IT FEELS GOOD to have the sun on him. To press his body into the sand, the hot wind across his bare skin finally drying out the open sores across his back, and across the backs of his arms and his legs.

He stretches his arms out ahead of him and kneads lazy fistfuls of the sand. Breathes its baked salt smell through the damp shirt, which he’d taken off and folded to lay his head on, avoiding the constellations of dried blood. He lets out a low moan. Muffled by the shirt it sounds almost sexual, but there is no one close enough to hear. The tourist season has been over for a month, the nightclub closed and the long bronze girls gone, and he had not been embarrassed to peel the clothes away from his damaged skin.