Unlucky Star

Mama Nui, also known as Princess Ruth, clapped her hands together at the sight of the new baby princess, Kaiulani, cradled in the nurse’s arms. 

“Thank heaven it’s a girl!” she cried out in Hawaiian, the only language she would ever speak in public.  “A Princess, a real Princess!” she kissed the infant’s cheeks. 

“Girls manage much better, don’t they, sweetheart,” she cooed to the baby.  “And they’re more sensible, too,” Mama Nui proclaimed to the room at large.

“Nonsense!”  Princess Likelike growled, tired and worn out from her long labor the day before and feeling stifled by the sultry mid-October afternoon.  “A boy would do just as well.”

“And girls are smarter, too, you know!  It’s almost always true!”  Mama Nui sang out as she lifted the newborn high in the air.  “Everyone wait and see!  I am giving this angel her own estate, her very own, and she will do so well for herself, you’ll all see!”  Resting her cheek against the top of Kaiulani’s warm head she inhaled the sweet, delicious smell.  “Yes, baby.”  Tiny fingers fluttered over her massive face.  “You will be a comfort to us all.”

“Heaven knows we need it,” Likelike’s sister, Princess Liliuokalani, sighed.

“Oh, why don’t you just speak English, Ruth?!”  Likelike complained, thinking how unfair it was that she had to put up with the dowager’s bossy moods and frequent flashes of temper.  Just because she was rich - well, what of it?  She also happened to be one of the most pushy and loudest women around.  And, at more than six feet and close to 400 pounds, she took up more space than anyone Likelike had ever known.

“Never,” Mama Nui said pleasantly, her bass voice rumbling out like thunder.  “Why should I?  Let them speak Hawaiian.  Who was here first?  And what do you think those haoles mean to me?  Less than nothing, that’s what.” 

She spoke confidentially to the baby.  “They are very rude, to begin with, and they move much too fast, all hunched and bundled up together like little rabbits.”  She looked over at the new mother.  “You know it is true,” she said sternly.  “They rush around all the damn time, going nowhere at all, making noise and trouble while they do it.”

One of the ladies in attendance laughed at the notion. 

“And their so-called ‘singing’ - pah!  It sounds just like little birds being slaughtered.  Oh, yes, it does!”  Mama Nui handed the baby back to her nurse, then cried out abruptly in a shrill, painfully accurate imitation of a bad church choir.

“Oooo, oooo!”  She flapped her huge arms about like wings.  “Like little o-o birds being plucked for their feathers!”