A Drink Called Paradise by Terese Svoboda

moonsuits push Temu’s fist away, a push that rocks the boat deep.
    I’ll take care of her, I say.
    Barclay turns his face from me.
    I look to the horizon, where the big boat sits, as small as one of my son’s from so long ago. One of the moonsuits radios that boat, another stretches his hand toward the lighter, gestures toward where I could sit, pats that place in fact with a Sit here .
    What do I owe you? I shout to Barclay as they start the motor. He’s barely holding Temu back from Ngarima, dollars aren’t on his mind. I give him what I have, but he can’t take it, Temu knocks it from my hand into the water. I bend down to retrieve it, but a moonsuit grips me by the arm, steers me onto the boat to a seat just as it jolts into gear and we’re off.
    It is not as if I am saved, not as I had imagined it. Sailors in angel white should have come, not men in moonsuits. An island chorus usually attends all island exits, Barclay, I’m sorry .
    You farted, says the electronic toy the lone child sitting on the wharf presses over and over, loud with new batteries. No one’s singing and dancing. A few friends of Ngarima stand by, weeping and waving. Barclay waves, holding his package of antenna and the struggling, crying-out Temu. You’d think Ngarima was going forever, like me. In the slow circle the lighter makes as it turns away, I inspect the wharf around Barclay, where my money washes, where I spent so much time looking out to sea, wishing the boat into it. Now I wish that at least Harry stood somewhere close, up to his ankles in surf, his eyes on me.
    But he’s happy.
    The moonsuits shoot the reef with a clumsy grinding of gears, and the lighter heaves as if the outboard won’t make it, then they’re hauling us up a wall of boat, a toy boat grown nightmare huge, up a long spaghetti of ladder that trails the side of the big boat and onto the deck. They haul us up with their strong arms, they shove and push and pull at us, they even put down a basket for the little girl, until we’re all on board.
    We stand on the deck in shock, wet with spray from the reef passage, the big boat still swaying so much you could be walking, but you’re not, you don’t even want to try, this is a big boat in a swell.
    There is only one thing to look at. From where I stand, the island looks flat and small, almost amoeba-shaped at this angle, about to break in half and become two separate islands, mitosis, something to be glanced at under a microscope.

Welcome aboard, they say. Yes, they say when I ask about their boat going back. I like that yes. Then one of them slides a bracelet over my wrist with my name and birth date on it. How do they know that name and date? After the bracelet slides on, it won’t come off, the snap goes tight when I pull on it.
    Then they have at us, needle, calipers, and scrapers. I give them what they need, then they need more, they wave their hands, Wait a minute, there’s something else, and I ask, For what? but they won’t say, they wave their vials and point out urinals, they hurry us out or in.
    It’s important to do it fast, just off the island is what their answer suggests. Otherwise it might wear off.
    I don’t think so.
    They want to know how many coconuts I drank or ate, and I laugh. They repeat the question. The forbidden fruit, I smile, and try to figure.
    Then they lead us to the showers.
    It isn’t that I don’t want a shower. A shower with hot water, the comfort of soap not rendered from whales or tar—or whatever the yellow cakes they sell on the island are made of—this is what I want. I’m shot straight back to all of what my place in the world counts for with that first hot spurt of water, a little more than blood-hot, laving the soap and salt off my skin under fine spray. But in the middle of the shower, the water beating on my skull releases some kind of improved thought run.
    It’s not as if