stop daydreaming and mend the damn fishing net, already your father yells at you from the picnic table in the shade of a towering coconut tree, pounding beers from the cooler at his feet, and you never like go holoholo with him anyway, but your mother wen make you go and now you stay mad because you gotta mend the stupid fishing net and all you like do is go body surfing out past the lava rock reef, and you look at your brown hands holding the woven mesh of green, the hole as big as your head that any kine fish can swim right through, and you gather the edges together, connecting them and tying them, a man's job, but you don't want to be that kind of man no make me come over there Koa he says, tossing an empty at your bowed head



Ikaika waits for his mother after school. He's excited to go holoholo with his uncles tonight. They promised to take him fishing for menpachi down south, a night just for the kane. He's tired of being the only boy in his house, his sisters always bossing him around, telling him to take out the trash, clean the yard, kill the cockroaches. His mother pulls up in their pickup truck, "Come on. You like go holoholo, right? Your uncles stay waiting." He climbs up into the front seat. His legs not yet long enough to step up, yet. "Auwe, Ikaika. You stay getting so big. You stay look just like your dad." He looks into the side mirror, hoping to catch sight of what his mother sees, but all he sees is a little boy, not his father with his dark hair and dark eyes, loud and funny and always smelling of fish and the ocean. "Ikaika, you bettah be careful and you bettah listen to your uncles, or else. You stay near them, especially on the lava rocks." He nods, not listening, dreaming of starry skies and talking story with the men, their fishing poles cast into the dark waters below.



I pull out my father's bamboo pole from the back of my truck, the one he added a reel to, the one he swore could catch any reef fish. I run my hands along each segment, feeling the embedded rings he installed to run the line through. I'm surprised it has held up so well all of these years. I remember holding the bucket and shining the light to lure the fish, or to help my father see, I could never tell; I was just happy to sit there next to him with the fish he'd caught, a rainbow, flopping in the water we'd scooped for them, as he talked story—his family, his father, his grandfather—telling me about the days when they caught ahi by hand before poles, before the big boats, just canoes and line woven from hair, hooks made from bones of whales or sharks, and in this fishing pole, firm in my two hands, I begin to see my father's hands reaching back through time. I get my bucket and my flashlight and head out to the edge of the lava rocks. There is the ocean, whole and wide. There is the spirit of my father just wanting to talk story for a little while.

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