Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

One Friday I found The Spiritist’s Telegraph open on my bed. It wasn’t anything I could read: the letters were printed in a runic alphabet that looked to me like flattened bugs. I’d had enough of this spooky crap, feeling scared in my own house — I carried the huge book to our bathtub, thinking that I would turn the faucet on it. When I set it down, a skinny velvet bookmark dropped out like a tongue. I screamed and threw a washcloth over it.

“Ava?” my sister called suspiciously later that evening. “Do you think one of the ghosts flew my book into the bathtub?”

“Yes. I do.” In my comic book another radioactive superhero had just saved the planet Earth. Why couldn’t Ossie read cheerful stuff like this? “Probably it was an ex-boyfriend of yours.”

I developed a weedy crop of superstitions regarding The Spiritist’s Telegraph . If accidentally I glimpsed one of the ink drawings of the Victorian Spiritists in their lizard-frilled dresses, or of one of the purple “daemons” built like pugilists, I had to knock twice on something real to ease a bad feeling inside of me. Not-real , I’d recite. One-two . I knocked on wood, food, the wavy black soap dish with melted pink soap flakes, even Tokay, our house gecko.

“Ava? Ahh, chickee, why are you knocking on your sneakers ?” Ossie was standing in the door frame. “You are such a weirdo.”

“That’s not what I was doing.” I pretended to do a sit-up. “See? I was exercising.”

My sister wrinkled her nose at me, amused. For a second I was happy, because it looked like my stupidity had knocked her back into being regular old Ossie again.

“Hey, Ossie? Have you heard from Mom yet?”

“No, Ava. I haven’t heard anything.” She smiled an old, brave smile at me. “I’m looking.”

Somehow I had worked it out in my mind to where I could believe in our mother without having to believe in ghosts exactly. In fact, I was discovering all sorts of beliefs and skepticisms turning like opposite gears inside me, and little drawers of hopes and fears I had forgotten to clean out. Sometimes while wandering around the park I’d still catch myself praying in an automatic way, like a sneeze, that my dead mom’s blood test results would come back okay.

* * *

After the Chief unrolled his Carnival Darwinism scheme, I tried to speed my own evolution into a world-acclaimed wrestler. The Chief did rehearsals with me, and I got him to let me try Mom’s old routines, which I ran so repetitively that I felt like my muscles were becoming hers. I held the tape loop under my right arm, like she did; I timed myself against Mom’s best times. Once, with only a minimum of help from my dad, I got a Seth’s jaws taped shut in four minutes and twenty-two seconds. (Hilola Bigtree could win a match in thirty seconds flat.) The Chief wouldn’t let me climb up her diving board — he said I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer yet — but I kept pleading my case. Pretty soon, if my plan succeeded, I’d be performing the Silent Night and possibly even Swimming with the Seths for a lot of people.

One morning on my way home from wrestling practice in the Pit, I saw my sister sitting at one of the picnic tables outside the Swamp Café. Her hair was a weird and glittery beacon viewed through the dense brush at the end of the wood-chip trail. I stared across the outdoor seating area: a sea of empty tables, several studded with blackbirds nibbing around for crumbs. Ossie was slumped over with her head on the table, eyes closed, the heavy clouds pushing seaward above her.

“Ossie,” I hissed through my teeth. “Ossie, wake up! Nobody thinks that’s funny but you.”

Two tables over a cormorant was pecking at a dessicated potato chip, its head as glossy as a seal’s; then it hopped onto Ossie’s pile of books and began to stab its beak serenely near my sister’s frozen face. I screamed. Ossie’s nose twitched but her eyes stayed shut. I screamed but I couldn’t get her eyes to open, I couldn’t even startle the cormorant; it cocked its head at me impassively and then continued to nick at the table.

“OSSIE, WAKE UP!”

Ossie opened her eyes, three strands of pale hair striping her face. The bird flew off. My sister looked truly surprised to see me, and maybe a little scared.

“Ava? How long have I been out here? I was holding a séance …”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said happily. “You were just playing a trick on me.”

“Sure. Gotcha.” She smiled back at me but her eyes looked clouded, like agitated water after a Seth’s roll. Ossie had been doing some serious reading, I saw. The black spell book was quilled with crimson bookmarks.

That night, Osceola didn’t come home at all. I woke up and saw her comforter doubled under the pillow. Guilt made my logic run backward: I decided that I had to find my sister before I could tell anybody she was missing. At sunrise I tiptoed downstairs to look for her; by dumb luck I decided to check the Gator Pit first. Ossie was asleep in the middle bleachers in her dirty beige pajamas. Little strings of brown blood marked where she had been scratching bug bites in her sleep.

“She needs medicine,” Kiwi said grimly when I told him where I’d found her. “She’s not well …” He tapped his skull with his pencil. “She needs a mainland psychiatrist. Maybe she’s sleepwalking.”

“Nah, Kiwi. She’s okay.” I wished now that I’d kept Ossie’s activities to myself. “She’s just playing.” But, so far as I could tell, it hadn’t been a game for months. What sort of game made you blind and quiet?

Kiwi and I found the Chief in the kitchen, drawing his fork through an aluminum tin of melted cheese. Tiny broccoli florets floated in the gluey cheese like a forest consumed by lava.

“Chief, you need to help Ossie. She’s experiencing delusions. Hallucinations. Ava says she was pretending, at first, but now she thinks she has real powers. She’s reading this thing—” Kiwi dropped that book onto the table and stepped back, as if expecting a bomb to go off.

“Goddamn, what is this?”

The Chief’s brows plummeted. He’d found the pictures in the appendix. Over his shoulder I saw a scary one: a devil squatted on the apron of a Spiritist’s dress, wrinkling puddles into her skirt with its little hooves. It looked both lamblike and lascivious. The devil smiled shyly out at us. Spikes of hair covered its body.

“She doesn’t date those things,” I said hurriedly. “Only ghosts.”

The Chief removed his reading glasses, shut the book.

“Kiwi, son, you two can’t find something else for her to read on that Library Boat? Something that’s not total bullcrap?”

My heart quickened in triumph — he saw . “We told you so! You have to stop her now, okay?”

“Christ, Ava, what do you want me to do?” The Chief looked up at me with a terrible blank expression. “She’s going through something. She needs a distraction. We used to have a word for your sister: boy-crazy. It could be worse: at least she’s not dating some mainland jackass with a motorcycle, huh?” He laughed his onstage laugh, ha-ha-har, the big seal bark in triplicate for an audience. “Some loser with an earring!”

“Could it not perhaps be better, Dad?” asked Kiwi. “That’s the bright side here, that the dead man does not have a piercing?”

The Chief blinked and blinked, as if he had momentarily blinded himself with his own silver lining. There was no coffee left in his mug but he kept touching the chipped green rim to his lips. “Hell, who knows? Do you know, son? Ava? I guess I’m no longer the expert on Better versus Worse.”

You could hear the serious effort of his laughter. I pictured my dad trapped inside Ossie’s painting of the underworld, chipping away at the enormous rocks. His little Dule screwdriver producing sparks, flakes …