Key West is a sand-covered mountain, almost 2135 millimeters above sea level. It is said that it is one of the highest mountains in the range called the Florida Keys. They jut up far above the Atlantic, and can be seen from hundreds of yards away by the approaching sailors. But only when the pull of the moon is low, and the seas are calm, and the two-foot waves don’t blot out the view.

Key West is the furthest southern point in the land they call the United States of America. Except for Hawaii. At that southern point, there is a buoy that says “Havana–ninety miles.” Havana, where the young women roll the cigars between their dusky, unshaven thighs, after tromping the leaves with their muy sexy unshod feet.

Lying in the road by the buoy is a dead six-toed cat. It has been there for days. No one knows what the cat was seeking at that latitude.

We went to Key West. The woman and I walked the streets that he walked.

Key West was hot. It was very hot. Imagine the hottest place that you have ever been. Then imagine ten times that hot. Then imagine harder. You still will have no conception of how hot it was.

The sweat dripped down our faces, searing our eyes with the salt of our dessicating bodies. The sweat poured down. It poured down like the thick, rich red blood gushing out of the buttocks of a fat tourist, who did not outrun the bull in Pamplona.

The sun blazed above us, like a giant ball of flaming gases, burning at temperatures of millions of degrees.

It burned our skin. It burned our skin in such a way that even the soothing balm of aloe from the CVS could not cure. It reddened it, reddened it like the lobsters on which we supped in the evenings, after the sun had dropped into the sea, with the sweat still running down us. The lobsters were out of season, so they were fresh-frozen. But they were lobsters.

We drank drinks. Strong drinks. Manly drinks, though she was, and still is, despite the fact that we were in Key West, a woman. Not a fresh-frozen woman, though the women were out of season as well.

We also drank sweet drinks. Drinks with umbrellas in them, to forget. To forget what?

We don’t know. We forgot.

Was it the drinks? Was it the low ceiling in the converted attic in which we stayed and for which we paid over two hundred bucks a night? And because we were not munchkins, or hunchbacks, continually confused walls and ceilings, and disrupted them with our noggins, and bled profusely from our scalps?

It could be the concussions talking, but we forgot.

It made us rethink our lives, and their purpose. It made us rethink our vacation planning methods. And then, with the skin peeling from the backs of our arms, and the backs of our legs, and backs of…well…our backs…we left.