There was a skeleton of a house across the street from ours.  It was right on the ocean, although it did nothing to block us from any of the salt spray. It was massive and gray, rotting in the humid summer sunlight and the oppressive winter rains.  Its history was a familiar one. Lots of people had tried and failed to build out here. There was another dinosaur house on Kaloli and 5th—also massive, but framed with heavy iron beams that were now red and disintegrating. “Plastic rusts in Hawaii,” my mom would sometimes complain.  The dinosaur on 5th street might have become something more grotesque than just another way to cover things up.  They'd let a big gnarled Ohia tree grow right in the middle of it, as if it was going to be an over sized conversation piece in the middle of their ballroom. A tree as a decorative caged animal. The tree now stood five or six feet higher than the highest beams in the metal skeleton, reaching out of it like a bony hand, or a long swaying neck.  

The dinosaur house across the street was four stories high, and seemed to sway and creak in the wind. It was all plywood and two-by-fours, with no glass in its windows, and no finished walls.  It was open like a broken ribcage, its roof acting like a sagging spinal column barely holding it together. My step-dad wanted it torn down. Wanted it cleaned up and hauled off.  He called it an unnecessary eye-sore, a rude reminder, and wanted it to stop blocking his view, and to stop creaking and whining at night, as if it was missing something by being all bones and plywood.  “At least we're not like that,” my mother would say, sunning herself topless on our secluded back deck.  My step-dad would startle himself awake with his own snoring in the hot-tub, and for an instant I would think of him drowning in his sleep.

My desire to go inside the dinosaur house grew the longer we lived near it.  We rented down the street while our house was being built, and I walked down to the work-site almost every day after school just to be near it.  I sat in the tangled shadows of the dinosaur house, and watched the shadows unravel on the ground around me. They seemed to scratch at the gaudy new paint of our unfinished house growing up beside it.  Together, we watched with tingling anxiety as the men my parents hired boarded up the open walls,  flesh out the windows, fill it in, cover it up, plaster it into place. But even when the walls were finished, and the windows and the doors kept the humidity and rain from seeping through, I knew what kind of emptiness and rot would be growing underneath the thin paint, the stainless steel nails, and the white sheet-rock.   

I wanted to go inside the empty, open dinosaur house.  I wanted to watch rain fall into what will never be a cold and empty kitchen.  Wanted to see it drip, drip, drip from where a chandelier will never hang.  I wanted to see the water run down the unfinished twisting staircases and soak the downstairs sitting room where a bar and a second living room would be.  I wanted to let it trickle from the treated wood into my stringy sun-bleached hair while I leaned against a wall, or lay on the floor in the room that they would probably make me live in.  I wanted to lay in the puddles and go to sleep there.

The day our house was finally finished, Alaska sent 25 foot waves to smash against the cliffs across the street.  I could see the white explosions of water in the light of the moon.  They towered over even the dinosaur house, and salty water sprayed against our windows, trying to break the glass.  My parents were holding a housewarming party, their glowing champaign glasses reflecting the calm white ceilings, diamond white teeth and empty glowing walls. The storm outside pounded and clawed at us, the empty gray skeleton unable to move out of the way.  In the darkness and the flash of the white ocean explosions, I didn't hear the dinosaur house roaring—didn't see it rocking violently. It buckled under the weight of my parent's house's gaze, and under the impulsive anger of the ocean waves.  It collapsed suddenly, as if exhausted.  As if it had been holding on to the same bitter hope I had been of seeing us and our vacation house shriveled at the last minute.  Instead, the dinosaur house crumbled and died, and I didn't even see it slip away, becoming nothing more than bones drifting in and out on tides for the rest of my childhood.