Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“No thank you, ma’am.”

“Too bad they don’t make kiwi juice, right?”

“Ha-ha, right. Thanks, Mrs. Pelkis.”

I am going to be a pilot, you bitch! Kiwi thought. His rage felt wonderful, like cake icing in his mouth. Pure lipids dissolving onto his taste buds. Kiwi didn’t care for middle-aged women. He found them all to be ugly, flighty, soft. Their wrinkles enraged him. Their dyed or graying hair. All the obvious, dimpled evidence that they had enjoyed years and years of life.

Coming into the kitchen, Denny rolled his eyes at Kiwi and barked at his wife: “Kid has to take a test, Nancy.”

Now that Kiwi had at last made it to a suburb it was easy to want the swamp. What was this fresh hell? The World of Darkness seemed like a cozy and benign place compared to the sprawl of these stucco boxes, these single-family houses. Kiwi saw no coconuts and no creeks. The Pelkises had a poinciana tree dragging magenta combs over the grass and a bunch of rusting croquet wickets in the yard. Inside, they had a Wurlitzer piano and a mantel covered in what appeared to be hundreds of tiny porcelain cats. The Pelkises’ decor was such a clean and pleasant variation on the Bigtrees’ cabinets of gin and lizards that Kiwi found himself holding tightly to the edge of the Pelkises’ Lysoled table, as if these shiny surfaces were trying to buck him. Instead of a Juggernaut Human Cannon, they had a green Toyota. Instead of a Gator Pit, their backyard had a shrunken plastic house that contained an animate cotton ball that turned out to be a dog.

“That’s the wife’s Pomeranian,” Denny said, following Kiwi’s gaze. “Vol de Nuit. She gave him a French name. Do I look like I speak French, son? The wife does a lot of things that just mystify me. Totally worthless animal.”

My dad would feed your dog to the Seth of Seths .

“How we doing?” Denny asked forty minutes later. He was on his fourth plain doughnut and listening to baseball on the radio. He looked over the page in front of Kiwi.

“Well! You must have memorized that whole dang chapter.” He planted the doughnut into milk. “But you know, son, this test, strictly speaking, doesn’t count for anything? These are for practice. It’s the FAA written exam you gotta pass. And then you gotta actually fly the damn plane.”

Kiwi nodded. “Right.” He covered his test with his palm and slid it toward his edge of the table.

“See you next Friday. We’ll see what happens when we get you airborne.”

The Jaws were terrifying at night. Something gaseous seemed to shimmer around them, a trick of the weak lighting and the ventilation. The molars shone like huge basalt blocks and everything looked suddenly, impressively real to Kiwi, the giant cave of the maw arching forty feet above him, the web of puce and ruby mesh shot through with dangling yellowish gray threads on the roof. A luxury of being the only rider in the Leviathan was that you could drift for hours. You could let the current conduct you. Also it was a good study break, Kiwi thought.

At two o’clock, after finishing the last of his homework, Kiwi stripped to his boxer shorts and climbed the frozen escalator up the Tongue. He crossed his arms in the SAFEST POSTURE depicted on the sign and he flew down the slide into the first of a seemingly infinite number of brachiating chambers — caves of water, some neck-deep and others shallow as dishes. The Leviathan felt bigger than he had ever imagined, impossibly big. The white points of his knees looked like distant buoys in the darkness. Kiwi’s mouth slammed shut and his teeth hit together as he flew around a bend in the Esophagus, and then he was submerged in deep water, his feet cycling and touching nothing.

Usually at this juncture one of the more athletic park employees would drag you up and bully you out of the pool and into another tortuous line — the Leviathan staff moved four hundred people through the ride each hour. Some kid’s feet would be punching into your back.

Kiwi shut his eyes and breathed very slowly. At night he felt less like a kid than a sick calculator. He ran the same problems and numbers in his head. What am I doing here? Kiwi wondered. Why don’t I go home? The longer he stayed in this place, the less he understood about his own motivations. But the World of Darkness gets me! Kiwi thought. The World has me gotten . The World of Darkness seemed to understand its workers the way that floating sticks got understood by a river, and studied to splinters, and undone by it.

Kiwi floated from room to room with his palms up. He got sucked beneath a grid of radiance, little stars that glowed blue and lime green above him — as if the roof of the Leviathan had suddenly opened onto the real sky! And with his own eyes filling with salt and his total spatial disorientation, the slow flow of the water, the turgor of a nonsensical hope in his body that grew and grew beneath the stars and left him airless, bewildered, so very unexpectedly happy — over the roar of his own happiness it took Kiwi a long time to understand that the blue and green galaxies spooning above him, blinking down in some holy binary, were actually banks of emergency lights.

There were thousands of stars above us — that much I knew from the neon hour blinking on my watchface. We couldn’t see any stars from our skiff because they were trapped behind the storm. Fifteen minutes after Whip left us, rain began to pound the slough.

“I’m sorry. I got nervous.”

“Jesus, kid.”

“I shouldn’t have told about the dredge.”

“You almost blew it for us. You almost cost us our best chance at saving your sister.”

“I know,” I said miserably.

A mosquito crawled out from the feathers at his collar. It drifted up and landed on my nose, its little wings sawing the air. My sister is alone out here , I remembered, watching it bob between my eyes.

“That was a close call.” When the Bird Man was angry, he sounded like anyone to me, like a blue-haired tourist demanding a refund. “We could have both gotten into some serious trouble. Imagine the hassle that man could have kicked up for me …”

I nodded, blinking mightily. The mosquito flew off. I was thinking that I had made a bad mistake, maybe. We were miles from any telephones, from the airboats with their UHF radios, from the city ferry. Back home, I could have placed a simple call to Search and Rescue and the whole rescue operation would have been out of my hands. I could have called my dad …

“You want to turn back?” The Bird Man peered out at me from the rain-sleeked hood of his coat. His mood was on the downswing now. Light caught on his whistle and in the soft, wet curls of hair around his ears, but his eyes were dull as gunmetal. “Say the word, kid.”

I took a breath. “I think I want to turn back, yes.”

“Kid, I’ve been poling for two days. We’re knocking at the door.”

“I’ll still pay you when we get home!” This came out as a cry, startling us both. I hadn’t expected my voice to sound that way. The Bird Man gave me a sidelong look of bad disappointment. For a while there was no noise from the stern beyond the air in the oarlocks, the hull’s regular lift and slap. The glade skiff nosed forward.

“I just … I’m really worried here?” I kept my gaze fixed on the blue quicks of my fingernails. “I think we made a mistake.”

“You need to be brave now, Ava,” the Bird Man told me seriously. I scooted forward a little and snuck my knee under his gloved hand. I liked the weight of the heavy metal buckle on my bare skin. When I leaned into him I was safe, I was pinned in space.