Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Eew, Ava, look!” Ossie kicked backward and nearly knocked me over. In the corner a mullet screwed its eye at the low roof, still scaled in gel and gloom.

“You scared me, Ossie! What’s wrong with you? It’s just a dead fish. You act like some Loomis girl …”

A foamy urine-yellow liquid came sloshing out of the galley hole, our movements having caused the great barge to rock on its keel, and we screamed with laughter and disgust as we scrambled up onto the workbench. Perhaps we’d jostled or reanimated something? Because just then the death stink, which I’d barely noticed until now, became overpowering. I hid my nose and mouth under my T-shirt collar and breathed in my mother’s perfume. For a moment I pretended to feel a wonderful guilt, like Mom will hate that we are out here. When she finds out she will punish us for sure . Our mother had that maternal sixth sense for when her kids were up to stupid or dangerous things. For a second I could really see our mother sitting in her wicker chair, humming one of her tuneless songs — in addition to being the world’s worst chef our mom was cheerfully tone-deaf. I knew this vision wasn’t anything like Ossie’s possessions — it was just a stupid, lucid daydream — but with my face inside my orange T-shirt I breathed Mom’s smell in the weave of my clothes and I just pretended. Mom was angry, not worried yet. She was drafting punishments. Her brown foot in a lake of sun on our porch, tapping at air, waiting on us …

I shivered and heard my breathing getting shallow. The dredge felt like a plummeting submarine to me, even though the portholes were level with the shining leaves.

“Give me that key, Ava.”

“What? No! Why?” This was the one item I wanted to keep. I tossed the bag of ossified lemon drops at her instead.

“Hey, I dare you to eat one of Miss Callie’s Grossest Candies. I’ll give you a dollar.”

“Where’s the key, Ava?”

“You don’t even know what it’s the key to,” I whined. “One more minute …”

Ossie returned to the galley with her Ouija board in tow and let me fool with the key for a little longer. When I next looked up, a dark blue had wrapped around the portholes. Outside I saw clouds rising like bread; one of these turned out to be the moon. A storm was coming, then — on a clear night on Swamplandia! we could see millions of stars. “We should go, we should go,” I kept saying, trying the key in various metallic fissures, bouncing on my sneaker rubber to make the barge jump. I touched the puckered rag, my share of the treasure. I was going to leave that candy. I’d read enough myths and fairy tales to know how eating some deadman’s candies would end. Most likely they were poisonous or carried some bad enchantment.

“Ossie, hurry up. It’s late and I’m starving. If we wait any longer we’re going to be like those Donners …”

Then I regretted bringing this up. Ossie, to the best of my knowledge, had not yet dated a Donner.

“ You go. They’re not finished with me yet.”

Ossie was hunched over her Ouija board, which she’d spread onto the grouty galley counter, where dead mosquitoes turned on little black puddles.

I returned uneasily to our damp treasure: I squeezed a candy and discovered that it was uncrushable; I mopped my sweat up with the elderly rag; I ran the bitter green teeth of the key up and down my underarm. The odd key didn’t fit into any slot or box on the boat. When nothing happened I ran the key along my collarbone. I tried again. I could hear my sister humming one of her pig-Latin-sounding spells in the galley. The key bit into the flesh of my neck, two dots of blood appearing. Turn, turn, turn. Come on . Do something . I glanced over at Ossie and placed it on my tongue; it tasted like a soda tab. I put the key under my right armpit like Mom’s thermometer and I waited.

Nothing flew open in my heart or brain. I didn’t start speaking in tongues or brim to fullness with some spirit. No hinge swung. So my body was not a keyhole after all.

Then my whole face felt hot and tight as a mask and I realized that I’d been hoping for real sorcery. The Spiritist’s Pathetic Black Telegraph! It was an embarrassing hope; I hadn’t conjured anything but a ragged red scratch up to my armpit, where I’d pushed up my shirtsleeve and tractored over my skin with the key. Disappointment had introduced us, me and the hope — it took the key’s failure to teach me what I was doing with the key.

Once Mom and Ossie and I spent an afternoon alone together in her hospital room. We were watching the small TV above her bed politely, as if the TV were a foreign dignitary giving an unintelligible lecture, and waiting for any news from Dr. Gautman. As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies in Waiting . A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl — they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances — anyhow, these pink chameleons, voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall. “Oh, but we did want to dance!” the actresses cry at the end of the scene, their faces changing almost totally. All these angry multiplying women.

Hopes were like these ladies, Mom told us. Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart. Our mom had become agitated as the movie credits rolled: There had never been a chance for them! What stupid women. That day we watched TV with her until the hospital began to empty, until the lights went white as a screech and the room grew so quiet …

Mom said that she was meeting all her pink ladies in the hospital. She had been hoping for the craziest things! For another baby. For your father to … well. For you girls … (and in her silence you could hear at least a thousand verbs). She’d touched her IV bag and sighed to us that a wallflower in bloom was very very angry, very scary.

“Okay,” Ossie called from the galley hole, packing up the Ouija. “I’m ready to go.”

“Who were you talking to?”

My sister reached a hand up to fix my hair, her palm stained a deep maroon from touching the old gaffs. They did not really look like gaffs though. Not in that half-light. They hung flat against the aft wall like long red and black piano keys, or farm tools for the harvest of an unimaginable crop.

“Nobody. Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Nothing. Ava, I think we’d better go now.”

“Hey, are you lonely here, Ossie?”

We were back in our room, dozing in that span of light-headed, hungry time that comes before dinner. “Dinner” didn’t really happen anymore — we were defrosters of burgers and Pick Up Club meals — but for some reason we still rolled down the stairwell every night at seven o’clock. In the old days, good smells filled the kitchen (misleading smells, since our mom’s cooking strategy was to throw a couple of raw things into a greased pan and wait to see what happened, like watching strangers on a date). Two voices, the Indian braid of our parents’ voices, called up to us.

“No.” Ossie frowned without looking up at me. “I’m busy, chickee. If you’re lonely, go watch TV.”

“I don’t mean here , like in this room. I mean here-here. Where we live. Are you lonely on the island ? Do you wish we could, I dunno, live on the mainland? Go to high school, like Mom did?”