Nonfiction
For many years I refused to be an exile, claiming that I am an immigrant, someone who chose to move to a new country voluntarily.
Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.
‘That’s just how he is, our dear doctor,’ people would say, and by this would they meant that it was this very energy that had sent him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a member of Iceland’s water polo team, and later to escape from occupied Denmark on a leaky old fishing boat
It didn’t feel wrong because I chose to do it. When I was home from university, I continued in this way, carrying a sharpened coal shovel and leather gloves, or my mother’s .22 Ruger handgun.
New Orleans—my home from the start. I fit better on streets that sag, where live oaks lay low, where rain falls in sheets all afternoon
There is no sound in space. Beyond our noisy atmosphere stretches an infinite quiet.
I am Googling the best places to get magic mushrooms. It’s important to stress here that I am the squarest person who has ever lived.
To the left of the scar, I could see the new heart beating beneath my skin. The new double pump song of perfection replacing the one wrong beat, a single ventricle, I’d had before.