Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His cheeks were as swollen and red as the playground foam.

Somewhere far above the park, a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the tree line, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

At the bottom of the ravine, all that was left of Eric’s scarecrow was the torso. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. I took a big breath; I was going to need Mondo’s help to get down there. He’d have to belay me with the rope I’d brought, while I crawled down the rock face like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed behind me. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed, too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, still gaping at my knapsack, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys-ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It was almost forty minutes before my feet scraped the floor of the Cone. At one point I stumbled and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was okay, I was okay (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral-blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lagoons of air between its humped roots like tiny underworld lights. Much higher up, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball-round and came loose.

The scarecrow’s torso was featureless and beige, like a long sofa cushion. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it somewhat less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the scarecrow’s chest, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t the real Saturday — but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I figured I couldn’t in good conscience steal the real Saturday back from Sara Jo — I was no expert in atonement but that seemed like a shitty way to go about it. Instead I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror (“You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?”). Many of the products that this pet-store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the ledge above, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to let my guard down now. I kept my feet planted but I let my own torso sway, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. “Get away!” I hollered at the sky above the substitute rabbit, wheeling my arms to scare off any unseen predators. If I’d lost the real Eric and Saturday, I could protect this memorial I’d made. Large shapes caught at the corner of my eye. Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a backward reenactment of its birth from my black book bag — first went its furry ears, its bunching back, the big velour skis of its feet. I spread my arms above the rabbit, so no birds dove for it. I had a knife in my back pocket. The thought occurred to me that I was the scarecrow’s guardian now, and the symmetry of this reversal both pleased and terrified me. Yes: now I would stand watch over what remained of Eric Mutis. It was only fair, after what I’d done to Mutant. I would be the scarecrow’s scarecrow. My shadow draped over the remains of the doll. The torso looked weirdly reanimated now with the tiny rabbit digging sideways into its soft green interior, palpitating like a transplant heart. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling to me from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or climb out yet. Owls might come for Eric’s new rabbit in a rain of talons. City hawks. Something Worse. How long would I have to stand watch down here, I wondered, fighting off the birds, to make up for what I’d done to Eric Mutis? The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

I am enormously grateful to the following people and institutions for their generous support: the Guggenheim Foundation; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New York Public Library Young Lions; the Bard Fiction Prize and the terrific Bard College crew; Daniel Torday, Robin Black, and the excellent students and faculty at Bryn Mawr; Mary Ellen von der Heyden; and The American Academy in Berlin and its extraordinary staff and Fellows.

Thank you to the editors and staffs of the following magazines and journals: Cheston Knapp and Michelle Wildgren at Tin House; John Freeman, Ellah Allfrey, and Fatema Ahmed at Granta; Michael Ray at Zoetrope; Willing Davidson at The New Yorker; Bradford Morrow at Conjunctions . I feel so lucky to have gotten to work with you, and these stories benefited tremendously from your keen reading and suggestions. I am indebted to Carin Besser for her enthusiasm and insight.

Thanks to Caroline Bleeke, Leslie Levine, Sara Eagle, Kate Runde, Kathleen Fridella, and the amazing teams at Knopf and Vintage. To Jordan Pavlin, my phenomenal and inspiring editor, and Denise Shannon, the world’s best agent. And a final thank-you, and big love, to the people who stuck it out with me once again:

To my family

&

To my friends

KAREN RUSSELL, a native of Miami, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Philadelphia.

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