GIRL by Kim Steutermann Rogers
She’s in a house back when the island still had electricity. Her hand barely reaches a railing down a flight of stairs. When she reaches the bottom, she sees a man standing in front of an open refrigerator. He’s tall, hair closely cropped, face shaven, wearing boxer shorts and no shirt. She thinks she once called him Daddy. “I’m two today,” she says.
***
The Big Wave comes when Girl is three, first laying bare the offshore coral reef, a platoon of fish flopping, shearwater feasting on the surprise banquet. Everyone knows to race inland before the water returns. But this wave is greedy, eating gas stations, the post office, her school, her childhood home, and Girl’s entire family—mother, father, and two brothers. Save her mother’s brother, Uncle Lono.
***
“Eh, Girl,” Uncle Lono gruffs and toes Girl, now 9, with one of his mismatching Xtratuf fishing boots. He’s caught Girl sleeping again on Leilani, the Boston Whaler he keeps ready, waiting for the day a barrel of diesel washes ashore. He comes down every morning to drink his coffee and stare at the horizon, humps of never-ending waves too big for his fishing boat. His on-gain, off-again girlfriend Leilani says it’s the taste of ahi sashimi that keeps him going.
“Anything last night?” he asks and hands Girl a chipped enameled cup of coffee. Sanka, a shipping container find. “Just more Crocs,” Girl says and nods at the laundry basket of plastic clogs in a variety of sizes and sun-dulled colors. “Not that I can get anything for them.” Nobody wants to trade for Crocs anymore. She gives the basket of them to Leilani who pots them up with anything green that washes ashore on logs or other debris, stowaways of life from afar. Leilani can grow anything.
Uncle Lono continues to eye the horizon behind a pair of women’s Gucci sunglasses rimmed in fake pearls. In the hold of his boat, he stores five-gallon buckets he’s filling with all sorts of petrochemicals he siphons from stranded skiffs and lawn mowers and, once, a snow blower.
***
Girl’s eleven when she opens a refrigerator bobbing on its back at the shorebreak to find a tub of plastic baby things inside. Baby bottles, sippy cups, teething rings, stacking rings in a rainbow of primary colors, and yellow rubber duckies each with a different emoticon face—smiling, frowning, puzzled, winking, red with anger, green and vomiting, and one with hearts for eyes. She shoves the vomiting one into Uncle Lono’s face, and he squinches his eyes and curls his lips, and grabs the ducky from her hand. “Ew. What’s that?” he asks. Something’s emerging from the ducky’s mouth. Girl pulls out her scavenged magnifying glass, scratched but still useable. “Larvae of some kind,” she says. Leilani has cautioned her about rat lungworm disease but that comes from slugs. This wasn’t a slug. Uncle Lono holds the ducky to his ear. “Hear that? Crunching?” Two more larvae emerge from the hole in the ducky’s bill, all three crunching away on the duck as if it were a noon-day meal. Girl’s belly growls in response.
Girl sets up an experiment. She puts the rubber ducky in a glass jar and covers it with a screen she ties tight over the jar’s opening. The larvae have devoured the duck’s bill, its head, and half its body when they mysteriously curl inward and encase themselves in a silky shell. A month goes by. Then, Girl finds three beetles inside her make-shift terrarium, and they set about polishing off the duck. Girl adds a toothbrush. They munch that in one night.
***
By the time, she’s 12, Girl’s got numerous terrariums and an assortment of beetles and larvae all surviving on plastic.
“I have an idea,” she tells Uncle Lono one morning. There hasn’t been a food container wash ashore in months. The Sanka’s long gone. People are losing the energy to comb the coastline, sticking inside what’s left of their homes, their roofs patched with fraying blue tarp. No one wants the parsley and basil Leilani grows anymore. Already Tutu Nani, the oldest survivor of the Big Wave, has passed. Some say it was old age, but Girl knows she gave up.
“What? You going to hire out your bugs for beach cleanups?”
“Not quite,” Girl says. She hypothesizes that the beetles have some kind of enzyme in their gut that breaks down plastic as food. Uncle Lono doesn’t interrupt her. He doesn’t try to play hide-and-seek with her nose the way he did when she was little.
“If only we had that enzyme,” Girl says.
Uncle Lono peers through his binoculars, reading the waves. Finally, he says, “We’d have plenty food to eat.”
Girl knows scientists often experiment on themselves. “I’ll go first,” she says. Uncle Lono doesn’t hesitate. “Let’s both eat ‘em,” he says.
Uncle Lono tilts his head at the horizon. “Might be getting a break,” he says. “Wave sets are smaller and farther apart.”
Leilani comes down to the boat carrying the door of a washing machine she uses as a tray. She’s somehow coaxed a sprig of greenery she found growing out of driftwood into a fruiting plant. “Breakfast,” she says and presents three ripe-red strawberries.
About the Author:
Kim Steutermann Rogers spent a month in Alaska as a fellow at Storyknife Writers Retreat in 2016 and, again, in 2021. Her essay, “Following the Albatross Home” was recognized as “Notable Travel Writing 2019” in Best American Travel Writing. Her science journalism has been published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Five South, Atticus Review, Bending Genres, CHEAP POP, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and 15-year-old poi dog named Lulu in Hawaii. Read more of her work at kimsrogers.com and follow her on social media at @kimsrogers.
About the Artist:
Serge Lecomte earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Russian Literature with a minor in French Literature. He is also a published novelist, poet and playwright. He has worked as a house builder, pipe-fitter, orderly in a hospital, gardener, landscaper, driller for an assaying company, bartender in one of Fairbanks’ worst bars, and other jobs. He lived on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska for 15 years and recently moved to Bellingham, WA.