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320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 3, 2015
A petro-stink hung thickly in the air, a smell like hot tar in summer. Cosgrove saw spangles of crude in the water, the flotillas of diarrheic froth. He worried about the fumes he was breathing, all those ominous-toxins he heard about in the news. Benzene, arsenic, Corexit. Dolphins, he'd heard, were coughing and bleeding out their assholes. Not good.
When Cosgrove got out of the truck he was ready to kneel and kiss the ground. He might have if it weren't so filthy: dirty Mardi Gras beads and petrified dog turds and cigarette ends.
A warm breeze carried the smells of garbage and piss, of seafood and chicory-spiced coffee, of horseshit and rotten fruit.
The fetid spice box of New Orleans
"Nobody's dreams are interesting, except to themselves."
“Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air--moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh--felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
After midnight and the black-green swamp was swollen and dripping moonstruck jewels of dew trembling on the leaves. The Toup brothers came across a fallen oak, its trunk worm-bored and teeming with larvae. ...Now they came across a spiderweb as big as a shrimping trawl, stretched between tumorous trunks of two alders. A hand-sized spider like a blown-glass object d'art lazed in the middle, motionless in the beams of their flashlights.