Tag: stories

There is a word in Ekegusii, my mother tongue, the language of the Gusii people of Kisii County, Kenya, that I did not understand the full weight of until I was old.

This is worth pausing on, because she said it with complete sincerity.

The heart fails in small vessels before it fails on the angiogram. So does a life. A cardiologist on the microvascular damage of a thousand tiny self-betrayals.

A few minutes past midnight on a Saturday, halfway through a twenty-eight-hour shift, I sat in a grey Toyota Corolla on the third level of a hospital parking garage.

The night a resuscitation worked and the physician walked out into the corridor unable to feel his own pulse on life. The essay behind the founding of this work.

Sixty-eight strokes of the cane in Class Four for a stutter no child chooses. The day a voice went quiet, and the long road of getting it back.