Paradise (pt 7)

In the hotel bathroom the boy washes off the saltwater and when he comes out his father and the girlfriend have changed their clothes. We’re going for a helicopter ride! the girlfriend says; the father gives the boy twenty bucks. Don’t sit up here watching tv, he says. And don’t waste all that money, neither.

The boy waits until ten minutes after they’re gone before picking up the room phone, squinting at the number on the back of a business card the guy from the bathroom gave him, the pencil nearly rubbed into illegibility. When the guy shows up they walk down the stone path into the bushes and take their clothes off on the black sand.

There is a moment, just a split second, when the guy is fucking him that he falls apart, his body exploding and pieces of him like dandelion seeds start to blow away; the guy is too busy cumming in the dark to see what is happening – it takes everything the boy has to put himself back together, and when they’re done they’re both covered with sand.

The guys tucks in his shirt, shaking sand out of his hair as he leaves. The breeze sends it into the boy’s eyes, stinging. As he walks back he realized that the ground feels like an eggshell; he walks up stairs that are made of paper; lies down in a bed made out of matches, sticky and sunburned, and waiting for his father to just get it over with already.

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