ANGELS ARE ALIENS

Through mangrove forests, you leave this world behind. Leery gazes follow you, squinted eyes; the feverish air sizzles with a sense of uncertainty. It is a place not meant to be seen by your eyes. A silvery gloom rests over the lagoon. While sleeping in the berth or climbing up the dock just after swimming right to the point where our neighbors shot at the 15ft American Crocodile two days later, an insect must have bitten me. A firm bulge of flesh was left behind. Over a beer, we slice it open, removing two ulcerous craters—reminiscences of venomous fangs. The surgery left a gaping crater close to my elbow.

Stranded on an island with people who became like family to me, so different from my own beliefs, who believed that angels might be aliens and that bell helicopters look like fire-spitting dragonflies from the bible.

Coincidentally, I ended up on a sailing ship at the shores of Roatan. Part of the Bay Islands in Honduras, the communities of Jonesville and Oak Ridge are mainly accessible by water—protected by a surrounding coral reef like a battered Venice, built on stilts into the Caribbean sea. Tales of pirates and the colonial past are woven into the fabric of current-day reality. Cigarette boats capsizing with kilos of cocaine, murder, and diamonds compound into a tropical should-be fiction.