Sharks in the Time of Saviors

Sharks in the Time of Saviors Plot Summary

Introduction

# Sharks, Gods, and Broken Gifts: A Family's Journey Through Miracle and Loss The Pacific churned black beneath the tourist boat as seven-year-old Nainoa Flores tumbled overboard, his small body swallowed by waves that stretched endlessly toward the horizon. His parents screamed from the deck, watching helplessly as dark shapes emerged from the depths—four tiger sharks cutting through the water with predatory grace. But instead of the carnage everyone expected, something impossible unfolded. The lead shark gently cradled Nainoa in its massive jaws, carrying him like precious cargo back to the boat while the others formed a protective escort. When they released him to the life preserver, not a drop of blood stained the water. This miracle would shatter the Flores family's ordinary existence, transforming them from struggling locals into reluctant celebrities touched by forces beyond comprehension. As Nainoa developed mysterious healing abilities that drew desperate pilgrims to their doorstep, his siblings Dean and Kaui found themselves living in the shadow of a brother who seemed chosen by ancient Hawaiian gods. Their journey would scatter them across the mainland in search of individual identities, only to pull them back to the islands when Nainoa's gifts became a burden too heavy to bear. What began with sharks delivering a child from death would end with the land itself claiming him back, leaving a fractured family to piece together the meaning of miracles that arrive disguised as both blessing and curse.

Chapter 1: The Chosen Child: Nainoa's Rescue by Sharks

The glass-bottom boat rocked gently in the swells off Kona as the Flores family peered through the viewing windows at coral gardens below. Nainoa pressed his face against the glass, mesmerized by the underwater world, when a sudden lurch sent him tumbling over the side rail. The Pacific swallowed him instantly. Malia Flores dove without thinking, her body slicing through the surface as her son's head bobbed in the distance. Then she saw them—four massive shapes gliding through the blue like living torpedoes. Tiger sharks, their distinctive stripes unmistakable even in the filtered sunlight. Her heart stopped as the first shark reached Nainoa, its jaws opening wide enough to swallow the boy whole. But death never came. Instead, the shark gently took Nainoa in its mouth, holding him as delicately as a mother cat carries her kitten. The other sharks flanked them in formation, creating an honor guard as they approached the boat. The lead shark lifted its head above the surface, presenting Nainoa to his terrified family like an offering. "They brought you straight at me," Malia would tell the story countless times afterward, "carrying their heads up out of the water like dogs." When Augie pulled his son aboard, coughing seawater but unmarked, the tourists erupted in cheers and prayers. Someone captured it on video—grainy footage that would play on local news for weeks. The transformation began immediately. Donations poured in from strangers moved by the miracle. Native Hawaiians whispered about 'aumakua, ancestral spirits taking shark form to protect their descendants. A scholarship materialized for Nainoa to attend Kahena Academy, the islands' most prestigious private school. The struggling family suddenly found doors opening that had been locked their entire lives. But with the blessings came strangeness. Nainoa began experiencing vivid nightmares filled with images of burning sugarcane fields and ancient chants. Animals gathered around him with unsettling reverence—stray cats, wild birds, even cockroaches that normally scattered from human presence. His parents discovered a small cemetery behind their new house where creatures had crawled to die near their son, as if drawn by forces they couldn't resist. "I hate what's in me," Nainoa confessed one night, tears streaming down his face as his mother held him. "I keep messing everything up." Malia stroked his hair, feeling the tremors that ran through his small body like electrical current. "What's in you is a gift," she whispered, though she wondered if either of them truly understood what the sharks had delivered back to them that day.

Chapter 2: Gifts and Burdens: The Family Confronts Nainoa's Powers

The knock came at three in the morning—desperate, insistent rapping that pulled the Flores family from sleep. Malia opened the door to find Mrs. Nakamura from down the street, her diabetic grandson limp in her arms, his breathing shallow and erratic. Word had spread through their Kalihi neighborhood about the boy who could heal with his hands. "Please," the old woman begged. "The doctors say there's nothing more they can do." Thirteen-year-old Nainoa emerged from his bedroom, already knowing why they'd come. He took the child into his room alone, closing the door behind them. For twenty minutes, the house held its breath. When Nainoa finally emerged, exhausted and pale, the boy in his arms was breathing normally, his fever broken. Mrs. Nakamura pressed an envelope of cash into Malia's hands before disappearing into the night with her grandson. It was the first of many such visits. Soon people arrived daily—cancer patients, accident victims, mothers carrying children with mysterious ailments. Nainoa would take them into his room, and they would emerge changed, leaving behind donations that kept the family afloat after Augie lost his job at the sugar plantation. Dean watched his younger brother's transformation with growing resentment. Once the family's golden child, a promising basketball player with college scouts already calling, he now felt invisible beside Nainoa's supernatural gifts. The breaking point came on New Year's Eve when a boy named Skyler arrived with his hand mangled by illegal fireworks, fingers hanging by threads of skin and tendon. "Fix it," Skyler demanded, thrusting his destroyed hand toward Nainoa. Dean expected his brother to refuse—the injury was too severe, too public. Instead, Nainoa took the ruined hand in both of his, closing his eyes in concentration. When he pulled away, witnesses swore they saw perfect fingers where moments before there had been only bloody pulp. "You don't know what you're doing," Dean exploded later, pinning Nainoa to the floor of their shared bedroom. "You're just a kid playing with things you don't understand." When Malia tried to intervene, Dean's rage spilled over, his hand striking her across the face. The sound echoed through the house like a gunshot, followed by terrible silence. Dean fled, leaving behind a family fractured by forces none of them could control. Kaui found Nainoa in the garage hours later, a hunting knife in his trembling hands, a fresh cut bleeding on his thigh. "Fix it," she demanded, echoing Skyler's words. "I can't," Nainoa admitted, his voice breaking. "It's never been like New Year's. I still did something for those people, I could feel it, but there are all these things that keep coming—pictures, commands—I don't know what they want from me." That night, Malia discovered her son staring at the stars from their backyard, his body swaying slightly as if moved by invisible currents. "I have to fix everything," he whispered. "Everyone expects me to fix everything, but I don't even know what I am." She wanted to tell him he was just a boy, that no thirteen-year-old should carry such weight. Instead, she placed her hand on his shoulder and felt the tremors running through him like electricity, the same energy that had called the sharks to save him years before—and would eventually call him back to the depths that had first marked him as different.

Chapter 3: Scattering Seeds: The Siblings Seek Their Own Identities

Dean Flores clutched his acceptance letter as he stood in Honolulu International Airport, Spokane University's basketball scholarship his ticket away from Nainoa's shadow. His family gathered around him with forced smiles, pretending this was celebration rather than escape. At eighteen, Dean had grown into his father's powerful frame, his hands capable of palming a basketball or throwing devastating punches with equal ease. "You watch me rise," he wanted to tell them, especially Nainoa. "Won't be nothing bigger than what I become." Spokane welcomed Dean with snow-covered courts and teammates who mocked his island accent. But when he stepped onto the hardwood, something transcendent took hold. During a game the local papers dubbed "Hawaiian Night," Dean entered a flow state that felt supernatural—every shot perfect, every steal anticipated, his body moving with liquid grace that silenced the crowd's initial skepticism. "I was everywhere at once," he would later describe it. "All the other players were exit signs I was passing on the freeway." The crowd chanted his name as he led comeback after comeback, his rage transformed into athletic poetry that scouts whispered might carry him to the NBA. Meanwhile, Kaui arrived at San Diego State University carrying engineering textbooks and a climbing harness, determined to scale both academic heights and literal cliff faces. On her first night, she met Van—a fierce climber with sun-bleached hair and eyes that seemed perpetually ready to start fires. With Van and their crew, Kaui discovered abandoned buildings to scale and drainage tunnels to explore, her body finally finding expression beyond her brothers' shadows. "I was a seedling pushing up through soil," she reflected after a night spent wrapped in Van's arms beneath desert stars. "Breaking through into rain and sunlight for the first time." The engineering program challenged her brilliant mind while climbing challenged her body, both offering identities entirely her own. Nainoa chose Portland, becoming a paramedic whose hands could diagnose internal injuries with a touch. His partner Erin watched with growing unease as patients with catastrophic trauma made inexplicable recoveries under Nainoa's care. He found comfort with Khadeja, a single mother who sensed his uniqueness without demanding explanations, her apartment becoming refuge from the weight of others' expectations. But distance couldn't sever the roots connecting them. During rare phone calls, the siblings circled each other like wary animals, their shared past a gravity none could escape. Dean's basketball career began showing cracks as his temper erupted during games. Kaui's relationship with Van grew intense then volatile when Van suddenly pulled away, claiming their intimacy had been nothing but drunken experimentation. One night, Dean called Nainoa after a particularly brutal loss. "I don't know why I hit her," he confessed, referring to that New Year's Eve when he'd struck their mother. "I was trying to fix something I couldn't name." "It doesn't have to be like this between us," Nainoa said softly, his voice carrying across the continental divide that separated them. But it did. They had scattered like seeds from Hawaiian soil, each desperate to grow into something uniquely their own. Yet the deeper they pushed their roots into mainland ground, the more they felt the pull of island currents that had first delivered Nainoa from the sharks—currents that would eventually drag them all back to reckon with the forces that had shaped them.

Chapter 4: Mainland Dreams and Island Chains: Life Beyond Hawai'i

The pregnant woman's blood pooled on the ambulance floor as Nainoa pressed his hands against her abdomen, feeling for the spark of life he'd sensed so many times before. Thirty-six weeks along, both mother and child fading fast from the car accident's trauma. His partner Erin watched nervously as Nainoa closed his eyes, reaching into that mysterious space where his healing abilities dwelled. "We need to get her to the hospital now," Erin urged. "If we take her there, the baby dies," Nainoa replied with certainty that chilled them both. Against protocol, he had Erin pull over, buying time he hoped would make the difference. His hands moved across the woman's body, searching for the familiar warmth that had saved so many others. But something felt wrong—the mother's life force flickered like a candle in wind while the baby's presence grew fainter with each heartbeat. He pushed harder, trying to visualize the repairs needed—clotting blood, mending tissue, restoring oxygen flow. For a moment, he thought he felt response, a strengthening of the connection. Then both lights went out simultaneously, leaving only the terrible absence he'd never experienced before. "Wait, please," he whispered to the silence. "Not yet." But by the time they reached the hospital, his first complete failure was documented in official reports that would haunt him for months. In Spokane, Dean's basketball career crumbled with equal devastation. The fluid grace that had once made him unstoppable vanished, replaced by clumsy turnovers and missed shots that drew boos from fans who had once chanted his name. Coaches who had praised his potential now benched him during crucial games. The scholarship that had seemed like salvation became a daily reminder of dreams slipping away. "How about the party in me started small and got bigger," he would later reflect on the drinking that consumed his nights. "Blackout epic." When the university finally cut him, Dean found himself loading delivery trucks, sometimes handling packages destined for the very campus where he'd once been king. Kaui's engineering classes became battlegrounds where she fought twice as hard to be heard over male classmates who dismissed her contributions. "Group work the way I remember," she noted bitterly, "Phillip with his raging boner for the sound of his own voice." At night, she found release scaling rock faces with Van, their bodies moving in perfect synchronization until Van abruptly pulled away, claiming their intimacy meant nothing. The siblings' phone calls home grew less frequent, their connections more strained. Parents who had once orbited around Nainoa's gifts now seemed distant, preoccupied with financial struggles and Augie's increasing mental fragility. Each conversation reminded them of the weight they'd tried to escape by leaving the islands. Nainoa's relationship with Khadeja deepened, but he couldn't shake the failure that had shattered his confidence. When she found him unwashed and delirious in his apartment, listening obsessively to emergency radio dispatches, he gripped her arm with frightening intensity. "What can you do?" he demanded. "You can't do anything, can you?" That night, alone with his 'ukulele, Nainoa played "Kanaka Wai Wai" and felt something stir in his chest—not the healing power that had defined him, but something older and more fundamental. The melody carried him back to rain forests and black sand beaches, to the moment when sharks had first marked him as different. A calling took root, spreading through his body like medicine he'd been denying himself. The islands were summoning him home.

Chapter 5: Shattered Faith: Nainoa's Crisis and Return Home

Nainoa stepped off the plane at Honolulu International Airport hollow-eyed and silent, his parents' forced cheerfulness unable to mask their worry. For days he wandered O'ahu like a ghost, visiting tourist attractions he'd never seen as a local—Pearl Harbor, Sea Life Park, the swap meet at Aloha Stadium. The concrete sprawl felt foreign despite being home, as if he existed between worlds without belonging to either. Khadeja's calls from Portland went unanswered until Malia finally intercepted one, her voice gentle but firm as she explained that Nainoa needed time. When she confronted her son afterward, his response chilled her. "I don't have to talk to her," he said flatly. "She doesn't understand what I am." "She wants to," Malia countered. That night, the truth spilled out in broken fragments. How he'd been learning to manipulate the mechanics of human life in the ambulance, reading bodies like medical textbooks, growing arrogant about his abilities. How his pride had cost a mother and child their lives when his gift failed at the crucial moment. "I hate this thing inside me," he confessed, his voice cracking. "It should have been given to someone else." "What's in you is sacred," Malia insisted, though doubt crept into her voice. "Then why does it feel like a curse?" Unable to find peace in the city, Nainoa began exploring O'ahu's wild places—illegal trails, hidden beaches, all the secret spots he'd known as a teenager. One morning near Makapu'u Point, he slipped into the ocean's embrace, letting the current carry him beyond the reef. When four gray sharks appeared, circling with lazy precision, he felt no fear. "Snout, pectoral fin, dorsal ridge," he catalogued as they passed, his paramedic training overlaying childhood wonder. When he reached out to touch the lead shark, something extraordinary happened—not a vision exactly, but a feeling that flowed through him like warm honey. He saw Waipi'o Valley with its rivers and taro fields, felt his family among countless others on the beach, their individual forms dissolving into something larger that connected land and sea and sky. When he opened his eyes, the sharks had vanished. But he knew with absolute certainty where he needed to go. Two days later, Nainoa was hiking through Waipi'o Valley on the Big Island, machete in hand, following a pull stronger than gravity. The trail seemed to open before him, branches bending away, mud firming beneath his feet, mosquitoes scattering rather than swarming. He pushed past Waimanu Valley into territories where few ventured, certain that revelation waited just ahead. At dusk, he encountered two German hikers sheltering in an abandoned shack. They shared food and spoke of the strange energy they felt in the valley, how it connected them to something ancient and powerful. "We don't have religion," the woman explained, "but we both say this place is somehow like that." Nainoa felt validation surge through him. "It could make the whole world better," he said, words tumbling out, "if the right person was using it." The next morning he continued alone, barely aware of his surroundings, so strong was the calling. The path seemed to guide him, leading to a clearing at the edge of a cliff where the valleys of Waimanu and Waipi'o spread below like a green tapestry. For a moment he stood transfixed by the beauty. Then the ground shifted beneath his feet. He felt weightless, then the sickening acceleration of falling, something tearing at his shoulders, his spine wrung with heat. Sky and ocean spun past as his femur snapped, the sound sharp as breaking wood. "Oh wait, oh wait—" were his last conscious thoughts as the valley claimed what the sharks had once delivered.

Chapter 6: The Valley's Call: Nainoa's Disappearance and Search

Dean Flores stood at the rim of Waipi'o Valley, sweat soaking his shirt despite the cool morning air. Four weeks had passed since Nainoa vanished into the green depths below. Search and rescue teams had given up after finding only a bloodstained hiking boot and torn backpack near a recent landslide. His parents had reluctantly returned to O'ahu to save their jobs, but Dean remained, running the treacherous trails with manic determination. "I can run the whole trail now," he thought grimly, his legs pumping like pistons as he descended the steep switchbacks. Below him, waves rolled methodically across black sand, the same rhythm that had pounded these shores for millennia. He pushed deeper into the valley, crossing thirteen stream beds, feeling river rocks shift beneath his feet, then mud sucking at his ankles. Something felt different that morning. As he approached the furthest point he'd searched before, a strange sensation overtook him—the same flow state he'd experienced during his greatest basketball games. "Everything around me bends away from my vision and there's just the one thing," he recalled. The vegetation seemed to part before him, revealing a path through dense foliage he'd never noticed. It led to a clearing at the cliff's edge where the ground had recently collapsed, leaving a steep slope before dropping away entirely to the surf a thousand feet below. Halfway down the unstable slope, something caught his eye—the toe of a hiking boot protruding from loose soil. Dean's heart hammered as he secured himself to a tree and lowered his body over the edge. He retrieved the boot, finding it stained with dried blood. Nearby, partially buried, he uncovered Nainoa's backpack. Inside, miraculously preserved in its case, was his brother's 'ukulele—the instrument that had channeled something ancient through Nainoa's fingers. When he returned to Uncle Kimo's house, his uncle took one look at the items and understood. "We gotta get some people, we gotta go get the body," he said quietly. "There's no more body," Dean replied, his voice hollow. "Just one place where there was a landslide that broke off into a cliff. There's nothing else to find." That night, Dean walked out without explanation, hitchhiking toward Hilo with no destination in mind. The weight of discovery pressed down on him—he had found his brother, but only fragments, only evidence of an ending he couldn't accept. Meanwhile on O'ahu, Malia drove her city bus along the Pali Highway in pre-dawn darkness, exhausted from weeks of searching and the return to normal life. A figure appeared in her headlights—a nearly naked man wearing only traditional malo cloth and a lei po'o crown of leaves. She slammed the brakes, certain she'd hit him, but when she rushed outside, the road was empty. In the distance, she glimpsed only a wild pig disappearing into the ferns. The same night, she returned home to find Augie missing again—another in a series of mysterious absences since their return from the search. When he finally stumbled in near midnight, he smelled of wet earth and native plants, the same scent she'd detected from the apparition on the highway. "Where did you go?" she asked gently. "I was walking," he mumbled. "All up the way, with the water. Up toward the clouds, toward the Pali." As she held him while he sobbed, Malia understood that something was trying to reach them—the same forces that had once delivered Nainoa from the sharks, now delivering messages she couldn't quite decipher. On the mainland, Kaui received the call about Nainoa's disappearance while cramming for engineering finals. "What do you mean he's missing?" she demanded, guilt mixing with fear as her mother explained about the spiritual journey to the valleys. "Called there," Kaui repeated sarcastically. "Not this bullshit again." But that night she dreamed of Hawaiian goddesses, women "as large and distant as volcanoes, their skin dark like pregnant soil." In her sleep, she danced hula with movements she'd never consciously learned, her body swaying to rhythms older than memory. Something was calling her too, though she refused to acknowledge it—the same current that had carried her brother back to the islands and into the valley's embrace.

Chapter 7: What Remains: Fragments of a Miracle

The Flores family gathered on Waipi'o's black sand beach where their journey had begun with sharks and miracles. Dean stood apart from his parents, clutching Nainoa's 'ukulele case like a sacred relic. Kaui had finally returned from San Diego, her engineering textbooks abandoned mid-semester, drawn by forces she couldn't name or resist. Augie waded into the surf, pushing a small outrigger canoe laden with ti leaves and plumeria flowers. The traditional ceremony felt both ancient and improvised—a burial for the body they would never recover, a farewell to the son who had been claimed by the same waters that once delivered him. "I still feel him," Malia whispered, her eyes fixed on the horizon where ocean met sky. "He's not gone, not really." Dean wanted to believe her. In the weeks since finding Nainoa's belongings, something had shifted inside him—the crushing weight of failure lifting, replaced by an inexplicable sense of completion. He remembered the flow state that had guided him to his brother's final traces, how the jungle had parted before him like a living thing offering revelation. Kaui stood with arms crossed, her scientific mind battling against island beliefs that suddenly felt less like superstition than forgotten truth. She'd dreamed of Nainoa the night before—not falling from a cliff but swimming with sharks, his body transformed into something neither fully human nor animal. She'd woken with salt water taste in her mouth and tears on her face. "The valley doesn't just take," a local kahuna had told them earlier. "It transforms. Your son answered a calling few can hear anymore. The 'āina needed him back." Augie pushed the memorial canoe further into the waves, its cargo of flowers and photographs catching the current. Dean stepped forward and placed the 'ukulele atop the floating shrine. The instrument that had channeled ancient melodies through Nainoa's fingers would return to depths that had first marked him as chosen. They watched in silence as the canoe drifted toward the horizon, growing smaller until it vanished entirely. Above them, clouds parted momentarily, allowing shafts of golden light to pierce the water's surface. For a brief moment, the ocean seemed to glow from within, and each family member felt something stir—not grief exactly, but recognition. That night, as rain lashed their rented beach house, Dean woke to find his mother standing at the water's edge, arms raised to the storm, chanting in Hawaiian words he didn't understand. He watched as she waded into the churning surf, disappearing briefly beneath a wave before resurfacing. When she returned to shore, her face was transformed—not with sorrow but with fierce, terrible joy. "He showed me," she told Dean, water streaming from her hair. "The sharks, the valley, the gods—they're all the same thing. They're us, Dean. They've always been us." Dean didn't fully understand, but as dawn broke over the valley, he felt something awaken within him—the same current that had once flowed through Nainoa, now finding new channels. Kaui felt it too, waking from dreams of dancing to find her hands moving in patterns she'd never consciously learned. The miracle child was gone, but the miracle remained, fragmented and distributed among them like seeds scattered by wind—waiting for the right season to take root and grow again.

Summary

The Flores family would never be the same after the valley claimed Nainoa. Dean abandoned his mainland dreams, returning to Hawai'i where he became a teacher and coach, guiding troubled youth through the same trails where his brother had vanished. His hands, once skilled at basketball, now helped others find their way through wilderness both literal and metaphorical. Kaui completed her engineering degree but found herself drawn to environmental restoration projects in the islands, applying scientific principles to heal land her ancestors had cherished. Her climbing skills translated into accessing remote areas where native plants could be reintroduced, her body moving through vertical spaces with the same grace she'd once brought to rock faces. Malia and Augie remained in their humble home, where visitors occasionally reported strange occurrences—animals gathering without explanation, plants blooming out of season, the distant sound of an 'ukulele when no one was playing. They neither confirmed nor denied these stories, having learned that miracles rarely arrive as expected. The sharks had delivered Nainoa to them once, marked him as different, set him on a path that led inevitably back to the forces that had chosen him. The valley had claimed him not as punishment but as completion—the circle closing, the gift returning to its source. What remained was neither fully blessing nor curse, but something more profound: the understanding that they were all fragments of the same ancient story, broken pieces of a miracle that had never been about one chosen child but about a family, a people, a connection to land and sea that colonization could damage but never fully sever. The healing power that had flowed through Nainoa's hands now moved through Dean's teaching, Kaui's restoration work, their parents' quiet tending of memory and tradition. They had learned to carry the sacred in ordinary ways, to find the extraordinary in daily acts of love and preservation. The miracle continued, transformed but unbroken, flowing like currents beneath the surface of their scattered lives—connecting them still to the sharks that swim in Hawaiian waters, to the valleys that hold ancient secrets, to the gods that speak through wind and wave and the beating of human hearts that refuse to forget where they came from.

About Author

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Kawai Strong Washburn

Fitzgerald interrogates the intricate dynamics of wealth and aspiration, with a focus on the underlying disillusionment that often accompanies the pursuit of the American Dream. In his exploration of societal structures, Fitzgerald uses vivid imagery and nuanced characterization to depict the moral decay hidden beneath the façade of prosperity. His narratives often probe the intersection of personal ambition and societal expectation, allowing readers to question the true cost of success. Therefore, readers who delve into his works are prompted to reflect on their own values and aspirations, gaining a deeper understanding of the cultural and psychological forces at play in their lives.\n\nIn his renowned book, Fitzgerald crafts a complex portrayal of characters striving for fulfillment, yet grappling with inner emptiness and moral ambiguity. This theme resonates with audiences who find themselves navigating the challenges of modernity, as it encourages introspection and a reevaluation of personal goals. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald's writing style—characterized by its lyrical prose and poignant symbolism—adds layers of meaning that enrich the reader's experience. Those who appreciate literature that challenges societal norms will find his work both enlightening and thought-provoking.\n\nFitzgerald's contributions to literature have cemented his place in the pantheon of great American authors. By examining themes of excess and moral decline, he offers a critical lens through which to view the evolving landscape of 20th-century America. His impact extends beyond the confines of his novels, influencing both contemporary writers and the broader cultural discourse. As such, his bio remains a testament to the enduring power of storytelling in shaping our understanding of the world.

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