PUBLISHED JANUARY 2021

7 Minutes

Paul Van Der Spiegel

The Queer Testament Book 2

At the point of death,

lost to all we’ve known,

adrift from those we’ve loved,

what stories do we tell ourselves?

William is clinically dead, his consciousness trapped inside a lifeless body for the seven minutes following cardiac arrest and the death of the consciousness generating areas of the brain. As William’s central nervous system asphyxiates, his body’s store of neuro-peptides are released: narratives unfold, buried questions of sexual and gender identity merge with vivid dreams and fragments of memory, and questions become an answer, and from death comes rebirth.