Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
We sat in a lounge for families of surgery patients. Nauseating green carpet, the eggshell walls one always finds in hospitals. My mother and oldest sister played cribbage and flipped through back issues of Ladies’ Home Journal. I reread Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut having long been a sort of literary comfort food for me. In between pages I thought about my father’s lung, and how as I sat there people were carving it out and placing it in a bag and sending it to the basement to be incinerated. This was back when I still had a reverential sense about our bodies, and I couldn’t shake the conviction that something as critical as a lung deserved a better send-off. That lung had gone to seminary with him, had breathed the sodden air of Vietnam for two tours, had kept him supplied with oxygen at every one of his children’s births. Sure, now it was trying to kill him, but like any faithful companion that suddenly goes rogue, it deserved some regard before being dispatched. It was owed some note for its fifty-five years of service.
What do You think about Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (2013)?
