KEIKI KĀNE
When we first moved to our home, the neighbors who lived behind us noticed our grand-children exploring and playing in the backyard. Imagine the surprise when our grand-children came in the house to let us know that they'd just made a brand new friend and that he was on his way over.
No sooner had we been informed of that fact then there come a knock at our front door. It was an adult male who we first thought was one of our next-door neighbors. I could see that he was not normal, his head was bigger than the rest of his body. There was practically no neck, just the head. He wore a faded grayish shirt that looked like it was worn every day. His loose-fitting shorts were the same. He rocked back in forth while he looked at me with eyes that were glazed over.
"Can I help you?" I asked.
"Yeeeesssss," he replied. "I came to play with the kids, they invited me oveeeeeerrr,"
"No," I moved quickly to the front door to close it but suddenly the strange man pushed it open with his shoulder. He was strong for someone whose body had no muscularity to it. But I was equally as pissed and I wasn't about to let any idiot harm my grandkids.
"I want to play with the keeeeeeeeeeds!" He grunted through spit and drool while I physically shoved him back onto the porch. He stumbled backward but managed to catch himself
My wife and daughter in law gathered our grandchildren and hid them in the downstairs room and locked the door from the inside. My son joined me on the porch to fend off this strange intruder. I'm not the kind of person who bothers with shouting threats at someone. I take care of business and I talk later. The intruder rocked side to side while humming to himself. The more he rocked the louder the humming became, almost as if he were revving up for an attack. I was about to cut that short and let him have my left fist join his flat nose, but I was interrupted.
"COLLIN!!!!"
Standing outside the fence of our front yard was a disheveled middle-aged woman who had seen better days. She was exasperated not just from her daily stress, but from life itself. " I AM SO SORRY," she exclaimed as she walked around to our gate and let herself in. She grabbed the adult male by his hair and yanked it back and forth while his face winced in pain. He cried and groaned as she screamed at him, "YOU GET YOUR ASS HOME RIGHT NOW! I TOLD YOU NOT TO BOTHER ANY OF THE NEIGHBORS!" She slapped him across the face several times before she finally kicked him on the side of his hip. "DON'T YOU EVER BOTHER THESE PEOPLE AGAIN! GO STRAIGHT HOME NOW!"
Crying hysterically, the strange man named Collin let himself out of our gate and walked back to his home one block over.
"I'm so sorry," the woman apologized. "I'm Gwen, Collin is my son. He was born slow and he really likes kids but he's too strong and he doesn't know his own strength. He's not even allowed anywhere near the school up the street. He hurt a little boy one day but purely by accident....it's been really hard and I'm worried that the next time.....I can't even think about it. We're so sorry to bother you."
She left after that and we were never bothered by Collin nor did we ever see his mother Gwen for a while. Three years passed from the time we moved into our little home off of Kapahulu and life was filled with the daily things that need the attention of a large family. Bills, food, transportation, and lots of family dinners. It was in the month of April that a group of unsavory people moved into the neighborhood. They drank and did drugs and more often than not there were fights. We saw the police a lot more often than usual. One day and no one knows how; these people befriended Collin. He was there all the time, everyone who lived on our street saw it, and everyday Collin's poor mother would be seen standing in front of that house, yelling for Collin to come home. A month or so after that, Collin was found lying dead behind the bus stop just around the corner from our home. A couple of elderly people discovered him thinking that he was some drunk homeless person at first. Then they smelled the putrid aroma of bile and called the police. It was only later after the authorities arrived and his body was being wheeled to the ambulance, did they see it was Collin.
Gwen's mournful cries could be heard from our street, it was sad and pitiful. She devoted her whole life to protecting Collin and to protecting little children from his titan like strength. We all suspected that the neighbors down the street were responsible for Collin's death but none of us had any proof. Collins mother became a recluse after he died and she hardly came out of her home. Those damned neighbors were night owls who slept most of the day. We were all home in the afternoon when those horrible people came running out of the garage in maniacal hysterics. The men had their shirts off and the women were only wearing tank tops. On all of their backs and chest were angry bruise marks, deep black and blue. It wasn't long before the police arrived and to their surprise, they weren't being called because of a fight breaking out or because of noise complaints from the neighbors. THEY, (the horrible people) were filing the complaint.
They'd all fallen asleep after a drinking binge that began the previous day at 1pm. They claimed that they'd all been awoken by someone who began physically assaulting them with vicious stinging slaps about their body which at first left welts all over them. Each one of them claimed that it was Collin.
Impossible was what the police said. Impossible because Collin was already dead. The police assumed that what they experienced was a hyper drug-induced hallucination and nothing more. Subsequently, there were all arrested for the possession of illegal substances which were found in their home.
..................
It turned out that our neighbors down the road had Collin come over to their house for entertainment purposes. They let him drink hard liquor and let him smoke weed and do other kinds of hard substances. They made him strip naked and run up and down the street, they made him play with himself and they filmed it. On that fateful night when he died, they had him drinking different kinds of hard liquor and then had him consume different kinds of medication from their bathroom candidate. The music blared loudly in the living room and everyone was dancing and having a great time. Suddenly, Collin's eyes crossed and he found it hard to keep his balance. He was dizzy one moment and in the next, he simply crumbled to the floor and never got up. In a panic, they carried his body to a spot behind the bus stop down the street and dumped him there. Those horrid people were evicted a short time after, no one knows what became of them.
Every now and again during a harvest moon, or the Mahealani moon phase, you can see Collin standing inside the living room of the old house, rocking side to side. You can hear him making that humming noise as it revs up like a race car. It seems that someone told Gwen about Collin's apparition but she did nothing about it. Too painful I guess. He's still there though. I hope one day that he finds a way out.
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