Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

I myself felt naked without her, as if I’d been wearing an armor composed of one scale and I’d thrown it away.

Ossie , I’d think in spasms, I’m coming , but these promises were like mental hiccups. Just thoughts, mindnoises, because I didn’t feel strong enough to voice a promise. Sometimes I’d stumble on the rocky glade and not really want to get up, and then I figured out how to use the promises like poles or crampons. Just the name “Ossie” could hook me up.

The moon moved so slowly through the clouds above me, high and white, with a frightening grace, and I wondered how we’d never recognized the terror of the moon before, this big thing that you couldn’t alter or ever reach. If I lived I was going to alert my brother and my sister to this interesting feature of the moon. Kiwi used to come running for us beneath the Perseid shower: “You are missing it, everybody!” he’d flail evangelically. “The end has already begun!”

Something caught at my shoelace, and when I looked down I was startled to find the dirty bowl of my face reflected on the water. My eyes rippled up at me. I didn’t look anything like an alligator wrestler, I didn’t even feel so much like a girl anymore.

Right at daybreak I started drinking the water. I’d stood sweating in the dome all night, until my thoughts shriveled up and I was just one feeling at a time: COLD or SORE or HUNGRY. All the cypress trunks were sopping up the limited sun and blushing against a gray sky. I crawled forward and bent like an animal over my own dumbstruck face, washing and cupping my hands in the shallows between the roots. The stick-and-needle-flickered brown water floated around the trees, and I drank and drank. This particular cypress dome was huge: I’d covered at least a mile of it and still it pulsed outward, the goliath trees ceding to six-foot dwarf cypress stumps at the perimeter. Skylight poured through the trees and reappeared in the cup of my hands as I crouched in the water. I drank in hot, foul gulps. One day without water should have been easy to tolerate; the torture part was thinking about the future of my thirst. It would grow and grow and do what with me? Thirst was bad, but the idea of night falling on me out here a second time was worse.

I have to get to higher ground , I decided.

“Think!” I commanded my brain. But my brain was a roaring liquid between my eardrums—“thinking” felt like trying to get a river to flex. This I guessed was panic. Pounding everywhere, timpani to bridge a waterfall. A headache throbbed from my temples to my earlobes. I’d never felt this way during a wrestling show; I’d never realized how much the tourists were helping me, just by holding down those chairs. Fear onstage was a thrilling feeling — often it was the prelude to a Bigtree victory. Fear out here was a new species. The sky above me got torn to small crystals by the cypress leaves and as the sun rose it went blue and deeper; some creature shouted kee-ow, kee-ow in the middle distance. I did and did not want to be found by the Bird Man. You couldn’t fool yourself into thinking a discovery like that would be a rescue. But who else knew to look for me, or where? I peered into the thick brush and got angry at the future: it seemed there was not one good thing left to hope for.

Okay-okay-okay, my mind kept chattering. Why was my mind feasting on the worst pictures? I saw the dredge hung up on rocks and my sister’s body inside it, as quiet as a sleeper, her purple skirt draped over the railing. I saw the red Seth floating belly-up on a nameless slough. Every time I heard a stick snap I knew it was the Bird Man. Fear kept making itself inside me. Certain feelings kept making themselves inside me, the way that blood rises to a tiny bead. But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

I did more mental math. I recited primes, which my brother had taught me were the strong, indivisible numbers. 1, 3, 7, 11 … I counted, wrestling off a shoe. I stood on my left leg in the dark water and struggled to pull the soaking shoelace out of its tabs. I was alone, but maybe not for long.

Because the vast floodplain from Okeechobee flows in a southwesterly direction, you can use the swamp water as a compass. I undid the laces from my left sneaker and tied them to a cypress knee. Water in the limestone depression of a dome only appears to be stagnant, you just have to watch it to give the lie to that. After five minutes of storky balancing on one leg, I had my answer. Bingo! The shoelace pointed southwest, toward the Gulf. I relaced. I had a strong itch to run, which would have been a very stupid relief to seek — already I’d found one sinkhole with my stick. A scarlet king snake slithered over a stump, its fantastic licorice colors glowing against the blacky green resurrection ferns.

Although the underworld had been a big hoax, the black raptors continued to map the sky. The buzzards from Ohio had migrated here, too. Turning circles, as docile as party ponies around a mainland carousel. Then they fell, one by one, like little black razors, into the paurotis palms. And it was hard to see this and not to think of carnage. A line of birds falling in a row. Red clouds massed in the southeast and it looked like the sky was getting its stitches out after an operation.

It had been so good for a little bit, to picture my mom out here. To think that I was on my way to meet her, in the blue mists of the underworld. Why had I ever believed the book? Quick as fire on peat, my mists were gone. Now instead of adventuring into an underworld I found myself in the most treacherous part of the swamp.

Seas of saw grass flooded into other, larger seas. No boats and no houses, no smoke rising on the mirror-flat horizon.

I said my little continual prayer that Ossie be alive and dry and far, far, far, far behind me. I tried not to think about the bad possibilities of just where she might be, or who was with her (such thoughts as: What if the Bird Man has found her? ) and especially to never think about the ending of the Dredgeman’s Revelation.

Okay. Okay. I had to move now. There was an orange light thinking its way across the darkness over the swamp and that was the sun.

At the dome’s edge, two black branches spooned out of the same wide trunk. They looked like mirror images, these branches, thin and papery and perfectly cupped, blue sky shining behind them, and an egret sat on the scooped air like a pearl earring. I squeezed through the left opening and scraped sooty bark all over my arms. At one point, I went sloshing into an old hole up to my chest; lily pads and mosquito larvae swarmed in front of my eyes. Accidentally I choked more water down. The Chief would have been proud — at last I’d turned the color of a real Indian. My neck and arms and legs were dyed a black-maroon from the tannins and I itched everywhere, as if my whole body was developing a rash. I wrung out my Swamplandia! T-shirt and continued walking. You could barely read the letters on it now. After a while the forest started to change.

Two days had passed since Kiwi had seen the Chief and he still hadn’t made a move to contact him. But he would! Today maybe. He’d mentally scripted the whole encounter — first he would reveal his many mainland accomplishments to his dad. He was a local Loomis hero, surely the Chief had heard something about that? He had saved a girl’s life inside the Leviathan, wasn’t that something? He’d earned one of four positions in the World of Darkness as an Apocalyptic Pilot; in September he would get his GED.

In Kiwi’s fantasy of this meeting, the Chief didn’t say much. Really, he didn’t say anything — maybe he would be overcome and just sort of paternally beam? Conveniently choked by pride, or joy? Or, failing those ambitious emotions, perhaps they could at least achieve a food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions? Kiwi prayed that was how it would go down, anyway, because when he tried to imagine having an actual conversation in the English language with his father in that casino: that was the end of the tape.