 Penguin Random House Audio presents What Strange Paradise by Omar Alakad Read For You by Dion Graham It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge. They merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it, Ambrose Beers, an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I taught you to fight and to fly. What more could there be? J.M. Berry, Peter Pan. The child lies on the shore. All around him the beach is littered with the wreckage of the boat and the wreckage of its passengers. Shards of decking, knapsacks cleaved and gutted, bodies frozen in unnatural contortion. Dispossessed of Nightfall's temporary burial, the dead ferment in decency. There's too much of spring in the day, too much light. Facedown, with his arms outstretched, the child appears from a distance as though playing at flight, and so too in the bodies that surround him, though distended with seawater and hardening, there flicker the remnants of some silent levitation, a severance from the laws of being. The sea is tranquil now, the storm has passed. The island, despite the debris, is calm. A pair of plump, orange-necked birds, stragglers from a northbound flock take rest on the land post from which hangs one end of a police cordon. In the breaks between the wailing of the sirens and the murmur of the onlookers, they can be heard singing. The species is not unique to the island, nor the island to the species, but the birds, when they stop here, change the pitch of their songs. The call is an octave higher, a sharp throat-scraping thing. In time a crowd gathers near the site of the shipwreck, tourists and locals alike. People watch. The eldest of them, an arthritic fisherman driven in recent years by plummeting cherub fish stocks to kitchen work at a nearby resort, says that it's never been like this before on the island. Other locals nod, because even though the history of this place is that of violent endings of galleys flipped over the axis of their oars and fishing skiffs tangled in their own netting and once, during the war, an empty Higginslander sheared to ribbons by shrapnel. The old man is still, in his own way, right. These are foreign dead. No one can remember exactly when they first started washing up along the eastern coast. But in the last... Sample complete. Ready to continue?