Free A Drink Called Paradise by Terese Svoboda

breath left. Boys get restless, they build a boat, and then they must use it. How to stop them? Then they get lost. They don’t know how to go—we don’t know anymore ourselves. Sometimes later someone will see them in Singapore or Cairns, but they will not be boys then, they will be the ghosts of boys having gone so far in these boats. But never mind—most boys die.
    At sea? I don’t say.
    I also don’t say I saw him, I could have stopped him. I say, Maybe they are only trying the boat out.
    Breasts for Three says they chose to launch the boat at Harry’s because there no one would see them. We see nothing, she says. I have to agree, I have to nod and look away. She says everyone else knew what the boys were doing, but no one can keep a boy even if he has no money for a fare. Boys like leaving. No one else wants to leave, this is our home—paradise. Only if someone needs medicine do they leave.
    It is dark when I decide to slip inside and gather whatever of my things Temu hasn’t gutted or strewn, and I shove all of it under my bag of rice. Barclay holds the boy’s arms back by the elbows when I lift my curtain to go back out. Barclay holds him, but Temu struggles to free himself. He wants to what? Take his grief out on me? Does he have grief? Or does he want to beat me for just being there?
    I will go sleep on the beach. Sleeping on the beach is what you’re supposed to do on a perfect island like this anyway, I don’t know why I haven’t done it sooner. Temu certainly wanted me out, even if he does sleep elsewhere, even if Ngarima says I must sleep in his room. Anyway, if the beach is hot, so are the beds. I shake the hands of each of the chief mourners slumped in wailing stupor on the porch, and I touch many of the hands of all the others who have come, who weep too, even the men, whose weeping frightens me, who wail men-wails and beat on the coral and each other, then I go to pick out a stretch of beach that will do for the night, and damn the roving rapists, the dying half lives.
    Mosquitoes graze in every depression, they come out of the bush as another sharp, cutting part of the bush, a part that flies. Where two palms grow close, where the wind presses these palms flat the way it is always blowing, where the wind picks up sand in sheets and stings so no mosquito stays, a place not far from where the car parts rust in their coral colors, not far from where a boat might come if it came, I hollow out a place anyway and line it with my flowered cloth. I don’t dig too deep, not to China, not to whatever’s left of a jelly baby. Then I lie down to test my hollow for later, pull palm fronds and scrap leaves over me, and I fall asleep, my sleep with Harry having been slight.
    Real night is about to fall when I wake. Loud singing wakes me, from people who don’t see me, filing past, singing with all the lust taken out, with no fists thrust up into the sky, no hips swinging and rolling. They file past my place, and they carry things—the comic book, the thong, the toys—and two men, Barclay one of them, and one woman walk out past the wharf into the lagoon with these things that they weight with stones and make into parcels, that they drop in.
    The boys are gone, they are buried.
    Returning, Barclay passes me, Ngarima passes. I’m now standing beside a line of moving people, trying to look as if I know what it is that they feel. There’s nothing you can day is what I would say to excuse myself, but that wouldn’t be nothing enough.
    I move to the wharf after they’ve all gone. I expect to see the bright newsprint of the boy’s comic book floating back in minutes, the way my bottle did, but nothing shows. A few things do get away. Then a star falls out of the sky, and I know as I watch the bright night with all the strange constellations built into its darkness that even the sky gets away.
    My son got away.
    He is dead. Dead for a