Not Three Miles from Port Everglades
My neighbor’s wife told me a crew member killed himself on their cruise through the Caribbean. I asked how it happened. Jumped overboard, she told me. I kicked at the brown grass between our yards and mentioned the lack of rain since they’d left. Everything’s dying, she told me, of one extreme or another. This time last year, rainwater flowed shin-high through our entire neighborhood, destroying almost everything they owned and missing my threshold by less than an inch. She told me she wouldn’t put so much as a toe in the ocean for the rest of their trip and her husband couldn’t stop questioning crew members about what went down. I asked what he found out. No one would say, but they gathered it had something to do with living conditions on lower decks. Some vacation, I said. She told me some folks never get a vacation. Then she slapped the side of her neck and lowered her hand to reveal a bright red asterisk. Mosquito blood, she said. But I knew it better as her blood. Maybe my blood. Maybe the blood of anyone recently tendered ashore.
