Authors: Madeline Smoot
Giants and Ogres
Giants and Ogres:
Fairy Tale Villains Reimagined
Edited by Madeline Smoot
Text Copyright © 2016
Forest Image Copyright © shutterstock.com/Baksiabat
Giant Image Copyright © shutterstock.com/vladiwelt
Ogre Image Copyright © shutterstock.com/vladiwelt
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without express permission of the copyright holder.
For more information, write:
CBAY Books
PO Box 670296
Dallas, TX 75367
Children's Brains are Yummy Books
Dallas, Texas
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN: 978-1-933767-53-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-933767-54-3
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-933767-59-8
PDF ISBN: 978-1-933767-60-4
Jessica Lee Anderson
I had imagined the theme for my trip to Hawaii would be “relaxing escape,” not “the craziest experience of my life.” When I thought of the island, I pictured palm trees, dancing dolphins, colorful flowers, and countless miles of oceans and rainbows. Minus the dancing dolphins and the exaggerated miles of rainbows, most of my expectations were spot on, though the haze blanketing everything limited visibility on the day I landed on The Big Island.
Aunt Genevieve greeted me at the mostly outdoor airport. The expression “my jaw dropped” is cliché, but that's exactly what happened when I first saw her. My aunt wore a black dress that swooped low to expose an expansive tattoo on her chestâa ring of red hibiscus flowers just above her cleavage which formed the base of a volcano erupting into flames up on her neck. Aunt Genevieve's cropped grey hair looked like a ring of ash. Tribal tattoos accentuated her bands of arm muscles. “
Aloha
, Dahlia!” she said, presenting me with a fragrant
yellow and white
plumeria lei
that tickled my neck.
Several people in the airport stared at my aunt as they passed by, but she must not have noticed or cared. She hugged me so tight she nearly crushed the flowers. “I am glad you're finally here!”
“Me too. I can't believe I'm actually in Hawaii,” I said.
“Just make sure you don't move here before you graduate high school, or your mom will kill me.” Aunt Genevieve winked before she picked up my luggage as if it weighed a mere ounce.
I laughed. Before I departed San Antonio for the summer, Mom kept warning me that I better not turn into her sister after spending time with her. Aunt Genevieve is Mom's polar opposite, and the story goes that my aunt studied astronomy at the University of Hawaii and never returned back to the mainland. “And no tattoos either, Dahlia,” Mom had joked.
“Too bad I don't turn eighteen for another ten months.”
“Very funny,” Mom had said, but she didn't have to worry because I'd never be brave enough to get as inked as my aunt. Wait until Mom saw a picture of her sister's latest chest tat.
My eyes burned from the Hawaiian haze, but Aunt Genevieve got the wrong idea as we walked to her car, a beat up Prius that Mom's suburban could've eaten for lunch. The windows were rolled down.
“I bet your mom is missing you like crazy too,” she said.
A trip to Hawaii without a smothering parent? No tears here. Mom was probably too busy setting up shop as a writer-in-residence at some foreign university for the next six weeks to miss me much anyway. She'd arranged my summer plans so I wouldn't be alone while she was away, and Aunt Genevieve amazingly covered all my expenses.
“I know you're far from home, but I'll take good care ofâ” Aunt Genevieve started to say, but she stopped when I coughed.
“Ahh, I see. It's the
vog
,” she said as if that made all the sense in the world.
“Huh?”
“Volcanic air pollution.
Vog
. Madame Pele is showing her wrath today. It's just a coincidence with your arrival, I'm sure,” she said and then mumbled something that sounded like a prayer.
I laughed again, but Aunt Genevieve's eyes narrowed
as if I'd disrespected her, or worse, disrespected this Madame Pele she'd spoken of a moment before.
That was the second time I'd heard about Madame Pele in less than a few hours. The couple sitting next to me on our very long flight talked about island hopping to Oahu to snorkel at some popular spot and to see Pele's Chair. Supposedly, the chair was an enormous lava formation they said was Madame Pele's throne. I overheard them discuss how some missionary had tried to destroy the monument but never could.
“Is this Madame Pele a giant witch or something?” I asked as I looked around at my new surroundings. The area was nothing more than an endless bed of black lava, not the tropical version of Hawaii I had in mind.
“A giantess who can take on many forms, yes, but most importantly, a goddess. The goddess of volcanoes.” Aunt Genevieve went on to explain how Pele is compassionate yet volatile and how there are many versions of the way her spirit came to occupy the Kilauea volcano. “The giantess created this destruction, this growth,” my aunt said, pointing at the lava fields.
“Are you some kind of witch doctor to know so much?” I blurted out.
“Some of the people I know call me
kahuna
,” she
said as if that answered my question.
We stopped talking, and I surveyed the land.White rocks, coral actually, stood out against the fresh black lava. Some people had arranged the coral to form shapes like hearts and letters.
TK & PC 4ever. Aloha. RIP Eli.
And then I saw my name.
Dahlia.
Surely, it's not the most common name. I shrugged off the strangenessâit's not a totally uncommon name either.
The Prius groaned as my aunt drove to the uplands, passing some breathtaking sights including Mauna Kea, the tallest peak in all of the state. The tropical foliage became thick, but then the scenery shifted once again, this time to more like Texas countryside as we neared my aunt's home in Waimea. No joke, one of the signs said “Whoa” instead of “Stop.”
“One night after a late shift at the observatory, I saw an old lady with long stringy gray hair standing over there alone,” Aunt Genevieve said, pointing off in the distance near a narrow road. “I thought she was lost, so I stopped to help her. Her voice was gravelly when she asked if I had a light for her cigarette. I plugged my car lighter in for her, but when I turned around, she'd vanished.” Aunt Genevieve snapped her fingers for effect.
I jumped.
“There's no way an old lady could've run off that fast or could've hidden. It was Madame Pele in one of her forms, testing me.”
My skin prickled at the story or maybe it was because the temperature had dipped now that we were in the uplands. It was sixty something degrees, much cooler than the near triple digits back home. I kept my window rolled down though, enjoying the much fresher air in this part of the island.
“And no, I wasn't drunk or hallucinating,” my aunt added as if she could read my mind. A short while later she pulled into a gravel lot in front of small shack. “Welcome to my
hale.
”
I had imagined her place was like a hotel room at a fancy beach resort which was pretty dumb of me, I know, especially since I'd seen pictures before. A cattle pasture was nearby that once again reminded me of Texas, only much greener. The closest beach was miles and miles away.
Half of Aunt Genevieve's guest bedroom, where I'd be staying for the next several weeks, was full of envelopes of varying sizes from all over the mainland and a few foreign countries.
“Sorry for the mess. I plan on taking care of these
right away,” she said.
“Is this fan mail or what?” I asked, regretting I'd brought so many things from home with no place to put them. And why had I packed so many bikinis and not a single sweatshirt?
My aunt chuckled. “I have two jobs actuallyâone at the observatory as you know, and I recently started taking care of other's misfortunes.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Visitors take lava rocks home even though they're warned not to, or they'll steal some sand from the beaches. Bad luck follows them where they happen to goâthe curse of Pele. They can send whatever items back to some visitor's center, but they'll just dump it without a care, or they can send it to me. For a small donation I'll return it with an offering to make peace with Pele.”
“So you are a witch doctor?”
“
Kahuna
,” my aunt said and left it at that. She showed me around her
hale
and pointed out gifts like a beautiful floral painting one of her satisfied clients had mailed her after her bad luck suddenly reversed thanks to my aunt's intervention.
“You up for a trip to the volcano tomorrow?”
I wasn't sure what I believed about Madame Pele, but going to Volcanoes National Park was on my Hawaiian bucket list.
My aunt gave me some time to unpack and encouraged me to contact my mom. Email was easiest given the difference in our time zones. When I got on the computer, the screensaver was a shot of the lava rocks with the coral tagging, identical to what I saw earlier today. There was my name againâDahlia.
“Weird,” Aunt Genevieve said, presenting me a plate of fried rice she'd heated up in the microwave along with a side of fresh sliced pineapple. “I wonder what happened to my photo of the comet?”