Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

Ossie rolled over and stared at me thoughtfully. She stood and walked to the windowsill, hugged the raw pillow to her chest — I’d been pretending not to know where all of Risa’s daisy pillowcases had gone, making noises of annoyance along with her for weeks, encouraging my sister to blame the phantom of Millard Fillmore, when in fact I had used all the pillowcases in the house to make a carrier for my pet alligator, who was now eleven inches — almost a full foot! I was going to tell my sister about her when she hit a foot for sure. My sewing was bogus and the carrier looked like a Franken-quilt of weird linens. To be honest, I think the red Seth was a little embarrassed to ride around in it.

“The mainland. You’re asking me if I’m a Kiwi? If I want to leave home for Loomis County?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to go there. You neither, right? I mean, I bet Kiwi likes it. I think it could be okay to go visit him. Remember when we stayed on the mainland during the hurricane? At the Bowl-a-Bed hotel? That wasn’t so bad.”

Pins clattering in the lobby even after the storm began — that’s what I remembered — gutter balls and the occasional strike still audible over the rising wind. Cold sodas and nuclear-orange crackers you could get for a quarter from a vending machine. We’d all piled into a single room. The Chief and Grandpa Sawtooth had climbed onto the balcony during the eye of the storm to smoke half a pack of cigarettes, and eleven-year-old Kiwi had followed to inform them about lung disease. At eight o’clock the power went out. Mom had read the TV Guide to us by candlelight.

“Yeah, that time was okay,” said Ossie. “I liked the shower cap, remember that?”

“The shower cap! Mom said we looked like actresses in it!”

(To be clear, we were talking about plastic hats. Disposable bath hats, used , with black curls of stranger hair in them. My sister and I dug into those jeweled soaps and shrink-wrapped bath hats as if we’d found a sultan’s treasures next to the minty hotel crapper.)

“That was fun. And all the mainlanders got so grumpy when they didn’t have hot water, and the Chief said that a Bigtree could shower in a Seth’s spit, remember? How hard he made Mom laugh?”

“But it would be different if we lived there. That time was like a vacation.”

We both grinned — the idea of the Bigtrees on a vacation, of the Chief as some dummy tourist! A Loomis dad .

Ossie’s smile flickered. “I don’t think we’d do very well there, Ava. I don’t see how we could really ever catch up. What grade would they even put us in, at a Loomis school? I mean, are they going to offer a class for Spiritists? Gym class for you? Gym credits for alligator wrestlers?” She flopped onto the bed and pushed two stained pillows at our ceiling like pom-poms: “Ava — I know! We can try out for the cheerleading squad!”

I laughed, startled — Ossie sounded as bitter as any adult. And Ossie was never the wise guy in our family. The jags of intelligence inside my sister shocked everybody, tourists and Bigtrees alike — she’d say something smart out of nowhere and prove to us that she wasn’t only a dreamer. Every time Ossie was funny or mean it surprised me; it was like your skiff hitting an intricate reef, all those delicate white fans that wouldn’t yield, or like your foot scraping a rock in the middle of a deep empty lake. Even her fantasies had such rocks in them.

“I’ll be the prom queen.” She grinned a terrible grin at me. “You can be the class president. We’ll make posters. ”

“Okay, I get it. Good. I think it’s a dumb idea, too. I was just wondering.”

Hours had passed since we’d returned from the Last Ditch, and already the dredge had taken on a pleasant, hallucinatory quality in my memory. Ossie did a studious belly flop onto her mattress, frowning down at the Model Land Company map through her white bangs. The map was four feet by three feet and thin as a butterfly wing; its blank half made the Floridian peninsula look like an amputated arm. It covered the whole floor between our beds, and the “L.T.” kept catching the light. A tiny lizard scurried over the Gulf of Mexico and disappeared behind the chest of drawers.

On Tuesday night I heard the bed groan at one a.m., the thud of Ossie’s shoes as she snuck out. Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long. It was five in the morning when I heard the door hinge squeak.

“Ava?” she whispered. Outside gray light was tenting the pines. “You’re not awake, are you?”

What a dumb question. I cracked an eye at her. My sister looked beautiful, I noted with a grudging pride. She’d copied a style from a magazine. Soft hair floated onto her cheeks.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

Her smile faltered. “It was wonderful. But he had to leave me; I think it was my fault? I couldn’t hold him. I started thinking my own thoughts again.” She looked at me with a face I didn’t understand, and I hated her new ghost, whoever he was. Was this guy just going to live inside her forever? Could she possibly want that?

“Good! I’m glad that guy is gone. Do you feel better now? Is it like climbing out of the Gator Pit? It sounds like waking up.”

But she shook her head sharply and I felt pained now, too, like I was the one hurting her. Ossie’s hurt was an airborne virus, it could travel at you fast as a sneeze.

“I’m sorry, Ossie. Don’t be like that.”

“You don’t understand, Ava.” She pushed at her hair. “That’s okay. Maybe in a few years you will. It’s not like waking up. I was awake before. We were together, and now he’s gone.”

I got up on my elbows in the bed.

“Kiwi says your boyfriend’s not real. Or he’s real, but he’s some Loomis kid you’re meeting up with in the woods.”

We stared at each other across the channel between our two beds.

“I won’t tell anybody, I swear. Is he older than you, this guy?” I paused, running down the list of boys with heartbeats who we knew. “Is it Gus Waddell? It’s not Cubby, is it?”

“Oh, well shoot , Ava!” she laughed, flopping back on her mattress. “Yes, he’s much older than me. He’s not some Loomis kid, either. Cubby Wallach, oof. ” She scrunched her face in a way to further underscore: Not. Cubby. “Cubby’s just some kid. My boyfriend is a dredgeman from Clarinda, Iowa.”

Her fist contracted into an abacus. She counted knuckles for a while.

“I guess if he’d lived he’d be Grandpa’s age. But he still looks like he did the day he died.”

“Oh.” I frowned up at her. “That’s lucky, I guess.”

She leaned in and patted my head. “Good night, Ava,” she whispered.

“Good morning , you mean.” This was the fat cherry on the whole crappy sundae because it was obviously morning — the skies were pinking up behind the kapok.

“Not for me. I’m exhausted, Ava. The Spiritist Telegraph says some Spiritists sleep for a week after a possession, but I’m going to set the alarm for lunchtime.”

“Mmnh.” I mummied myself in the bedspread. Osceola could sleep forever, for all I cared. Fine by me. I would save the park by myself. I had important training to do with my red Seth.

“Okay. Getting into bed now.” But she sat on the edge of my bed instead. “Listen, I’m sorry I left without telling you. There’s a secret I have to keep for someone. Don’t worry, okay?”

I did my best to inhale like a sleeping person.

“Hey, chickee, I do wish I could tell you,” she mumbled sadly somewhere above my head, the mattress sagging with her weight, “what’s happening to me …”

Two thirty a.m., about ten days after the Chief’s depature: I walked downstairs to investigate an animal rumbling in the kitchen and found my sister gorging on a lump of cauliflower — there was nothing left to eat, she said, and she was ravenous . Swamp rats could not have cleaned out our pantry more thoroughly. I saw an apple core, broken spaghetti, six cola cans. Her lipstick had left a glossy print on the plastic we kept our bread in. She’d sucked the stick of butter into a little fang. “What the heck are you doing?”