Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

My best guess was that these individuals were based in America’s capital, Washington, D.C., but I hadn’t yet been able to locate an exact street address. Gus Waddell claimed never to have heard of them. Well, Gus was really more of a nautical man, a very nice man but not exactly what you’d call educated when it came to herpetological sports.

I wasn’t going to risk a no by involving the Chief and Kiwi prematurely. I wasn’t going to tell my sister, either — Ossie was like an aquarium when it came to other people’s secrets. I sent this letter to the Smithsonian, the state universities, the Florida Wildlife and Gaming Commission, along with a flap note: “Sir or madam, please do me the great favor of forwarding this letter to the correct bureau(s). Thank you!!!”

If they accepted me, I figured that I would be the youngest person, boy or girl, ever to compete at the national level. Five years younger than my mother, even.

That same month, a remarkable thing happened on our island: a miracle, a freak rainstorm of luck during a time of cash and tourist droughts. I got to watch this miracle unfold inside a glass case — not in our museum but in one of the reptile incubators. On Swamplandia! we hatched baby alligators under heat lamps, dozens a year, using incubators that the Chief got on the cheap from a bankrupt chicken-farming family in Ocala. We restocked the Pit with the largest and the hardiest of the alligators, and the rest we sold to St. Augustine reptile farms in north Florida or released. Thermostats controlled the gender of the future alligators in their eggs, and the incubator I was polishing was set to 84 degrees Fahrenheit — a female brood. I breathed a tiny porthole onto the incubator glass and peered in.

This was excellent timing: as I watched, a tiny caruncle punctured the eggshell. Baby alligators are born with these, the “egg tooth,” a tusk on the tip of their snout that allows them to punch through the membrane of their eggshells. A Seth’s eggs are oblong and leathery, narrower than the eggs a hen lays. Next I heard the telltale squeal, a sound that came from inside the eggs — the alligators were pipping! The fetal gators coordinate their jailbreak by making a squeaky noise at a frequency that can be heard inside the shell; now the noise had begun, and the thirty-two hatchlings in this incubator were butting and rocking against the shell membrane.

The first alligator to hatch caused me to frown and lean in, because there was something unusual about her — the alligator’s hide appeared to be red. A tiny, fiery Seth. Her skull was the exact shape and shining hue of a large halved strawberry. At first I thought her pigmentation was a trick of the light and I was afraid even to touch her. The red on her skin seemed like a disease I could contract through my fingertips or a spell I could break, a color so pure and unreal that I thought it might rub off.

I put her on the kitchen scale we kept next to the extra lamps. She weighed seventy grams. She was nine inches from snout to tail.

Her claws scrabbled at the air when I picked her up. The door to the shed stood open, and her skin brightened like an ember. I half-expected her temperature to flare up, too. To burn and sizzle. But her scales were cool and damp. She curled flat against my palms, reminding me of the inlay of a dragon I’d seen once on Mrs. Gianetti’s fancy black Oriental dinette set. Her pupils were compass needles, thin and wobbly. Her camelia-pink eyes blinked and blinked, and I wondered if she was surprised to find a world outside her egg. Like any hatchling gator, her snout tapered into a look of flutey suspicion. A yawn revealed the paler watermelon chinks on her tongue, and I suppressed a laugh.

The Chief is going to turn a backflip! I thought. This alligator could save our park! But when I thought about telling my family about her, my mouth turned to sand. I felt very certain that she was going to die. That nothing born this color could live for long in the open air. We’d hatched hundreds of broods on Swamplandia! and they grew very slowly, a foot a year. Few hatchlings made it to adulthood, even in captivity. (I still don’t know what melanistic fluke or mutation accounted for her. Her sisters were born the usual straw-yellow-banded black; they died later that same week, all thirty-one of them, of yolk sac infections.)

We had an old forty-gallon aquarium in storage and I dragged this out and swabbed it clean for her; I hid the tank in the fenced-in shrubbery behind the shed. All day I’d invent excuses to go back there. Keep breathing , I’d command her through the glass. The rise and fall of the Seth’s belly scales could hypnotize me for an hour at a stretch.

When a week passed and the red Seth was still crawling around in her tank, I felt a terrible hope begin to grow inside me, at pace with the alligator. Two more weeks, and then I’ll tell , I thought. Three … If you tell him now, she will die . What a dumb superstition! I knew that. When Mom was sick, I went around knocking on everything for luck, not just wood. I avoided black and even dark brown cats, I skirted the Chief’s ladder, I carried around Grandpa’s creepy, ostensibly lucky marsh rabbit’s foot, and did any of this make a difference? My mom died. But my new superstition didn’t care to hear about the earlier failure. It told me, If you tell anyone about the red alligator, she will die or disappear .

At first I thought this fear might be like a gut cramp that would pass. Then my throat would relax in a day or two and then I would be able to share the miracle of the red alligator with the other Bigtrees. I tried to bargain with the fear: Four more weeks , I told it. If this alligator lives another month, then it’s settled. I will definitely tell them . If I could get her to nine months, she’d be eighteen inches long and out of the danger zone of predation. I figured I just had to keep her alive for long enough to prove my fear wrong.

So as the World of Darkness usurped our place in the rankings, I became a hunter of minnows. I looked for life that my pet Seth could gulp: tadpoles loitering in the cattails, green anoles, clear slugs that I peeled from the trees. Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head. My pet, because she was mine, was at the top of the chain. I cared for the squirmy swamp rats in the most perfunctory way, with none of the love I felt for my red Seth. The rats and fish ate the small golden crickets, and the crickets seemed to live on air and chirpy fear, surviving for weeks on the pickleweed at the bottom of their cages, so that there was a whole food chain happening in the forty-gallon tank that culminated in my alligator, my lovely ruby girl.

Three weeks after my red monster was born, on a warm and limpid Sunday afternoon, the Chief finally made good on his promise and took us on the ferryboat to the mainland to visit our grandfather. On the ferry ride over, I stayed on deck. I stood mute as a heron on the stern, rubbing seawater across my rashy left shin with the toe of one sneaker to create a sort of pleasant burn and staring backward at Swamplandia! where I’d left the red Seth in her hiding spot. To even think “the red Seth” was like staring into a radiance I’d swallowed, a sun. Maybe I will tell Grandpa Sawtooth about her, just as a kind of practice . Grandpa Sawtooth would be a safe husk for that sun, a good secret-keeper, because right away the secret would go dark again. Right away he would forget her. Listen, a red alligator and I are going to save your real home, Grandpa , I wanted to promise him, but I bet that Grandpa wouldn’t even know my name this time. And Kiwi said that as soon as we stepped off the retirement boat Grandpa would lose the faces that had been talking to him.