Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“See? This is her palatal valve, the same fire-type color, pretty impressive, right? And these are her dorsal scutes …”

“Well,” he smiled, “I’ve never seen anything like her.”

He thanked me; he still hadn’t mentioned the money we Bigtrees owed to him for his avian removal services. This made me feel grateful and a little nervous. We couldn’t pay him, obviously. I was embarrassed, imagining handing him my dad’s voice on the phone. The Chief would offer him coupons instead of cash.

When we got to the house it was very quiet — Ossie hadn’t come home yet. I didn’t think she would tonight.

“I haven’t slept indoors in such a while,” the Bird Man told me absently from the bottom step. He touched our wall the way a child might touch the flesh of a strange animal, flattening his hand against the polished grain of the wood and frowning at it for a moment. The indoors was exotic to folks from the remote swamp, I guessed.

“Thanks again, kid.” He smiled at me. “Beds and linens. It’s like a little vacation.”

His coat made a shuffling sound against the wall of the stairwell.

“See you in the morning! The sixth step sags a little,” I called idiotically. “The towels are sort of dirty?”

I watched him disappear behind my brother’s bedroom door, trailing wispy blue-black feathers behind him. They floated on a slender flume of light from Kiwi’s bedroom, dreamy nicks suspended in the dimness, so small they seemed like molecules of night or visible scent. Should I offer him water, a toothbrush? Did he want a cookie or a sandwich before bed, like I did? For a swamp kid, a visit from a Bird Man was like a dark Christmas. I wished Mom or the Chief were there to help me work out the etiquette of the visit.

Within minutes I could hear our guest snoring behind the wall. I sank beneath a dirty cloud of sheets and lay open-eyed on the pillow. I tried to match my breaths with his snores. I had a feeling like I was dreaming although I was wide awake, staring at the beige cracks overhead and floating happily on my mattress. Maybe this was how a possession started? The Bird Man was no ghost, though, and I was grateful for his company. I had childish fantasies about this man: I wanted to hold his hand in the woods again. I wanted to put my ear on his chest, something I used to do with Mom. To listen to the thud-thud-thud of another heartbeat. For the first time in what felt like months, I slept all the way through a long furrow to dawn.

When I woke up from a dissolving dream of great happiness, Osceola was not in her bed. Light filtered through our window and when I read the clock I felt a little sick. I pulled on yesterday’s socks, my muck boots, and tied my grimy shoelaces. I tromped past the wax-fruit shine of the smaller reptiles’ plastic cage lids, still waking up. Searching for her from the crow’s nest of the kapok tree house, I felt chilled and annoyed. This time she wasn’t in the Gator Pit. I followed our old footsteps from yesterday’s trip to the ditch, which now felt like it had been a thousand years ago. Then our footsteps ran out, and fear unspooled through me as slowly as a yawn. The ditch that I returned to was empty. I remember it as being calm and wet, and very peaceful, flat as a pasture in the blue light.

As I approached the live oak in the center of the Last Ditch my heart began to pound — a glowing square was taped to peeling bark: a blank sheet of paper. No, I saw, hurrying forward, not blank, just white. There was a beautiful handwriting on it that I recognized:

Dear Ava,

I am eloping with Louis. That means we are going to the underworld to get married. Do not stay here by yourself. Get Gus to take you to the Chief. Ava I love you very much. Tell the Chief I love him too, and Grandpa and Kiwi. I will see you maybe.

— Ossie

All I could think was: Her spelling is perfect . I pictured Ossie in Kiwi’s empty room, looking up each word in his dictionary. Slowly I got up and walked to the bank of the canal, which that morning was swollen with rainwater and stained from the cypress roots. We’d checked our rivers against Louis Thanksgiving’s map, and it seemed possible that this canal in our backyard could be the very same artery that the Model Land Company dredge had dug out during the Great Depression. I peered around the river bend, saw only thin trees and moths.

Oh-no. Please-no. Mom …

Moths flapped in mute hysterics all along the canal. I counted hundreds, flying downriver like a second water.

The ditch is empty , I realized.

The dredge is gone .

From the roof of the World, the pigeons looked like falling stars. It was a shame you couldn’t relax and enjoy the Olympic splendor of this, Kiwi thought, on account of how the pigeons kept shitting on everything. Their timing was uncanny, malevolent — the pigeons had gotten him twice this week, down his open work-shirt collar and splat across the back, and the King Suds Laundromat off I-95 was yet another mainland luxury that Kiwi couldn’t afford. Kiwi didn’t even have the bus fare to get to the King Suds Laundromat. He did not have sufficient quarters to pay tribute to King Suds, the mustachioed monarch who ran it. Instead, he took his uniform shirts and his losery boxer shorts into the dormitory showers and washed them with Leo’s dark green dandruff shampoo, which burned like acid on your skin. Somehow it had gotten onto his balls and into the webbing between his fingers and the shit just hunkered there like cold fire. He had developed a rash or a pox, something purplish and specklesome on his bony thighs that he was determined to ignore until it went away, or killed him.

“Ahh, Leo,” Kiwi moaned into the mildewed nave of the showers, “why is this shampoo so thick ?”

Was Leo trying to regrow hair or something? In the break room his colleagues plugged their noses and made a big show of asking, “What smells like formaldehyde, yo?”

During their break hour, Vijay sighed and tugged at Kiwi’s slimy shirt hem. “I told you, I will lend you quarters to do your fucking laundry, you retard.”

“Laundry is my last priority right now, V.”

“Shit, I’d rethink that! Have you smelled you? I will, like, sneak your laundry into my house, bro. My mom loves doing laundry, it’s like this Immigrant Mother disorder? She uses Lluvia de las Montañas detergent — it’s so badass. You’ll smell like Costa Rica!”

The last thing Kiwi wanted was some other kid’s mother doting on him. Just the word “mom” still made his stomach flip.

“Ha-ha. Yeah. I am none to be fucked with.”

“Vijay. I need another job.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” He sighed happily and rolled his pant legs up. “Who don’t?”

The boys were sitting on the sooty edge of the roof overlooking the eastern side of the main lot, watching someone in a BMW double-park. An awesomely jawed man in chinos got out of the car, took a furtive look around, then sprinted on his loafer toes for the park entrance. Banker/lawyer, Kiwi thought, ticking down his taxonomic chart. Silk tie, comb-over, tassels. Something about his gait made the double-parker seem almost jolly; it was like watching an elf leave a Christmas surprise.

“Sing it with me now, Margie: what a d-d -douche. ” Vijay was smiling his breaktime smile. You could tell time by that smile—5:45 must be just around the corner.

“D-d-d …”

Far below them, the Loomis traffic roared. A pigeon waddled along a pipe, lifting its mauve wings like an acrobat. Kiwi felt a stab of the unpredictable homesickness.

“How much do they make over there?” he asked quietly. He was pointing at the row of businesses that abutted the Leviathan hangar, which looked small as a ring of petrified rocks. As if someone had planted them around the World of Darkness, Kiwi thought, thinking for some reason of The Spiritist Telegraph . Those diagrams in the appendix of sacerdotal magic.