Compulsory Christianity

I don’t know his name, or what crime he was accused of, or whether he was guilty. We’re told that he composed a poem moments before the executioner’s blade fell. This suggests such remarkable equanimity that I find myself wondering if the sparse details I have about this event are reliably rooted in what happened.

Hugo Chavez is sitting on the side of the tub, watching my father as he takes a bath, his last one, as it turns out. My brother and I have limped him here to the tub with the built-in rails; rails it turns out he’ll never need because his time, from diagnosis to departure from

“This hospital would be impossible for anyone with a normal brain to navigate,” Barbara says, eyes flashing anxiously. We stand arm in arm, staring at the colored squares and rectangles on the wall map that shows Building A connecting to Building C via hallways called B. I’ve never looked at a hospital floor plan before