Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

I closed my eyes then and tried to breathe through my nose only. Dimly I was aware of cold air on my belly; a little shiver of disgust drifted up between my legs. My neck kept getting ground against the hard knot of a root and all my embarrassment seemed to concentrate and grow acutest in that one spot: he would know now that I didn’t shave my legs, that I didn’t even wear a bra yet. Your legs are still hairy, he’ll think you’re a kid .

“I’d like to go back now,” I said. “Please.”

We walked back from the hammock in silence. We passed the same trees and their same orbiting bulbs, the same white flowers, the same sour, creamy ponds, but everything looked changed to me now. The moon had a bad charge. I followed the Bird Man’s feathers through the trees, staring over his left shoulder to the gray sea glint. A small alligator curled like dried spittle in the radish-colored reeds. As I walked I held a punch against my abdomen, wishing that I could throw up. My big toe pressed up in a hole in my left sneaker and I watched this, fascinated. With each step the toe dilated the mesh. It was like watching the movements of an alien organism. My sneaker laces were still undone. When I bent to tie up, red threads of pain went whooshing through me. I pushed my knuckles angrily against my crotch — somehow I wasn’t adding up right anymore. My parts weren’t summing into myself.

Why didn’t it occur to my body to run then? My body’s best idea was to stare at the ground. At no point had I tried to fight this person. Less than two hours ago, when we were poling through the dusklight, I had boasted to him that I, Ava Bigtree of the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty, could defeat a thousand-pound alligator. Instead I trailed his elbow. I talked nervously, like a tourist girl; I remember noticing out loud that the stars on this island were very very white.

I won’t tell Ossie , I decided with a sudden viciousness. I don’t have to tell anybody about it . “It” was this bloat. Already the thing had somehow grown so big and slippery inside me that I didn’t see how I could get it to adhere to any story. Anyhow, I didn’t think that Os would understand what I had done with the Bird Man. Way deep in my gut I hoped she wouldn’t, and deeper than that I hoped or wondered if she maybe could. Her Spiritist possessions — the ones that I had seen in our bedroom, anyhow — they looked clean and solitary. I pictured ghosts coiling in a glittering and spacious place inside Osceola, ghosts rolling through my sister like a fog and then lifting again, no harm done. (While dressing I’d touched the sweat on my legs and found a salmon-colored film that I’d mopped up with one pant leg, my face hot, as quick as I undid or hid messes in the Pit. I’d pocketed the red Seth, who had been dozing under the leaves.) I knew now that I didn’t know anything. Those nights with the ghosts belonged to my sister so completely that I couldn’t guess at them, I realized, the way that this thing was going to be mine.

No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this , I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

“Ava, come here,” the man said to me again — shouted, really — in his new voice.

In the history of sound, nobody has ever said a girl’s name that way before. Like it was a string you could pluck. “A-va.”

When I didn’t come over right away he stood and stretched, opened his mouth in a kind of angry yawn. His smile grew larger and stranger until it was almost unbearable, at which point he began walking toward me.

“Ava, honey …”

I wanted to go to him then? Not all of me but the same part he’d just hurt. I don’t understand this pull, still. I think it must be a really dangerous physics, the gravity of wound to fist. You can see it happen to the other animals. When a hunter or trapper begins kicking at an alligator, its body curls to accommodate the withdrawing foot.

Once, at Argyle Murphy’s fish camp, I watched a little Scottie dog get a Gulch bottle broken across its back and then go loping, tongue lolling, toward its owner with the man’s beer and its own blood stiffening on its fur — not to attack him, as I’d originally thought, but to lick and lick at the emerald bits lodged in his hand.

“Ava, I need you to help me over here …” The Bird Man’s voice was full of squishy feeling that sounded to me so much like tenderness, love. Like he really did need me, too. It was a voice you could see, like green glass sparkling in a palm.

At the same time I heard my mother telling me something I should have figured out hours and days ago, something I must have been on the brink of knowing since Stiltsville. I don’t mean that my actual mother told me this, like one of Ossie’s ghosts, but it was her voice I heard in my head:

The Bird Man is just a man, honey. He is more lost out here than you are. The Bird Man has no idea where he’s taking you, and if he does, well that’s much worse, and you won’t find your sister anywhere near here, Ava, and I would run, honey, personally …

What I did next was all instinct, as if my muscles were staging a coup: I felt a movement in my breast pocket, the red Seth clawing against the cotton ticking; I pulled her out and untaped her small jaws and flung her at him in one fluid motion. The Bird Man was surprised into reflex. His naked hands flew out like catcher’s mitts; I could see past him to where his falconer’s gloves were hanging off the keel. He caught the Seth hard against his chest. There was something almost funny about watching this, hysterically funny, but terrifying, too, a bad hilarity that lights up eel-bright in your belly. A hideous squeal went up through the trees but I don’t know what happened next, if the red Seth bit him or clawed at him — I was off. I disappeared between two trees and felt my upper body career forward as I slid on the deep peat beds. I caught myself, monkey-swung my way out of a liquidy nick in the limestone. I sucked air on the jumps and splashed through pools of vegetation.

When I got up a little higher I dodged the willow heads and tried to avoid the obvious holes where female gators had piled and clubbed down brush.

Even running, I kept waiting to feel a hand fall onto my shoulder. The only noise I heard was my own progress through the cypress dome, my breath rocket-shipping up and up through a heavy tube of sky. He is letting you go, you can stop running , but I crashed through the dim hammock. Two great white herons stood like marble statuary in a belled opening in the trees and they opened their wings and they blew away from me and oh I was running so fast their flight looked like smoke; I fell and screamed, my hands sinking into a foot of water, and it took me many many seconds to get up.

The elevation crept up. I burst into a meadowland, reentered the woods, felt my toes curl inside the suck of deep, spongy peat. Curtains of Spanish moss caught at my hair like fishermen’s nets. The night had developed a suffocating wetness — breathing felt like drowning in a liquid you couldn’t climb out of. Collapse seemed like a wonderful option to me — to fall sideways, to curl into a ball and wait in the braiding weeds for help to come …

Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night. I was acquainted with it, this bright spot, because once or twice before it had taken over during my fiercest wrestling matches. Encapsuled in this pinhead lived a brute, a swimmer, a thirst, a hunger, a fire-hater, a grass-jumper. The same as anybody’s, probably, as any living person’s. I’m sure that yours and mine would push up for air with the same force: mass ratio. Would fin up, would open its frog mouth for air, would claw up, would gallop. This new self had all the personality of a muscle. Its haunches charged ahead of my heartbeat, leaving a wake of blood in my ears: KICK. KICK. KICK.