Karen Russell - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Then he closes them around Seth’s jaws. I smile and smile at the tourists. Inside my tight fist, the Seth strains and strains against the tape. The Chief keeps his meaty hands on top of my own, obscuring the fact that I am doing any work at all. The Chief likes to remind me that the tourists don’t pay to watch us struggle.

At some point, I must have dozed off, because when I wake up the screen door is banging in the wind. I glance at my watch: 12:07. When Mom was alive, Ossie had a ten o’clock curfew. I guess technically she still does, but nobody’s here to enforce it. She lets Luscious possess her for hours at a time. It makes me furious to think about this, and a little jealous, Luscious taking Ossie’s body on a joy ride through the swamp. I worry about her. She could be deep into the slash pines by now, or halfway to the pond. But if I leave the house, then I’ll be breaking the rules, too. I pull the covers over my head and bite my lip. A surge of unused adrenaline leaves me feeling sick and quakey. The next thing I know, I’m yanking my boots on and running out the door, as if I were the one possessed.

Strange lights burn off the swamp at night. Overhead, the clouds stretch across the sky like some monstrous spider-web, dewed with stars. Tiny planes from the Mainland whir towards the yellow moon, only to become cobwebbed by cloud. Osceola is much easier than an animal to track. She’s mowed a drunken path through the scrub. The reeds grow tall and thick around me, hissing in the wind like a thousand vipers. Every few steps, I glance back at the receding glow of the house.

Several paces ahead of me, I see a shape that turns into Ossie, pushing through the purple cattails. She’s used hot spoons and egg dye to style her hair into a lavender vapor. It trails behind her, steaming out of her skull, as if Ossie were the victim of a botched exorcism. The trick is to catch Osceola off guard, to stalk her obliquely behind the dark screen of mangrove trees, and then ambush her with my Flying-Squirrel Super Lunge. If you try to stop her head-on, you don’t stand a chance. My sister is a big girl, edging on two hundred pounds, with three extra eyeteeth and a jaguar bite. Also, she is in love. During her love spells, she rolls me off her shoulders with a mindless ox-twitch, and steps right over me.

What is she going to do with Luscious? I wonder. What does she do out there with Luscious for hours every night? I’m more fearful than curious, and now she is waist-deep in the saw grass, an opal speck shrinking into the marsh. At odd intervals, rumbling above the insect drone, I hear one of the wild gators bellow. For a monster, it’s a strangely plaintive sound to make: long and throaty, full of a terrible sweetness, like the Chief’s voice grown gruff with emotion. Ever since he left us, I am always listening for it. It’s a funny kind of comfort in the dark.

As I watch, Ossie moves beyond the clarity of moonlight and the silver-green cattails, subsumed into the black mangroves. A new noise starts soon after.

I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I’ll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision. I walk along the dots of the invisible line, peering after her. There’s a syrupy quality to this kind of night: it’s humid and impenetrable, pouring over me. I stand there until Ossie is lost to sight.

“Ossie…?” It’s only a half-yell, the very least I can do. Then, spooked by the sound of my own voice, I turn and walk quickly back towards the bungalow. It’s her body, I think, it’s her business. Besides, Ossie likes being lovesick. How do you treat a patient who denies there’s anything wrong?

Behind me, the bellows intensify. I walk faster.

Most people think that gators have only two registers, hunger and boredom. But these people have never heard an alligator bellow. “Languidge,” Ms. Huerta, our science teacher, likes to lisp, “is what separates us from the animals.” But that’s just us humans being snobby. Alligators talk to one another, and to the moon, with a woman’s stridency.

When you are a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them. As it turns out, I have my own beau. Nothing I tell Ossie, or anybody, about.

When I wake up, I am relieved to see that Ossie is back on her cot. She is covered in scratches, Spanish moss dripping from her matted hair, her nightgown torn in several places, smiling in her sleep. I lie there for a while, watching her face twitch with some happy dream that doesn’t include me. Then I go to study the Bigtree Gator Wrestling Bible by the inky canal. It’s still dark out, the palest smattering of stars in the sky. I swing along the trapeze ropes of the docked boats, dizzy with sleep, the only human awake for miles. Swamp dawns feel like bearing witness to a quiet apocalypse. Infinity comes lapping over, concentric circles on still water. It’s otherworldly, a river of grass, and a red needle of light on the horizon.

I curl up in a tiny ball, pretending to be an insect egg. Next to me, the abandoned airboats hunch along the river like giant spiders.

“Nobody in the world knows where I am,” I whisper. I chant it fast, under my breath. “Nobodynobodynobody…” It makes me feel excited and dizzy — like when I used to look in Mom’s mirror and say my name over and over again, Avaavavava, until the sound didn’t belong to my face anymore.

“Nobody in the world knows where I am right now….”

That’s when I hear the first twig snap behind me.

This is no Prince Charming. He’s covered in feathers and bird shit. He’s older, and I can tell right away that he is nobody’s father.

“Hello!” I yelp. “Are you here to see the show?”

I hate how eager I sound, but I can’t help it. It’s my Bigtree training — I run up to every adult on Swamplandia! like a dog trailing its leash. “Didn’t you see the sign? Don’t worry, we’re not actually closed.”

The stranger looks at me with the flat, lidless interest of the gators. He looks me to pieces. Our alligators are not hunters or scavengers; they are lurkers, waiting to decide if something is worth the lurch. I realize now that I have been glimpsed and corner-of-the-eyed before, by the Chief and my sister and the yawning tourists. But I have never actually been looked at. Not like this.

He laughs. “Hello, sugar.” His spiny hair, his glasses, make him look like an antlered beetle. If the Chief were here, he would have laughed him off our property.

I’m not scared. I’ve closed the jaws of eighteen Seths in my bare fist. I’ve wrestled my fat, love-starved sister to the ground. But I’m not stupid. When the man steps over me and boards one of the busted airboats, I’m on my guard. Never accept airboat rides from strangers. That is one of the Chief’s many swamp maxims.

Anyhow, I recognize him now, his type. The heavy, tus-socked coat, the silver whistle, the bright eyes in a shingled face. It’s just a gypsy Bird Man. There are several Bird Men who travel around the parks, each one following the seasonal migrations, traveling beneath the shadow of his own pestilential horde of birds. These men are avian pied pipers. They call your problem birds out of the trees, and then lead them off your property, waiting for them to alight in someone else’s orchard.

“Did the Chief call you to get rid of our honey buzzards?”

“No. What’s your name?”

“Ava.”

“Ava.” He grins. “Can you keep a secret?” He reaches his hairy hand over the canal and holds two fingers against my lips.