The Tourist

by M. Anne Kala`i

Naiwi’s first and only visit to the mainland nearly burned him down. Desperate to escape the island that knew him better than he knew himself, he sold what valuables he could scrape together from distracted vacationers and his cash-strapped family, and lit out for California.

He traveled the state in a tired coupe, stopping when work cropped up. For the first time, he was an island all his own, surrounded by nothing he knew. He took every chance to share the legends of Hawai`i; more of his mother’s stories poured out of him than he knew she had. He wound up the coast, past Shasta and into Washington, then back down to Route 66, wandering through landlocked states whose endless highways jumped borders to keep growing. Each city was like Honolulu, but different. Haoles had given their own home the treatment they exported to paradise, paving over old growth forests, damming rivers, and stacking humans until every downtown was a warehouse.

Outside the cities, the land still had a voice. Naiwi watched Mt Rainier glow alpine pink as the sun slid down the sky, illuminating trucks that carried the peak’s Native Puyallup name: Tacoma. He walked dirt roads in Death Valley, and hiked through Arizona’s Petrified Forest, whose wood summoned misfortune when stolen. He found that mainland scientists used Hawaiian terms for hardened lava flow: `a`ā for the jagged kind, and pāhoehoe for smooth layers that settled into ropes. Half a dozen states welcomed him, then spit him farther east. At last, high summer unearthed the city of the jazz greats who birthed sounds as smooth as the Mississippi River: St. Louis.

Fresh off the interstate, Naiwi slipped into a garish tiki bar with glowing pineapples strung from the ceiling and a big-bellied bass that shook the floor. He stole glances at the young wahine dancing, her skin warm and orange in the kitschy lights. She dared to return his gaze, hooking him with a smile and a downstate twang that sounded like television. Naiwi downed his drinks, self-conscious of how much of an outsider he looked and sounded and was. She drew closer, whittling away the inches between them with swaying hips. When they touched, she reached into his soul and pulled out the things no one alive should see, leaving him with chicken skin.

That was the first night.

After the fourth, he wanted to know where she was from. Back home, you didn’t know nothing about nobody unless you knew where they were raised; where they graduated, or dropped out of, high school. The girl–Whitney was her name–wouldn’t say. An unusual flicker of fear passed through her gaze. “I don’t come from anywhere good,” she said, her voice drained of feeling as her skin paled. Naiwi smiled and took her in his arms, painting a promise with his steady voice: Visiting would be different with him. They would find the good.

*

Whitney hailed from the nation’s oldest mountains, beat down by millennia into hills: the Ozarks. Her Missouri hometown was a scattershot collection of gray homes and trailers tucked into hollers like something to forget. One dirt road held her childhood home, which was guarded by a wizened woman standing on the stoop, her knotted hands nursing a rifle. Before the couple could say a word, Whitney’s grandmother struck her with an open palm. The matriarch called her all the types of trash that Naiwi didn’t see. She called her names like she had been giving herself away all her life out of weakness.

To his surprise, Whitney didn’t fight. Instead, she turned her gaze on him. Shame filled her eyes, which had shrunk to those of a child’s, all their swagger gone up in smoke. She withered not out of weakness, but pain.

Naiwi swallowed hard and stepped in, spoke up, so the woman turned on him, hissing that she hoped he didn’t think he was the first her granddaughter had lain with; demanding to know what pick-up the girl had plucked him off coming north from the border. She called him the devil and spat on them both, shouting no kin of mine like a battle cry, or a curse.

Naiwi backed away then, stepping over downed branches and ruts in the road, then over the highway and across the state line. The mainland pushed him westward like his incubation was complete, for he understood now. Nothing good remained in a place like this.

M. Anne Kala`i works across genres to knit connective tissue between disparate places and communities. Her fiction was longlisted for the 2025 DISQUIET Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 Cheshire Novel Prize, and her poetry has appeared in the San Pedro River Review. Kala`i is an alumna of PEN America’s 2024 Emerging Voices Workshop LA and Vassar College’s creative writing program. She is a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of Women Who Submit.