The Woman Who Faded into ʻŌhiʻa Rain By Jesa Amascual

The first time Marikit vanished, the apapane were singing. Their crimson feathers flashed between the ʻōhiʻa branches like warnings as her fingers turned to mist as she spooned the last of the ‘uala out of a jar. The birds fell silent—then burst into their liquid “kēhau, kēhau” song, as if laughing at the absurdity of disappearance on an island where everything was already being unmade.

Before the collapse, she’d been visible in all the wrong ways: a queer Pinay birthworker with blunt bangs and a target on her back in the Dying States’ protests, catching rubber bullets in her medic vest while the other resisters talked stories behind her back. She fled west when the sterilization vans started rolling through immigrant neighborhoods, trading one occupied territory for another. In Hawaiʻi, they called her “kamaʻāina-adjacent”—close enough to tend their births, far enough to blame when the placenta cords knotted.

But after the hospitals shuttered, after the grid failed and the last evacuation crafts left for New Zion, she learned the language of hiding from the ōmaʻo. The thrush’s dusk cry—”ho-wē, ho-wē”—became her curfew signal as she moved through lychee groves gone feral. She wasn’t the only one listening; Kanaka farmers timed their taro plantings by the bird’s morning song, now that the moon cycles had gone strange.

“You’re not disappearing,” the ʻōhiʻa tree told her when her left knee winked out of existence during a rainstorm. A fledgling ʻapapane hopped along the branch above her head, its feathers the exact red of the lehua blossoms drinking her vanishing hand. “You’re becoming what the land remembers.”

When the Reclamation Patrols came with their biomass scanners, Marikit stood still as the ʻōmaʻo does when predators pass. Let them look. She was the space between

Let them look. She was the glint off a dismantled fence, the space between two raindrops. The island had learned how to hide its beloved. The ʻapapane sang on, their voices stitching the forest together—thread after scarlet thread—as the island wove its beloved back into the story.