Free A Drink Called Paradise by Terese Svoboda Page A

year—a year, is it? Dead for however long it takes to work that hard after. An accident is that hard. An accident is nobody’s fault, you’re on your own, there’s just a doctor to sign papers, your ex to tell you how stupid you were to let it happen. That’s why there’s no telling anyone, there’s no mourning—I am that stupid.
    He is not dead. See the stars, see the rain that fell, the ocean?
    I get back down into my pit, and I weep at last.

Morning.
    Why not walk to where the middle of the island might be, where fewer people walk and where I can’t see the ocean over either shoulder?
    Why not not walk? I stop anywhere, I look into the bush that has bitten me—or is that mosquitoes? I look into it, but there’s no picture made in my head of bush or bugs.
    I find myself sitting. I find myself making earplugs from the soft centers of flowers, then I curl on my side away from ants and mosquitoes and bush and I shut my eyes. I dream about nothing, I dream about living on a beautiful tropical island that I have made out of nothing, as advertised.
    Flowers rain down. I can’t sleep anyway. I can just breathe in and out, I can just keep my eyes closed and dream. I sit up. I brush the flowers off with the dream, but they release their smell, the one sense I can’t block. I rub their petal silk into my hand and hold one to my face, and this is why people here go on living, this freshness.
    I can’t not smell it.
    Another bunch of petals falls.
    I think I see a gray rat body in the thick of the leaves’ black against the dead-white sun. I unplug my ears to hear if it rustles in the leaves, and I crouch to run if it does, I do do that, I crouch out of a dream of a rat, of myself as rat. What I hear instead of rustles are giggles. I turn toward them and they’re in color, I can see them: giggles that turn into Veelu, who’s a branch over, giggling among others peering down from their branches.
    I don’t pretend I don’t notice, I nod and I smile how I remember I smile. Is that Spreader? Breasts for Three? I can’t say hello , I can’t say good-bye .
    I can’t be rude.
    Why do you gather so many flowers? I almost say, What a waste of time it is, all these flower crowns and leis every morning, don’t you have anything else to do? Don’t you have to wail and tear at your hair and not eat? But I smell the petals, the way they change what you want.
    Veelu monkeys down a limb. You think we are primitive, she says.
    She doesn’t say this, she spits it.
    I say, I don’t think that.
    If you have no work to do, says Veelu, you are primitive—right?
    I’d say you were advanced if you don’t work. I look at my hands. They are purple. Or is that the smell?
    That’s not what people say, she says. That’s not it, not advanced.
    All right, I say.
    If you are primitive, you might as well be dead—that’s right, isn’t it? That’s what people think, isn’t it? Primitive means like an animal, free as an animal, easy to kill because you have nothing to do.
    Maybe, out of jealousy, I say. Maybe that’s why people kill.
    I could run away now. I’m still in my crouch. My beach isn’t far.
    You are the ones who are primitive, she says. She breaks off a branch full of blossoms and points toward her belly. This is where the ghost you and your people make hurts me, she says. Six times it fills, and six times there’s nothing.
    That angled branch over that part of her—this is exactly the place a maid on the main island pointed her dust mop when she warned me about what on this island—sex?
    No.
    Veelu shrieks her nothing , and at the end of it comes a cry, a short, high cry, a sound I’m not supposed to hear but have to.
    The other women thread their flowers.

I keep my eyes shut against the smoke and walk into a palm. I rub my head where it hit and get into my crouch, gulping smoke in the