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

On the other side of the marina, one of the stingrays slides dangerously close to the Wave Assuager. It struggles against the machine’s currents, its stinger pointed like an arrow towards the undertow. The ray gets sucked into the whirring underwater fan, silvering between the blades like a quarter into a slot. The accordion pump of the Wave Assuager lets out an elastic sigh. It sparks and groans. It vaporizes clouds of minnows with its electric death throes.

Then the Wave Assuager sends a final, renegade crest coursing up beneath the houseboats.

Ned Kaufman cracks skulls with his buddy and lets out a howl of real pain. Undersea Mary gets swept back overboard, her votive candles extinguished. When the wave hits, Sawtooth is squatting in the bathroom, his carbuncular ear pressed against the bathroom wall. If he had two legs to stand on, he might have been able to regain his balance. Instead, he spills out onto the living room floor.

“Fuck!” Augie falls backwards into the box of left shoes. The pain pills go flying out of her hands, raining down on Sawtooth’s prone body. Sawtooth grunts and struggles onto his knee. Augie is regarding him with a stricken expression, still holding the empty orange bottle.

“I didn’t see anything,” he wheezes. He sweeps the nearby pills into his clammy palm and holds them out to her. “I didn’t see a damn fool thing….”

“Oh, God…” She starts scrambling to grab her things.

“I know you been stealing from me, girl,” Sawtooth cries. “I know and I don’t care….”

Augie already has her hand on the doorknob before Sawtooth realizes that she’s leaving.

“Girl,” he sputters. “Girl…”

Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he’s become tightlipped as an oyster. But he can feel the words pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.

What comes out is: “I used to steal muskrats.”

Augie struggles with the handle. “Fuck.”

“During the Depression.”

The door swings open.

“Stole ’em right out of the bigger boys’ traps.”

Sunlight spills into the dim cabin. Sawtooth takes a shuddery breath.

“Girl,” he says in a low, throaty voice, not unlike a bullfrog in heat. “I love you.”

Augie pauses, one foot out the door. She whirls around, slowly, and comes to stand over his prone form. Her eyes have narrowed into hard, bright kernels.

“You love me, Pops?” Her voice takes on a rib-kicking cadence. It elicits a moan from Sawtooth, like the lowing cry of a sea cow.

“ You love me?” she keeps asking, her voice flat and pitiless. Sawtooth tries to speak, but can only make little strangled noises. A thin stream of spittle trickles down one side of his mouth.

“You love me ?” Her voice tightens, and Sawtooth thinks of a hand squeezing some dumb animal’s udders.

“Yes!”

“No,” she says with a bitter little laugh. “No. I don’t think so, Pops. How could you?” She shakes her head angrily, as if Sawtooth is the one who has committed a stupid, indefensible crime. “How could you?” As if to echo her own question, she scoops a few yellow pills up from the crease in his flaccid trouser leg and pockets them. Then she strides onto the dock without a backwards glance.

Sawtooth flops back onto the floor. A small puddle seeps into the rug, his empty trouser leg dripping toilet water. He can feel the gravelly pills pressing into his back. He sees no reason to struggle, to get up.

Eventually, Sawtooth dozes off. He has a nightmare about the stingrays. He is lying on his back, naked and whole, on a velvety carpet of rays. There are dozens, hundreds of them, undulating beneath him. They do a cartilaginous dance through the warm salt water. The tips of their wings smooth against his wrinkled skin like bruising kisses. They brushstroke Sawtooth’s pebbly spine, his scrawny ass, the hollows of both knees: all the soft, forgotten places that haven’t been touched for decades. He can’t enjoy it. He lies there, holding his breath with a terrible anticipation. His spinal cord screams like a silver wire. His whole body tenses, waiting for the stinger. In the dream he can see Undersea Mary watching him from the opposite deck, her cheeks shining with painted-on compassion.

When he wakes up, night has already fallen. He goes and peers nervously over the side of his boat. It’s too dark to tell what’s under the surface of the water. Gherkin must have repaired the Wave Assuager, because he can seen Zenaida’s Medicaid Lifeboat bobbing alongside her slip. Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It’s a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth’s old eyes. Tonight, the phantom pain banshees through him with a pointless fury. He considers taking one of his pills, then thinks better of it. The doctor is reluctant to give him refills. And the girl might come back. He massages the roaring space where his leg used to be. If she needs the pills badly enough, he thinks, she just might.

When he was a boy growing up on the swamp, Sawtooth used to know all of the constellations, but now he has forgotten how to find them. Overhead, the sky lurches in unfamiliar, opalescent swirls. All around him, the muted yellow lamps of his neighbors’ boats blink off quietly, one by one, until Sawtooth is left bobbing alone in the darkness.

“Hooey,” Mr. Oamaru says, working his fork with a silly urgency. A single pea is caught between his square front teeth. “That boy can sing. The boy just needs a friend is all. You be that, Tek. You be that friend.”

My mother’s prim smile confirms that I should be that friend. My Christian sisters nod their earnest, brunette heads. Makeup is forbidden in our household, but my sisters have slathered their lips with beeswax so that each syllable emerges at a blinding wattage:

“Be that friend!”

My sisters all have Bible names that start with a pious growl, “Rrrachel, Rrrebecca, Rrruth.” They eat unbuttered peas and fatty gristle and leave the choicest, glaziest cuts of the ham for Mr. Oamaru and me. They are pretty, and this means that charity comes easy to them. They don’t understand the real cost of what they are asking me.

There is a long silence full of bright, expectant stares and chewing sounds, gulping sounds, tiny metal clinking sounds. Jesus. Peas roll around and around my selfish mouth. Outside, I can hear the reindeer rubbing antlers against the fence wood. Snow waits in the high clouds. Our kitchen window fills with cold early stars.

“Why should I have to do it? Rangi is creepy, Mom. He’s Moa. He’s mute.”

“Son,” Mr. Oamaru answers for her. I don’t look over at him, but I can feel his radiant disapproval. “Why shouldn’t you have to do it? The boy is very nearly your cousin.”

That’s a cheap trick. Everybody in Waitiki Valley is almost a cousin. Marriage here requires an actuary to make sure you’re not blood kin.

“Rangi Gibson is not my cousin.”

“He’s your brother,” Rebecca says unhelpfully, “in Christ.”

“He hasn’t had your advantages, Tek.” Mr. Oamaru twirls a pea on the tine of his fork. “To be orphaned at that age! And Digger Gibson is a heathen and a drunk. He can’t even keep the cemetery grass mowed, much less care for a bastard child.”

My mother winces at the word “bastard.” Some advantages, I think angrily.

“Why should I have to be part of the stupid Avalanche at all? Why should I have to freeze my ass off and pop my ears to sing a shitty untrue song about pirates?”