigarettes and throw angels all over her yard while God smoked his authority above us, and children in a red room in the barracks scream their way through the confines of a long, low-ceilinged prison, which might have been a perfectly fine setting for a morning of play, if I had been able to crack the code that they seemed so effortlessly to understand, the thing about volume and velocity, and if I had been less distracted by the lingering sweetness on my tongue, tasting like a promise that came and went too quickly, and a day that was yet to begin.

* For the record: I have never been to Schofield Barracks, nor have I ever tasted a fresh Hawaiian mango. This is a fictional exercise that reminds me of a writerly maxim about the way that fiction has a paradoxical tendency to be more true than fact, sometimes. I thank Judy Reeves for inspiring this entry with an interesting exercise that involved the cutting of maps into pieces, and writing from the section you received.