num_pages: 332
description: Doctors tend to the needs of their patients but patients give meaning to the lives of their doctors. So it is for Cullen Brodie a twice-divorced kidney specialist and Ennis Willoughby a troubled cross-dresser whose life is saved by a rare heart-and-kidney transplant. Haunted by a personal tragedy he blames on his fathers religious zealotry Cullens bitter disbelief in the afterlife is tested when Ennis begins to exhibit tastes and characteristics uncannily similar to those of his female organ donorwhose first name Ennis inexplicably knows. Ennis becomes convinced that her soul has inhabited him but Cullen sides with Enniss psychiatrist who tells Ennis he has subconsciously merged his transgender female personality with the imagined characteristics of his donor. Yet even as Cullen struggles with his own issues of reconciliation and forgiveness Enniss eerie knowledge of his donor forces Cullen to consider the unimaginable: is it possible he is witness to a verifiable incident of transmigration tangible proof of a human soul? Or is he witness instead to the miracle of being transgender? Male and female at once the poetry of one and the poetry of the other both burninglike a parrotfish another miracle of nature changing gender apace beside its glorious ever-changing hue.
language: English
title: The Atheist and the Parrotfish
publisher: Evolved Publishing LLC