Good stories emerge from the unexpected.

The wounds hug the edges of my hips, five thumb-sized circles of hot red blisters. They look like hives or chemical burns, little liquid-filled boils set in frames of scorched flesh that I notice as I’m changing clothes.

I call a doctor. Boriana, a Bulgarian with the slow small voice of a grandmother, doesn’t hesitate: “Have you been to the beach recently? Did you eat any lemons or limes?”

Playa Grande is long and broad, flanked by black cliffs like bookends, with palm trees bursting from the rock and blurring up into the liquid blue sky. Down below, I’m on the hot sand, lying on my belly and squinting through cheap, tinted plastic sunglasses. Mia and I chat mindlessly and sip from plastic cups— cool Dominican beer, slightly bitter, the carbonation and grit of stray sand drifting across my tongue. I swallow, and sand lingers between my teeth.

Lunch is fried fish: cotorra, with technicolor interlocking scales and funny calcified teeth for nibbling on coral out on the reef. Someone caught this fish today, with a spear gun, and sold it to his cousin Luisa, and she gutted it and sliced it down the sides and sprinkled it with lime, salt, sazón completo. She slipped it into a blackened metal pot resting on hot coals, and the oil bubbled away, and she flipped the fish twice and then scooped it onto my plate. Two sliced limes on the side.

I am ravenous. I squeeze a lime like I’m making a fist, feel the acid creep into a hangnail and instinctively stick my finger in my mouth. I taste salt, stone, citrus. When the limes are spent I set them aside and do what any self-respecting person eating beach fish in a swimsuit would do— I wipe my hands on my skin, in the curve just above my hips. Mia and I eat in blissful, amicable silence. After, we throw fish fins to the hopeful dogs and watch the sun fade over the water.

Phytophotosynthesis, a compound word easy to pick apart—phyto, plants. Photo, light. Synthesis, the reaction between the two. I wiped the lime juice from my fried cotorra on my skin. And the citric acid drew the sun down like some cruel magic and left me with blistered, discolored sunburns in the shape of a handprint on my hips.

The burns faded to bruises, and the doctor said, in her small sweet voice, that they’d be gone in a few months. But a year later, the marks are still there—a matched set of off-color fingerprints, wrapped around my ribcage like tattoos, bruise-colored reminders of the fish, and the sun, and the island.