Free This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

he bent down and picked up the body of his bird. Then, on the mat where everyone could see, he gave his bird the screw. Its body went limp, and Mr. Oh walked off with the dead animal in his hands.
    All around me I could hear men yelling and laughing and cursing. Some had won big, some had lost big, some just wanted me to leave the mat so the next match could start. As I walked off men clapped me on the back.
    Zoo was waiting to hug me and give me a big, wet kiss on the cheek. Uncle Lee called me his baby girl and embraced me. They both told me the amounts of their bets, how much they had won, but I didn’t hear them. I couldn’t even feel the weight of their hands on my shoulders.
    For Mr. Oh, what had this fight been? Just one among many? He had lost a bird, maybe a few hundred dollars, nothing more. He hadn’t lost a father. And I hadn’t regained one.
    After I washed and taped Keoni’s wounds, I secured his left wing so he wouldn’t flap it. I caged him and secured the others, leaving them in my uncle’s truck. I walked down the long driveway to the highway, and then toward my uncle’s house. I wanted to go home. I was done.
    I picked up my car at Uncle Lee’s and drove fast down Haleakalā Highway, taking the curves with urgency. When I arrived home, the lights were off, the windows black. I parked and climbed out of the car, exhausted in every way. The Indian’s truck wasn’t parked in the driveway so I figured he was still in town with his buddies.
    I dug in my purse for my keys, and when I found them, I pushed the diamond-shaped one into the keyhole. The key didn’t fit. I tried my other two keys, and neither of them fit either. Confused, I walked around to the backof the house and tried my keys there, but again none of them opened the door. I looked around, suddenly unsure if in my weariness I had driven to the wrong house, but this was it. I was home. I didn’t understand why my keys weren’t working. I looked up at the windows and then behind me, at the cock yard, and that’s when I saw what he had done.
    The Indian had stuffed all my belongings into the roosters’ coops. My clothes poked out between the wooden slats like errant feathers; photographs of my father and my uncle and me were piled in the feeding dishes; incense from my grandmother and a Carhartt jacket from Uncle Lee lay on a teepee; and my ledgers, all of them, where I had tracked my birds’ diet and exercise regimes, their weight and moods, were stacked outside the nearest coop.
    I started to put together what must have happened: The Indian had heard in town that a fight was on and he had returned home and seen me gone and known I had lied to him. Or he had known all along. Maybe he had even come to the fight, for a minute, to confirm his suspicions. Maybe I had actually seen him in the stands.
    I walked around the yard, some small part of me impressed with his righteous anger. I would have to beg for forgiveness, I realized, and the opportunity to laugh this all away. I had, just an hour ago, truly given up the birds. I was finally done with the fighting, the men, the violence—all the things the Indian detested. If I asked him, he would take me back.
    I spotted a turquoise negligee ballooning up from the back cage, and I laughed to think of the Indian stuffing all my underwear into a rooster coop. I would admit that his revenge was perfect, and I deserved it. I knew he would eventually forgive me, make keys to match the new locks, wash the smell of rooster shit off my clothes.
    I was still smiling when I spotted a white, downy roll beneath the final coop. It looked like an old sweater of mine, and I bent down to pick the thing up. Only when my hand grazed its side did I feel the feathers and the remnants of body heat coming off the dead chick.
    I ran to the hen house. The wire door was ajar, its wooden base bent and misshapen as if it had been kicked in. Hens lay strewn across the yard, and bullet casings littered the ground, the