The Arkansas Fluke (redux)

I ate the wrong crawfish on my first float trip. It really wasn’t wrong, but eating it raw sure was. A specialized blood test found a lung fluke eating me from the inside out. I didn’t like this because women don’t generally like men with parasites in their lungs. I was scared that I’d have this fluke in my lungs for twenty years. Then a secondary infection led to the removal of fifty percent of my left lung. After six weeks I went home, I was feeling like myself. Now I drive a pick-up. I like that, it looks pretty.

What I’m Reading:

As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish.
The fish was in my mouth.
My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.

I fell like this for years,
in the fishy air. I stopped panicking.
I could think as I fell.

— Edward Salem / “My Aerodynamics”