An excerpt from my memoirs, The Girl Who Left a Butcher’s Knife in the Door
For the majority of my life, I have been raised by people without proper uvulas. I found this out officially from my grandmother when I was in the kitchen, tossing swoll blueberries into the air and trying to catch them in my mouth.
“I can’t do that,” she said, “because it would just go straight down my throat. I’d choke to death on it.”
I looked at her from across the ugly forest-greenish-bluish counter. Part of me vaguely remembered discussions involving uvulas from the past—it’s not hard to keep track of quirk topics with only two or three conversations to their name.
I call such things capybara thoughts, thus dubbed after my friend Chris observed one day during AP Lang: “You know, capybaras exist.” I think about capybaras about once every three years, but they are still in the back of my mind, somewhere with all of the other useless things that are too useless even for me to use. (My quotidian visits to the Internet placate my unquenchable thirst for niche knowledge).
If prompted, my brain goes back and pulls out a full album on capybaras: pictures and incredible facts about them. I have other albums that feel the same way. It’s weird to think about, but somehow, I had a capybara thought, a capybara memory, that my grandmother did not have a uvula.
She elaborated on this, after I had asked to make sure that my conviction was correct. In fact, she had had it reattached after her tonsils were out, but one day she opened her mouth and bam, no more uvula. She had swallowed it. My grandfather had his cut out as well, but I don’t think he ever digested it.
And so, these are the people that raised me. Without fleshy, dangling throat sacs, and even more without filters.
iamnotoldfashioned 