The Milk of Paradise
by Jerome Barry
Copyright© 2026 by Jerome Barry
Fantasy Story: A mysterious soda jerk arrives in a storm-battered town with a drink that can erase painful memories. For a young couple torn apart by tragedy, his miraculous Milk of Paradise offers a second chance at happiness. But forgetting sorrow may also mean forgetting the lessons that keep us from repeating our mistakes. A moving tale of love, guilt, redemption, and unexpected magic.
Tags: Romantic Fiction Mystery Paranormal Magic
He came down the street out of the darkness between the widely spaced lamp posts, as if emerging from nowhere, and entered the pool of light that shone on the sidewalk from the windows of the drugstore.
The warm, damp gale that whooped down out of the overcast sky seemed to hustle him along until it suddenly slackened and left him standing beneath the neon sign that creaked in complaint against the pummeling of the wind. The sidewalk, still black-wet from the recent rain, was streaked with wavering crimson by the glowing tubes overhead.
He could see, behind the display of vitamin pills and first-aid kits, the hunched forms of a young man and a girl at the soda counter; but they were too frowningly intent upon some private difficulty to glance through the window toward him. He set down a small suitcase, fumbled in a pocket for a memorandum book, worn and dog-eared, and thumbed through it.
“Las Animas, Colorado ... West Helena, Arkansas ... Opelika, Alabama ... Brother, how I do get around ... Old Orchard Beach...
Sparrows Point ... Hmmm ... Here we are! Highland Springs.” He glanced up at the glowing red tubes and read the legend they spelled out.
Drugs—COOPER—Soda
He looked at the window again as if for something that should be there and wasn’t, and his brisk certainty seemed to falter. His gaze lifted to the upper darkness. “This is the place, isn’t it?” he said aloud, and seemed to listen for an answer.
There was a wink of lightning, and then distant thunder cleared its throat softly all around the horizon.
He nodded, snapped the little book shut, and stood waiting patiently until a gray-haired man reached between the window displays and tilted a hand-lettered cardboard against the pane. It read: soda man wanted.
The stranger outside picked up his suitcase and entered the store. Following the gray-haired man back toward the prescription department, he passed the couple at the soda counter and caught the murmur of their voices.
“ ... want to forget I ever met you, Dave Leonard,” the girl said in a whisper of agony.
The boy beside her, a dark, good-looking lad with a hint of desperate recklessness in the cant of his head and the slant of his broad shoulders, said numbly, “Aw, Louise ... what does that leave me?”
“What you had before you killed her ... and that was bad enough.”
The boy’s chin went to his chest, as if she had laid her knuckles across his mouth.
Then the overheard snatch of conversation was left behind, and the gray-haired man reached the prescription counter and turned and saw the newcomer.
“Can I help you?”
“I saw your sign in the window, Mr. Cooper.”
“Well, I dad! I just put it there ... What’s your name, son?”
“Harry.”
“Harry what?”
“Harry Farr.”
“Local boy? Don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
“No. I was hitchhiking through.”
The old man sighed and looked Harry Farr over. This was the type, all right. Sandy hair, rumpled with the wind. A beaten-up old raincoat and a scuffed cardboard valise that probably had nothing in it but a spare shirt and a change of underwear and socks. And the face—always the same, whether it was dark or fair, handsome or ugly—the pert, restless, worldly-wise, young-old face of the itinerant soda man. Mr. Cooper had seen so many of them. Flip, disillusioned, and yet hungry with something boyish and unfulfilled that drove them on and on, from town to town.
“Where you come from, Harry?”
“Louisville, last.”
“Long way off. You been around, I guess.”
“Plenty.”
“This ain’t a big-town store, Harry, with tips and all that. I pay the regular wages, and that’s about all you can count on. How long you figure to stay here?”
“As long as I’m needed, Mr. Cooper.”
“Well, I’ll be dad!” the druggist said. “That’s a new wrinkle. Most o’ you boys only think about what you’ll get out of it yourselves.” He peered through thick lenses. “You look like you had something solid underneath, son, instead of a wisecrack today and gone tomorrow ... Long as you’re needed, eh? I need someone, all right. Gettin’ too stiff in the joints to be all over the store at once whenever the latest high school boy throws down his apron and quits ... You know your trade, Harry?”
“You heard of Joe DiMaggio?”
“Seen him on television, son.”
The corners of Harry Farr’s wide mouth tucked themselves into his cheeks, and his puckish eyes crinkled. “When it comes to mixing fountain drinks, that’s who I am.”
Mr. Cooper grunted. “You won’t die o’ gallopin’ modesty, boy. Nor o’ shortness o’ breath ... Got a place to stay tonight?”
Harry nodded. “Where’s an apron and cap? I’ll start now.”
Mr. Cooper frowned. “Business is slow tonight, account o’ the storm. Get settled where you’re goin’ to room and start work tomorrow. We got quite a lunch trade from the Standard Silverware factory downstreet.”
“I’ll start now,” Harry said again. For a second there seemed to be an air of quiet authority about him, then he grinned and stripped off the tired old raincoat with a playful twirl. “Gotta get on the payroll right away, chief.”
Mr. Cooper rubbed one ear and thought of the lunch rush tomorrow.
“I wouldn’t be chinchy about a few hours o’ pay. Go ahead.”
Harry walked along past the grill and the sirup pumps, a crisply laundered cap cocked over one eyebrow, removed two empty glasses and wiped the dark plastic of the counter. “Anything else?”
The girl raised anguished eyes and shook her head. All but a few strands of her deep-gold hair were hidden by a dark kerchief. Her cloth coat was buttoned closely. Her clothes seemed only a somber frame for a face like that of a grieving young madonna.
The boy beside her motioned Harry away. His head went closer to hers.
He muttered, “I’ll promise anything, Louise. Anything.”
“You promised before.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do to make you believe me?”
“Oh, Dave, don’t you see? It isn’t that I don’t want to. Wanting hasn’t anything to do with it.”
His strong young body rocked slowly from side to side on the stool, like a wild animal fretting behind bars. His voice was hoarse and low. “Then I might as well let everything go to hell. So those guys are hot-rod fools and maybe worse. Some of them are on the heist, I guess. I listened to you. They were the only friends I had, but I was ready to give them up for you.” The tormented swaying of his body made the heavy thing in the side pocket of his coat bump against his hipbone. He held himself rigid.
“Give them up?” The girl made a despairing sound. “You said you would. But you didn’t.”
“That one night. Just to tell them good-bye. They were guys I’d gone around with. We’d been together.”
She said in a stiff-lipped whisper, “My baby and I had been together for three years.”
His breath made a quick inward sibilance, as if she had knifed him.
Mr. Cooper rubbed his spectacles with a cleansing tissue, looking comfortably toward his retreat in the prescription department. “Guess I’ll read a little, Harry. The wife bought me a set o’ classics for a birthday present—must be nine years ago. I never did get to look into ‘em before. We always had somethin’ to do together. But now it’s kind o’ lonely, and I been workin’ through ‘em, volume at a time.”
“I’ll watch the counter, chief,” Harry said. “Go on and read.”
“You know the stuff the kids around here order? Know a steamboat?”
“Sure. Five scoops of ice cream in a row, all different flavors. On top you put—”
“Okay ... Steamboats are kind of old hat. Know any new wrinkle, Harry? Anything the kids might go for?”
The soda man’s face twisted into a pert smile on the side nearest Mr. Cooper. The other side remained still and grave. “I’ve got a specialty.”
“What’s it like?”
“I call it the Milk of Paradise.”
“Good name. Sort of a milk shake?”
“Sort of.”
“What’s in it? ... Wait now. The Milk of Paradise. Seems to me I read a poem—about two volumes back. ‘For he of somethin’-or-other has eaten—’”
“‘For he on honeydew hath fed,’” Harry said quietly, “‘and drunk the milk of Paradise.’”
“That’s it! Coleridge. Right? Poem about Kubla Khan and the pleasure dome. I remember now. You know, Harry, I’ve often tried to figure what he meant. What did the milk of Paradise do to the feller in the poem? Now, I thought at first maybe it got him all excited. Gave him a big lift, a terrific kick. But as I keep gettin’ older and lonelier, I think ecstasy—different.”
“How?”
“Well, people have always dreamed about some marvelous drink or food. Do you know what it was supposed to do, most of the time? Just make ‘em forget their grief. There was the water of the river Lethe. The Greeks thought that when you drank it, you would forget all your past troubles. And there was nepenthe. That was supposed to be an Egyptian magic drink that wiped out all your memories of sorrow. People have always imagined there might be something like that. But not like any of the drugs we have.
“No,” Harry said. “Dope won’t do. It’s been tried.”
“Your old troubles come back worse than ever—and a lot o’ new ones with ‘em. I think the thing the poets wrote about—nepenthe or the milk of Paradise or whatever—was a beneficial gift from the gods. It would take away the painful memories without puttin’ anything bad in their place.
It would give a man peace when the grief was too great for him to bear. That’s just my idea.”
“It might be a good idea,” Harry said. “Sometimes. For some people. Not always.”
Mr. Cooper sighed. “I often wish I had some stuff back there in the jars that would do that for people. Or here in the syrup pumps.” He nodded toward the young couple at the soda counter. “Take them, for instance. Pair o’ nice kids. They’re in a bad way. A real bad way.”
“The boy looks beat down.”
“Dave Leonard. Mechanic over at Belknap’s garage. Makin’s of a good worker but got a wild streak in him. Grew up in the shacks over on the north side. Tannery Hollow. Had a no-good father run away when Dave was just a sprout. Last year the kid was chasin’ around with a pack o’ young rascals. They had jalopies that Dave souped up for ‘em till they could outrun anything on the roads. Racin’ and darin’ one another to do crazy stunts. Like to kill somebody sometime. Wonder they didn’t. Or get mixed up in these gas-station hold-ups been goin’ on.”
“He’s in love with the girl?”
“Heels over head, boy. She knocked him all to sticks and staves. Better way o’ sayin’ it, she put him together out o’ the bits and pieces he already was in.”
“Who is she?”
“Louise Korinek. Young widow. Her first was a steady, quiet feller. Electrician. His folks were Czech. He took sick and died—some trouble with the blood cells. Left her with a child—pretty little girl. Before Louise got a regular job at the silverware factory, she worked here at the counter for a while. A real nice girl. Everybody liked her. She came mighty near gettin’ Dave straightened out.”
“Near?”
“Yup. They were goin’ to get married. They’ll never make a go of it now. I look to see the boy slump right back into bad company. Shame.” He drew a heavy breath and started toward the little glass enclosure. “We can make a sign for the back bar. ‘The Milk of Paradise.’ See if it catches on, Harry.”
“Chief,” Harry called after him, loud and bumptiously, “one sip of my specialty and anybody’ll forget all their troubles.”
The girl glanced up quickly. The slight movement of her body made her purse slide from her lap. As she snatched for it and missed, her knuckles struck the hard, heavy thing in Dave’s side pocket. Her hand twisted and grasped it through the cloth. Her eyes, the smoky blue of a summer rain cloud, widened. She let go of the thing quickly.
“Dave! What’s that for?” Her body moved away from his. “You said some of the crowd were already—Those hold-ups—Are you—?”
His strong, dark face reddened. “I didn’t get this to use on somebody else. I don’t stick up gas stations.”
“Where’d you get it? What for?”
“One o’ the guys ... When you told me you were all washed up with me—” He paused and then blurted, under his breath, “If I feel like trying a little Russian roulette, it’s my business.”
“Dave, no!”
He said desperately, “I don’t know what I—Does it make any difference to you?”
She drew the kerchief closer around her lovely, tortured young face. “Don’t say things like that just to make me sorry for you, Dave. I can’t help how I feel. I was in love with you. I really was. But now—what can I do? No matter how I try, it’s no use. I keep thinking about what happened.”
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