South of Suva

Pacific light fractures across a gin-soaked veranda where Phyllis Latimer—white linen wilting, spirit still unbroken—discovers the man she crossed the globe to embrace sprawled like a discarded marionette, liquor blooming across his shirt like tropical rot. One breath later she is racing through sugar-cane dusk, salt air slashing her cheeks, until an outlying island rises—an emerald crucible where identity itself becomes costume. She slips into the name of Pauline Leonard, ward of the imperious planter John Webster, and for a velvet moment the masquerade holds: lantern evenings, stifled glances, the hush of palms writing gossip across the sand. But her estranged husband, a cyclone of entitlement, whips the indigenous laborers into fury against Webster’s imported Hindu workforce; drums throb, cane-knives flash, and paradise combusts into a coup of resentment. Latimer drags his trespassing wife back through the mangrove night, hurls her to the rebels as a ritual oblation—flesh for failed promises—until Webster’s cutter cleaves the surf, rifles crack, and the would-be sacrificers scatter beneath a blood-orange moon. In the ember-lit silence that follows the gunsmoke, Phyllis and Webster stand amid the wreckage of every mask they wore, admitting a desire no longer needing names.