The salty breeze held me for a moment like a firm handshake from the island ahead. It was the kind of handshake a shifty car salesman will give you, or the kind of trustworthy smile you’ll see on a serial killer as you walk down the street in ignorant bliss. It was warm and pleasant but still gave me chills. 

I didn’t get off the boat. I didn’t trust the island enough to do so. I just watched as a herd of small clouds moved across the water to the beach, eventually casting their shadows over the massive tropical forest. That was the entire thing. Just a strip of beach and miles of lush, tropical, almost sarcastically green foliage. It unnerved me. I knew that out there in all that humid shade - in all that muggy, exotic growth - way back under the trees that block out the friendlier chunks of sunlight…there’d be monsters. There had to be. And they sat there all day, batting flies from their wicked eyes with razor-sharp claws, licking their lips and waiting to make ghosts of children and tourists…

Of course, the real monsters were men. Like the men who kidnapped and raped that fourteen year old girl in Aruba a few years back? They found her dead in the jungle I think. My mind wanders into that jungle sometimes, where the monsters live.

Behind me, on Lido, was a wholesome European family doing wholesome European family things like being fat and wearing polos.