Shaping Bones By Jesa Amascual

Sy came to the forest to escape the fractal suffering of cities, but found instead the grief of the forest waiting to take up space between their bones.

In Honolulu, pain had been manageable in its repetitions—the same arguments blooming like mold in apartment walls, the same tourist sunburns glowing pink beneath storefront neon. People patched their wounds with bands and bureaucratic tape, hands pressed over holes in the hull of a cursed ship. Sy could read their suffering in tidy, recursive patterns: rent checks folded into eviction notices, hospital bills papering over bullet wounds.

But the forest’s agony was oceanic.

Here, grief was metabolic. Rapid ‘Ōhi‘a Death sang through Sy’s bones, reverberating heat blisters up through to the skin. When they pressed their palms to soil, root networks shrieked through their nerves.

Dai watched from the branches, teeth glinting. “You’re learning to open,” they said, as Sy popped their right shoulder back into place—myna bird gossip slid through the gap.

The desert came in dreams:

Joshua tree: “You’re put together wrong.”
Creosote bush: “You smell like wet rot.”
Rattlesnake: “One bite. You’d stiffen up nice.”

Sy woke with Di’s teeth at their throat. “Get off me– I was dreaming of home!”

“Liar,” Dai murmured. “You dreamed of being alone.”

The storm broke them open. Wind screamed through hollowed ribs; dislocated joints howled. Then—

Expansion.

Sy was rain on their own cheeks. Magma’s groan. Broken-wing of ʻŌmaʻo. The ‘āina whispered: You are not alone in your pain.

Their right hip popped—‘Ōhi‘a grief fermented in the joint, sweetening to syrup, they let it drip into soil.

Right shoulder click—fire ant war drums shattered to salt-sweat. Let the māmaki drink it.

Third rib—the wind’s scream curled around each vertebra and into a lullaby. Dai hissed: “You’re making lullabies from lightning. Your body is all open doors.”

Sy smiled. Somewhere, a bone found a new way home.