Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

You are squeezing too hard , a small, milk-neutral voice inside Kiwi noted. You might actually kill him . The voice didn’t have the shrillness of a conscience; it was bored and old, content to let Death happen.

Kiwi let go.

Robina tried to get him to go to the emergency room but he refused; he watched with fascination as welts rose in archipelagos on his skin. Kiwi touched one gingerly and winced, blinked tears back into his eyes. Robina was asking him in a worried hiss if he was going to press charges; she didn’t specify who these charges would be pressed against, Sawtooth Bigtree or Out to Sea or her personally, and for a disorienting moment Kiwi thought she was asking him to turn himself in to the police.

“What? Criminal charges? No, I don’t think that’s necessary, okay? I just want to go. I’m really sorry …”

He’d left Grandpa Sawtooth watching Cheers reruns with Harold, both men sipping at Vital Light shakes that looked like peed-on snow. The “Heeeere’s … Cliffy!” episode was on. Grandpa Sawtooth had just two bruises that Kiwi could see — the dark blue-red stain of hemoglobin into bilirubin on his shrunken biceps, and a purpling of ruptured vessels on his cheek. The EMT had given him a clean bill of health.

“You got off extremely lucky,” the EMT had told him with relish. “He’s an old man”—the EMT kept repeating this to Kiwi, as if it were a controversial diagnosis. “An old, old man. You could have suffocated him. How would you like that, huh? How would you like to do jail time for killing your own grandfather?”

Kiwi shook his head, to indicate that he would probably not like that.

“You got off lucky this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it again.”

Now Kiwi nodded. He was afraid to talk. Two violet thumbprints were darkening at the front of his neck, a tier of ghostly fingerprints at the nape.

When Kiwi returned to the World dormitories, the elevator doors opened on faint sniggering, the TV screen drumming softly with pale light — the lounge was empty, but somebody was inside his dorm room. The Chief! Kiwi thought for a crazy moment. Then he heard the phlegmy rocket of Leo’s guffaw.

Leo and Vijay were standing in the middle of his room, wearing big shit-eating grins from ear to ear. They both had frozen, red-handed postures.

“What are you dudes doing in here?” Kiwi hated the pitch of his voice.

“Vijay says you’re broke, Bigtree,” Leo said. “So we decided to get you a little something. Think of it as an early birthday present, like …”

He swung the closet door open and Kiwi’s heart stopped.

The boys had put up a poster: a shiny centerfold from a porn magazine. Her face was an absolute blank but Kiwi returned the gaze of her enormous brown nipples, which seemed somehow sorrowful and frank, alert to a great sadness behind the pornographer’s camera, while the boys smirked.

“Look, he loves it!”

“Ha-ha,” Kiwi heard himself say. “Thanks, guys.”

Next followed innuendo of the conventionally scatalogical variety and Saturday insults, “cocksuckers” and “pussylickers” raining down on him like blows, and each time Kiwi spoke a word it felt like raising an arm to cover his face: “Fuck you, fuck you, shut up. ”

Kiwi elbowed past them and tried to shut the closet door with a growl of laughter. Then he saw what they had done to the poster of his mother.

“Oh, sorry, bro.” Leo let out a buzzy laugh but then changed tone when he saw Kiwi’s face, pinching at his earlobe. The mood in the room became cinder-flecked. “That was like an accident? We were trying to get that ugly one off the wall, that’s some seventies shit right there …”

They had split her down her middle. SWA and MP CENTAUR read two halves of it. Half her face regarded him with its dusk intelligence, and he pushed the scraps of her into his fists. Kiwi wanted to scream at everyone to get out of his room, to die slow and go right to hell; out loud he could hear his dull, persistent chuckle.

What he could hear as clearly as if it were still happening was the blare of the Chief’s banter through the Pit’s loudspeakers:

“Hilola Bigtree has more talent in her pinkie finger than any other wrestler on the planet!

“Hilola Bigtree can tape up a twelve-foot gator in the time it takes you mainlanders to haul your lard asses up to the fridge!”

All day long the Chief’s good publicity funneled into the blue sky inside Kiwi, scattering birds.

Patched together the poster would have read HILOLA BIGTREE, SWAMP CENTAUR. Kiwi had always been embarrassed by this particular epithet for her — more of the Chief’s lame publicity — but it was a name that his mother was growing into, apparently. Because here she was: a real centaur on the door. The closet wood showed through half a dozen rips in the poster and blanked out one cheek. You could touch the grain of the wood through her torn forehead. A crescent of her smile hung on a little fang of green paper. Death was speeding her evolution into this monster: half woman and half invention. Kiwi couldn’t remember the real color of his mother’s hair anymore, her nascent wrinkles like the first cracks in an eggshell, her voice, her beautiful scowl, because the poster had papered over her third dimension and now even it was ruined.

“Kiwi? Learn to take a fucking joke, bro …”

“No, it’s fine.”

He touched the paper of her face and shut the door.

Ossie’s ribbon was still on my wrist. All it did was remind me that I had a sister somewhere, the way you’d strap a watch to your wrist to keep you in time. If the Bird Man had showed up and tried to take this cloth protection from me then, I really think I might have killed him.

This part of the swamp grew very noisy at night, growls and squelches and the infinitesimal roaring of each mosquito piling into waves. Sticks snapped and once I heard a large animal go crashing through the water; all I saw, though, were the tall gumbo-limbo trees that were like pepper shakers of moths. Probably the Bird Man was miles and miles away from me, I told myself. On his way home, back through the Eye and this phony underworld. In a way, he’d made good on his promise to me, our bargain, because I couldn’t imagine a hell that would be worse than this place where he’d left me. Overhead the sky was a fast and swallowing blue.

“Ossie?” I gulped. “Mom?”

I fixed my eyes on two palm trees at the edge of the saw-grass prairie; I was going to use them as goalposts. I started to walk. I could see little oases of thatch-palm and cabbage trees, carpets of gray sea oxeye, of red sea bight, and between these the stalks weaving, endlessly, acres and acres of this.

* * *

I walked steadily all morning. By noon I was getting really mixed up. I drank more of the silty groundwater and then threw it back up an hour later.

If I don’t find water , I thought, freshwater, rainwater, potable water, and soon …

Now I didn’t always recognize the cries of the animals; whatever adhesion in my brain connected sounds and light to the names of species was breaking down. The leaves that I had easily identified as bay or gumbo-limbo or pop ash gave way to a muted palette of foliage, a glowing russet and gray, much of it alien to me. Fewer and fewer of the plants that I tripped over or pushed through in curling curtains of vines uprooted a name in my mind. I was seeing new geometries of petals and trees, white saplings that pushed through the peat like fantailing spires of coral, big oaky trunks that went wide-arming into the woods (no melaleucas anywhere). A large egretlike bird with true fuchsia eyes and cirrusy plumage went screeching through the canopy. For some reason all the life gurgling in the anonymous hammock made me want to cry. Some underworld this turned out to be, Ossie .