Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

When we got back to the island, Ossie and the Chief headed toward the house to get some grub, but I padded alongside Kiwi and grabbed ahold of his elbow. His arms surprised me with their thinness. Nobody was really eating right, and Kiwi wasn’t wrestling. I would never have guessed that the cessation of our alligator wrestling would make the least difference to him, to his body. But it had mattered to Kiwi; the changes on our island had robbed my brother of actual matter, had changed him in a way that I could touch. Skin bagged under his biceps. When I gripped his arm, I could feel how much we’d both weakened. Instead of feeling sad about this, I was for some reason teetering inside a wash of total joy. I squeezed down on the arm again, hard, to make sure that I was right, that we had both lost mass in the same place.

“Ow, Ava! You think that’s funny? No? What are you smiling for, then?”

It was a strange vise to be in, that feeling. I let go of Kiwi’s shrunken biceps and closed my left hand around my right arm. Too skinny! I thought, but this only stoked the joy in me. It didn’t matter. We’d go back to regular rehearsals. We’d be a team, me and Kiwi — we’d do it for Carnival Darwinism. We’d get strong again, build up together. Maybe we could even choreograph a brother-and-sister show, once Kiwi got back into the swing of things …

“Come with me to the museum,” I said sternly. “I want to show you something.”

We stepped off the wood-chip trail that led away from the touristed park to our house and walked to the museum. The Chief had forgotten to lock up again. Shapes nuzzled toward us. It took a few seconds of blinking before your memory filled each like paint — that rectangle to my left was Grandma Risa’s bedside table, that long and skinny geometry on the wall was Grandpa Sawtooth’s.22 Winchester rifle. Extinct and taxidermied objects to us kids. A small bat shot through the door; moonlight pricked at the strings of hanging sleeves.

Somebody — who else but Ossie? — had stolen our mom’s wedding dress. I’d discovered this theft while cleaning out the museum earlier in the day. I pointed my flashlight at Mom’s empty case to show Kiwi: there was a raisiny blot on the wall that yesterday had contained a froth of lace. The hook that used to hold her orchid headpiece was naked metal. It bounced light back at us, a frantic signal: something used to be here .

Kiwi sighed. “Okay, Ava. That’s what you brought me here to see.”

“Look at that! I think Ossie took it.”

“You think, Sherlock?”

“Should we tell on her? What do you think she stole it for? If she’s wearing Mom’s dress out there in the mud … Oh my gosh, Kiwi? If she ruins it …”

“I thought you hated that thing,” Kiwi mumbled.

“I do!” I said angrily. “That’s not the point, though …”

But my brother seemed distracted.

“I am finished with that man …” Kiwi was mumbling to himself.

“Who?” I let out a shocked laugh. “What man? Dad ?”

“Do you know how much debt we’re actually in, Ava? Play Go Fish with the bills on our table. Go ahead. Open any letter addressed to Dad. Do you know how much money it would take to buy even one of the items for his Carnival Darwinism project? He really thinks we can compete with the World of Darkness …”

I wanted to say: Of course we can! I’d been practicing holds that only the Chief and the best Seminole wrestlers performed.

“Why do you talk like that, Kiwi? Only a traitor talks that way.”

“Why do you want to stay here so badly?”

I kicked a rock. Why save your own life?

“Because it’s our home, dummy.”

“But everybody moves, Ava. Mainlanders do it all the time. We could find a decent place on the Atlantic side of the city, I bet. I don’t think you’d hate it there. I mean, you could still come visit Swamplandia! It’s not like the island would just vanish without you. The alligators, you could still …”

He trailed off.

“I could still what? Take the ferry out to look at them, our Seths?”

“Ava,” my brother said in a careful tone, “if we get you into a Loomis high school, I bet you could go to college, too …”

“But I don’t want to leave.” I hated how small my voice sounded. A-va , my mom used to say when I cried tears after flubbing a move onstage, now you tell me, is that the octave of a Bigtree wrestler ?

“But you will. You will want to. You don’t want to turn seventeen on this island, Ava, believe me.”

I would vanish on the mainland, dry up in that crush of cars and strangers, of flesh hidden inside metallic colors, the salt white of the sky over the interstate highway, the strange pink-and-white apartment complexes where mainlanders lived like cutlery in drawers. Well, Kiwi pointed out, but we had survived the tourists, hadn’t we? Hundreds of strangers at a time! But tourists’ faces were like these flumes of bubbles: they jetted over our island and disappeared. We stayed on the island past dusk; we waited until the moon rode up over the swamp and the only faces in the windows were our own. That’s what “home” and “family” meant, I thought: our four faces, our walls. If we left Swamplandia! for the mainland, what would happen? It was too strange to think about. In Loomis County my family would be the tourists, the bubbles.

“Ossie doesn’t want to go. She’s just one year younger than you and she wants to stay.”

“Ossie found a way to get out of here without leaving her bedroom.” Kiwi pushed at the bridge of his nose. “It’s pretty genius, actually.”

“Mom would hate it. Mom would feel responsible if we left; she would never forgive us. She would never get over it.”

“Huh. How do you figure, Ava? Because Mom’s dead.”

Kiwi kicked the rock at me and I whammed my right foot into it, not aiming at him exactly but also not aiming not to hit him, not 100 percent opposed to the possibility of hitting him; the rock flew high and wide of his left shoulder and pinged off the case of Grandma Risa’s gator-skinning knives.

“Jesus, watch it! Don’t do that indoors. Look, you can’t think like that, okay? Ava? Pay attention — you are using that pronoun erroneously. Because there is no ‘she’ anymore.”

Frogs were chorusing thickly, invisibly, somewhere under the dock. I heard a hunter’s splash and wondered what the Seth was after.

“Oh, God, Kiwi, I know that. I know she’s dead. I’m not like Ossie. ”

But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a sentence that I could read about my mother. All objects and events on our island, every single thing that you could see with your eyes, were like clues that I could use to reinvent her: would our mom love this thing, would she hate it? For a second I luxuriated in a real hatred of my brother.

“I hate him,” said Kiwi.

“Yup. I mean, I don’t.” I frowned. “But I can see how you—”

“He’s going to ruin everything. He thinks he’s being optimistic or something but it’s sick, Ava, what he’s doing. We won’t even have enough money to move.”

I found a knot to work out on my left sneaker. The light from my flashlight was drawing long fingers of pittering moths to us. They twittered on the museum screens. Their wing beats spooked me — so stupid, I knew, since moths are just a flying paper.

“Do you ever think that Ossie’s ghosts might be real, Kiwi?” I asked.