Anansi Boys (American Gods, #2)

by Neil Gaiman

The casket was a glorious thing, made of what looked like heavy-duty reinforced steel, gunmetal gray. In the event of the glorious resurrection, thought Fat Charlie, when Gabriel blows his mighty horn and the dead escape their coffins, his father was going to be stuck in his grave, banging away futilely at the lid, wishing that he had been buried with a crowbar and possibly an oxyacetylene torch.

It belonged to the Spanish, and then to British, then to the Dutch, then to the British again, and then, for a short while after it was made independent in 1962, it belonged to Major F. E. Garrett, who took over the government, broke off diplomatic relations with all other countries except Albania and the Congo, and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett’s fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island’s sole hospital. Since then, Saint Andrews had been ruled by a beneficent and elected local government and was everybody’s friend.

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You’d miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.