🌹’s Reviews > The Best American Short Stories 2019 > Status Update

All I can say is that when I pulled up to the house on Redtail Road I thought life was one thing, and when I drove away I knew it was another. I knew, quite simply, that a life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us. It is ‘amazing,’ it is ‘exquisite,’ it is a ‘stunning charmer,’ and it is noted in water and jotted in dust and the wind lifts it away.

In later centuries, new etiologies will evolve. Miasma theory will yield to germ theory, superstition to science. Yet every novel treatment breeds an equally novel genetic resilience, as only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it.

Uncertainty contains an infinite number of certainties…Many people claim they like certainty, but I do not believe this is true—it is uncertainty that gives freedom of mind.