A Drink Called Paradise Read Online Free

brother hits him again, this time across the back of his tiny head.
    That head sinks to pale knees.
    The boy pulls him onto his back and carries him out of the house. Temu, the boy explains as he passes me, and dumps him in the shade with his board.
    I rush over, I put my hand out.
    The boy is already on his feet but turning as if he doesn’t know where.
    Wait! Ngarima clumps from the bush to herd him away from me, away from the house, using a switch of coconut frond. He stumbles and reaches for her between switchings. She drops her switch and starts to coo, she cups his tiny head in her knife-scarred hands, rubs his cloud of hair, touches his welts and cuts, all the time cooing except when she snaps out an order, catching sight of his slinking-off brother, who doesn’t bother to point to the dish broken at the door, or at me.
    She holds Temu close.
    They stand together for a long time.
    After a long time, I follow Ngarima’s son into the bush. But follow isn’t exactly what I do, I just take his path. I am so confused and full of fear for the small head, the wind-milling arms, the beating, I just walk. I guess I choose the bush because that’s the way the boy went who beat him back, who saved me, and if I need saving again he is the one to follow. I don’t care about the things in my room anymore—or I forget to care, it is his room anyway. I am the trouble if there is trouble to be pointed at, to be windmilled away.
    Ngarima’s son is gone from the path by the time I take it. I walk and walk and see no one, no brother or child or man wandering with a machete. I walk and I am pregnant with that child, the boy is flailing his arms around inside me, I am wondering what’s wrong? Then the head is too easy coming out, I smile at the wriggling arms until I see the rest and can measure what’s wrong against what’s right.
    My son is about Ngarima’s son’s age, stalkier though, less woe-eyed but just as fidgety. My son’s fidgets are mine. I have to keep going, I have to keep working. Even when he was a baby I worked at this business of illusion, putting con in the game, the game in the con of telling people they must drink things like Paradise in a bottle. I have an imagination that makes that work. But I’d never imagined a child in paradise being wrong.
    I’m afraid of people, yes, even children, who aren’t right, whose heads are too small or too large or wrong. I suppose I’m more afraid of them when I’m on an island. In another country where you drive past or stare and then turn your head and leave money and move on, I’m not so afraid. It is part of the country, why you are not them.
    Now I have his room.

I walk on and on, but I know I can’t keep the shore from showing up. I want to avoid it and its lagoon with the tiny head maybe already back in it. Let they who seek out the uneasy bits all islanders bury, seek. I will walk.
    I walk until I see a pig in the way, a big pig. I walk to one side of the path and give way to that pig, his bristly back, his huge behind. But his front bears tusks, and he’s annoyed, I’ve annoyed him as he roots with those tusks at a fallen fruit and has to lift his tusked snout just as I am passing on veritable tiptoe past his fruit.
    He makes his noise.
    I pick up a fruit and hit him in the face with it. He blinks, sniffs it, then crushes it between his jaws, the juice coming through real animal’s teeth.
    Then he makes his noise again.
    I run.
    Off the path, everything scratches. I rip my shorts, my legs bleed, my hands tear as I lurch away from the boar into the bush, into the real bush. They may as well tack up boards covered with nails as grow all this stiff stuff so ready for sex that scratches, cuts, jabs, lances what is already dish-shard-sliced.
    The bush thickens further with its knife-sharp plants, and I stop. I have to. Besides, the pig’s not in pursuit, nor is the windmilling boy.