A Drink Called Paradise Read Free Page B

into the sunset with, but I collect myself, chase children who squirt me with rubber-hose creatures that grow in the shallows, burn the continental drift into my sandy thighs, cavort with snorkel and mask in the empty lagoon.
    Empty except for that tiny head on a board, swirling and stopping, swirling and stopping.
    You aren’t hungry? screeches Ngarima. You are sick? She’s spotted my leftover portion, some of my taro hidden upright beside the can.
    She feels my forehead.
    The way coconut is food for pleasure, taro is punishment. The queen of starch, you can taste in every bite all the shirts it could stiffen.
    I’ve eaten plenty, I say. I don’t say, I eat small bites to parse out the taste.
    Go, says Ngarima to me as if I’m her son, one of the family, as if I’ll obey. Go inside and get another tin, she says.
    No, no, please, I’m fine, I say.
    Open the drawer there—just inside—and you’ll find one. I keep them in the drawer.
    Her voice tells me she won’t take no.
    I cross into the kitchen. She is my host, after all. I am a paying guest, but this is her house. I open the drawer next to the food safe, the one I think is the one she means, but I discover this is not the drawer, that this drawer should not be opened. There’s sugar at the bottom of this drawer, an inch of it spilled on purpose, and the purpose flies up at me when I open it, out flies a flock of gold-brown roaches. I scream, and then Ngarima screams, That’s their drawer.

I am thinking I must leave my room and cross the kitchen again, I must pass its roaring roaches, I must go out, I must go to the bathroom, I must go for a walk, I must see if the rain’s truly stopped and how stopped and whether it will rain again. I am thinking how I’ve made my own island, how one island begets another, like a fish with an organ bag you can see through, all the seeds of future fish in a row, ready to be born and bear and be born again, when I begin to creep past the drawer, which is now closed and not still pulled out to the point where I left it, when I start picking my way past the oozing white of what flew up at me earlier, which I beat down and made ooze, and just then, while I am concentrating on getting around it all and not thinking, a man-sized boy with such a head crashes in from the porch with his arms flailing and a noise coming out of him in big gobs like something left on and stuck.
    Boom—pink shredded plastic and streaks of pepper sauce and ketchup, a full jar of mayonnaise, all three of the family’s forks ricochet off the kitchen walls, and its cooking pot, its charcoals and tinder, are smeared into the mess with one more whirl of his long, long arms, with one more great gob of sound.
    Back, shouts Ngarima’s son. Back to Auntie, go on back to Auntie. Go on.
    The boy is coming for his room, my room, my room that was so empty when I came, and now I know why—those long arms pull down anything in their windmilling radius. But I’m too stunned by the boy’s tiny head, let alone the whipping arms, to stop him from going into my room, to connect what has happened in the other room with those arms that whip toward my clothes, books, passport, money, ID, sun lotion—and his space.
    Ngarima’s son raises the boy’s board, the one the boy floats on with his long arms, and he hits him with it, he tries to herd him away from the room by beating him with its hard foam. The boy falters in his furious beeline, he turns in circles beside his brother in the staccato of the beating.
    His brother hits him again and again.
    I do not scream, seeing the boy being beaten. Speech and the power of speaking leave me. I do not scream, not even as the boy begins to cry, not even when a plate comes down from the back wall with a tremendous crash and splinters into shards that cut my skin in the painless way of razors. Cut too, the boy scuttles away from the broken plate and then his