Paradise (pt 8)

There’s a luau at the hotel. They watch the man with the fire sticks and sit on the grass mats and take pieces of the pig that was cooked in a pit in the ground. The boy gets his picture taken with a tiny monkey on his shoulder. It grabs his ear, but it doesn’t hurt. The girlfriend isn’t talking to the father. She keeps her arms crossed and frowns. Twice she looks at the boy and starts to say something to his father but the boy interrupts. His father has him stand under a coconut tree, taking his picture; there are coconuts all over the ground so the boy holds them up, and a passerby tells his father that those things are full of spiders and his father tells him to drop that shit right now; he hands the boy the Polaroids, and while he waits for them to develop his father and the girlfriend go to the bar. He has her by the arm. It looks like it hurts.

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