Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“We are in love, Ava,” she told me one night while we were brushing our teeth. “We’re practically married.” Her face in the mirror seemed so sad. “When he left me tonight, Ava? It was terrible. It hurts worse than when a Seth bites you! It’s like the opposite of that feeling — like an unlatching. You know what I mean?”

I shook my head. I did not know. Nods weren’t going to come cheap anymore. If she wanted a nod, she’d have to do better than her easy, lazy invocation of “love.”

“Is it like being hungry?”

“Not really … maybe a little. It’s hard to explain. You know how light-headed you get when you don’t eat?”

“Sure. You feel bad.” I licked a pea of toothpaste off my finger. “Starved. About ready to eat Spaghetti Surprise.” Spaghetti Surprise was a simple equation for indigestion, invented by Mom: noodles tossed like a blond wig over all your leftovers. Noodles as a culinary disguise for gross, inedible root vegetables: surprise! In a trash can this dish was raccoon kryptonite; even Grandpa couldn’t finish it.

“Hey, remember when Kiwi goes, ‘Forget the cheese, Mom, you should grate antacids over these noodles,’ how hard she laughed …?”

“I don’t want to talk about Mom tonight, Ava, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We were talking about my boyfriend.”

Ossie made her voice shiny, doing her best impression of the mainland girls’ gossip:

“… and people think a ghost is just air but Louis is heavy , Ava. There’s so much to carry — he gave me his whole life …

“… his death, too.” She touched his shirt pocket and shivered a little. She felt cold, she said. Her heart, her vocal cords, they’d gone cold.

“I won’t feel warm again until my boyfriend comes back.”

I stared at her with the toothbrush in my mouth. Was she crazy? She was crazy — I hardly needed to ask the question. It was 80 degrees in our room. I tugged at my hair with both hands and watched her performing hygiene in the mirror. My sister didn’t look possessed — we were both wearing the same ankle socks and the striped pajamas that we wore to bed every night. Ossie had a green freckle of toothpaste on her upper lip, her hair was pulled into a high ponytail for sleep purposes, her cheeks were sunburned, she looked pretty and dumb with her same big-eyed, ostrichy features, and all these outside things were so as-ever and ordinary that I wanted to scream at her: You are faking, you are lying! There is no such thing as your dredgeman .

“You know who I miss? I miss our brother. I miss Mom. I don’t miss some invisible boyfriend . That’s …” But the words I tried to stick to the knot I felt all drifted away.

I told myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts at all, or at least not with the ardor of my sister, but at night the huge, paperwhite moths flew up to hit or kiss their wings against our bedroom window screens and even the tiniest rasp made me want to cry out.

The employees of the World of Darkness got paid on a biweekly basis. On his third Friday in Loomis County, Kiwi queued up outside a small office catty-corner to the Jaws, waiting to ask a question about his paycheck. He whistled the new hit single “Haters Will Hemorrhage Blood!” (Incredibly, this turned out to be a love song. It had a violin in it. Very popular that year, Vijay informed him, at area proms.) Kiwi undid a triple knot on his shoelace that had been bugging him for weeks, which felt as satisfying as solving a crime. A bunch of kids were shrieking as they slid down the Tongue.

“We love the World!” an entire family screamed in unison — this was the catchphrase from the World of Darkness commercials. People liked to scream it down the slide from the top of the Tongue, as if to confirm via sonar that they were at the location they’d seen advertised on their TV screen. Kiwi craned around to watch their descent. The mom and tiny daughter were wearing matching skirted yellow bathing suits and foam Whalehead hats. Mere seconds after they vanished inside the Leviathan ride, another family appeared at the top of the slide, their wide buttocks pancaked and drawn upward by the cushioned ruby pads.

Watching people board the ride and get released down the chute was like watching an eerie factory assembly line. Real whales, Kiwi had to believe, were less orderly but more expedient about their consumption of plankton. There were no lines winding around outside their great teeth, no hand stamps and tickets; the real whales just opened wide and destroyed.

At the apex of the Tongue, the ride operators came running out like bandits to pluck the eyeglasses and rings and wristwatches from the startled riders; you couldn’t wear these things into the deep inner pools of the Leviathan. You couldn’t have heart arrhythmias, spinal injuries, psychoses. You couldn’t have a baby growing inside you, either — not if you wanted to plunge headlong into the Jacuzzi steams of the Leviathan! No pregnancies! No stowaway futures! A chubby new hire in a tight WORLD OF DARKNESS SECURITY shirt was escorting a pregnant woman in a pink-and-blue-striped bathing suit down a side stairway just now. “Twins” he mouthed to Kiwi when their eyes met across the long hallway, rolling his eyes, as if he had just caught a nervy shoplifter.

“My mother had a pregnancy that turned into a cancer!” Kiwi shouted back to him, confident that over the roar of the Tongue’s salivary jets he would not be understood. Then he pushed a fist to his mouth, stunned. Really, what the hell was wrong with him? (She wanted a baby and she got cancer instead! Isn’t that funny …) The new hire grinned, shook his head. He waved good-bye before disappearing down the stairs with his ward.

The full length of the Leviathan experience, a.k.a. “Digestion,” took twenty-three minutes. Lost Souls dropped seventy-six feet from an elevated chute into the first of a series of domed funnels, pools, and bowls meant to replicate the twists and turns of a labyrinthine whale’s stomach. Kiwi had never been on the Leviathan ride himself, in part because it would have required changing into a bathing suit, in semipublic. And Kiwi, according to his first paycheck, couldn’t afford a bathing suit, or any suit. Or food.

This office had a marmalade-tinted window that opened onto a dark, box-strewn artery of the World. Kiwi wondered how the payroll guy could stand to exist here. You could go a full day inside this part of the Leviathan without seeing the sun. Kiwi made sure to take breaks with Vijay on the roof. Some days he’d go running into the parking lot at noon, nostalgic for clouds and shadows. Finally the door swung open.

“Good morning! How can I help you, ma’am?” the payroll manager asked. He had the crew cut and the saturnine blue eyes of an ex-marine. He introduced himself as Scott, and Kiwi thought he looked crisp and official compared to the grunts on the World’s payroll.

Kiwi hadn’t cut his hair in a while; it hung in glossy waves over his ears.

“My name is Kiwi Bigtree,” he said politely, and when that didn’t help he tugged at the puffy brimstone design on his collar and added, with a note of quiet apology, “I’m, uh, I’m a guy?”

“I’m sorry?” Scott the payroll manager said. He was linking paper clips into a chain that ran across his desk. Scott was alternating colors: blue clip, red clip, green clip, white clip, repeat. They hung over the side of his desk and trailed into his wastepaper bin, swaying hypnotically. How much does Scott get paid per hour? Kiwi wondered.

“Well, you see …” Kiwi realized that he was unconsciously craning his neck to display his sizable, indubitably male Adam’s apple. Evolutionary psychology: he’d read about this. A vestigial, animal impulse to impress his superior. In fact the payroll manager was just a kid himself, a twenty-something in a glittery red World jacket, his black-and-magenta dress socks peeking beneath his ordinary slacks. He had a framed degree from Volmer State, economics BA, 3.2.