 What strange paradise, by Omar Alacad, 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 indecency. 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 sea water and hardening, they 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 lamppost 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 side 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 year it has happened with such frequency that many of the nations on whose tourists the island's economy depends have issued travel advisories. The hotels and resorts, in turn, have offered discounts. Between them, the Coast Guard and the morgue keep a partial count of the dead. And as of this morning it stands at 1,026, but this number is as much an abstraction as the dead themselves are to the people who live here, to whom all the shipwrecks of the previous year are a single shipwreck. All the bodies, a single body. Three officers from the municipal police force pull a long strip of caution tape along the breadth of the walkway that leads from the road to the beach. Another three wrestle with large sheets of blue boat cover canvas trying to build a curtain between the dead and their audience. In this way, the destruction takes on an air of queer unreality, a stage play, blood of movement, a fairy tale, upturned. The officers, all of them young and impatient, manage to tether the fabric to a couple of lamp posts, from which the orange-necked birds whistle and flee. But even stretched to near tearing, the canvas does little to hide the dead from view. Some of the onlookers shuffle awkwardly to the far end of the parking lot where there's still an acute line of sight between the draping and four television news trucks. Others climb on top of parked cars and sweep their cameras across the width of the beach, some with their backs to the carnage, their own faces occupying the center of the recording. The dead become the property of the living. Oriented as they are, many of the shipwrecked bodies appear to have been spat up, landward by the sea, or of their own volition to have walked out from its depths and then collapsed a few feet later. Except the child. Relative to the others, he is inverted, his head, closest to the lapping wave.