The Southernmost Point

By Cody Bond

If I die in Key West, there will be a party. There will be drinking and sunburns and sex. They will toast me at sunset in Mallory Square, and they will play up and down Duval Street, shouting into shop corners as their hats fill with pocket change. Everyone will dance. And in the morning, when the sweat has dried, they will forget. The roosters will crow, and the cats will yawn, and the breeze will blow in from the Gulf and carry my soul away.

At least that’s how I imagine it. Like every other night here. Seamless, sticky hours of loose tongues and rowdy sidewalks. Christmas lights in the banyan trees. Long legs, bleached hair and teeth, and the collared boys who love them. This island is a hideout. The beginning and the end. Mile 0. Time passes only as a series of classic rock covers and vague impressions.

Duval is just like any other Spring Break street, with the doors flung open and the tanned shoulders spilling from their halter tops. The girl on the bar is too young to know the songs she’s dancing to. Hungry faces slouch at her feet, suck down pints and slide dollar bills beneath her garter. Outside, the pedicabs and taxis hustle by. The cops grope their belt buckles and lean in the alleys to spit.

Everyone is on vacation, even the locals. They carry their drinks from corner to corner, scream and lust and vomit, and no one notices. The spiky-haired hippy chicks with the homemade tattoos and the banjos on their backs, the Navy boys on their scooters, the bikers and sailors and fishermen all struggling to hold their liquor and let everything else go. They’re escaping something, searching for a way to lose themselves in this tropic limbo and linger like another grain of sand, another buoy tangled in the mangroves.

No one wants the story to end. They drink enough to forget what they have read or tear out the pages and tuck them away. Paradise, after all, is a matter of perspective. It lasts only so long as there is ice for the rum.