Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

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That night Osceola never came home from her walk. When I woke up at midnight her bed was neatly made. Nothing like this had ever happened before; Ossie didn’t even like to go to the tree house alone. I lay awake waiting for her return until 3:22 a.m. When you are waiting for somebody for that long, your ceiling fan can whip ordinary air into a torture. I must have finally nodded off, because when I woke again there was Ossie, snoring lightly in her black cotton dress. She had collapsed facedown on the pillow. Her puffy white arms were flung in a T over the mattress. Wet mangrove leaves clung to every clothed and unclothed inch of her, even her fingers, even the line of her scalp. Where had she been? In a gator hole? Crawling around a tunnel? Osceola was smiling, some good dream rippling over her.

The next day Ossie stalked downstairs without apology, as self-possessed as a cat, and slid the obituaries section out of the Chief’s paper. She spooned eggs out of the frying pan, opened the obituaries on the countertop like this was all very normal. She still had on screwy lipstick and was wearing a pair of Mom’s fishnet stockings, her legs pale and unshaven.

Your legs look like Sasquatches in nets , I considered saying. They look nothing like our mother’s . I kept waiting for the Chief to make a comment.

Kiwi came downstairs and did a double take.

“Well, you look weird. New pajamas? Did somebody exhume you last night?”

Kiwi looked exhausted, too, with his baggy eyes and his dirty hair, the top half of his red scalp greased to a wet-looking brown, as if somebody had tried to put out a fire on Kiwi’s head with a rag. He sat down and gaped at Ossie.

“You’re the one who’s been wearing that same shirt since, like, Christmas,” Ossie mumbled. She left her toast and her runny eggs untouched and shoved past him, the stockings making an itchy noise as she opened and shut the door. Outside it was a beautiful sunny morning. For a second the sky yawned blue at us, then disappeared. The Chief looked blankly up from the newspaper. An ad on the front page read: WORLD OF DARKNESS TO HOST INFERNAL LIGHT SHOW. It was a hologram ad. If you let your eyes unfocus, a laser shot out of a whale’s blowhole and fractaled into columns of fire.

“Well?” Our dad shuffled Kiwi’s hair. “What’s your problem today, son?”

“Ossie is talking to the dead people again, Chief,” I told him.

My father was sipping at a third cup of black coffee. He glanced up at us with the dreamy look of a mutt leashed to a tree.

“It’s a stage, Ava. We’ve been over this. You want me to talk to her?”

“Cancer happens in stages,” my brother grunted, “and guess what the last one is?”

I stirred crumbs into a puddle of ketchup. Sometimes the word “cancer” was like a hinge we could swing onto a conversation about Mom, but not that day. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something crawling along the bottom of the Chief’s newspaper. Just the advertisement again, lifting fizzily away from the paper.

Lasers! We didn’t have anything close to a laser . I felt queasy with a new kind of embarrassment. Until 1977, Swamplandia! had used crank generators. The caimans had eaten or destroyed most of the eraser-size bulbs in their terrarium. The poor bear was eating her fish heads under strings of five-and-dime Christmas lights.

“I need to go change some things, you guys,” I mumbled.

Outside our porch had become a cauldron of pale brown moths and the bigger ivory moths with sapphire-tipped wings, a sky-flood of them. They entered a large rip in our screen. They had fixed wings like sharp little bones, these moths, and it was astonishingly sad when you accidentally killed one.

“Ossie!” I called. “Ossie, wait for me!”

Shortly after Ossie’s strange birthday, our Ouija “séances” began to change focus. Our sessions at the board became a game of spectral Telephone: Ossie would get me to anchor my side of the pointer while she cruised through the alphabet, summoning “boyfriends.” It made her too sad, she explained, to get “a dial tone” when we tried to ring Mom; now we were going to practice conversing with other ghosts, the ones whom she could make contact with. At first I refused to play; I felt as though we were giving up on our mother. Getting Mom on the board was the whole point of the game, as I’d understood it. But pretty soon I started to sort of enjoy reading my sister’s conversations with these ghosts — it was a very special kind of eavesdropping. Your eyes had to dart around the board and add up the words as fast as her pointer flew. We sat on the bedroom planks and spelled things to ourselves like I LOVE YOU, GORJUS. Wally Pipp was my sister’s first “date.” Wally looked like a living dimple, just this chubby footnote to sports history that she’d found in a book called Baseball: An American Passion . It was not for me to criticize my sister’s tastes, but why not try for Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth? I asked her. Or even Lefty Gomez? Why not Lefty?

“Too famous,” Ossie told me, concentrating. “We’ve got to be realistic here, Ava.”

Then the rules changed again, and Ossie told me that I was not allowed to play anymore. I was “too young to understand” her Spiritist communications. Ouija was no longer “our toy”; it was now a private rotary. She’d sit with her delicate hands vaulted over the pointer for an hour, like a concert pianist waiting for her score to appear.

Now that I couldn’t play the game with her anymore, I was happy to ally myself with my brother. We’d tag-team tease her:

“Hey, Ossie, what do baby ghosts eat for breakfast? Dreaded wheat! ”

“What do you call a ghost’s mother? Trans-parent! ”

In addition to his many academic aptitudes, Kiwi had a genius for embarrassing our sister — he could make her plump, serene face crumple into tears of rage in under a minute, and I encouraged him. If she got angry, then I knew she was listening to us. Frequently now she was within earshot of us but zonked, out of it. When she was doing a séance her pupils blew wide and her violet eyes became as hard and shiny as bottle caps. You could yell her name at her and she wouldn’t look up. During the day it was easy to roll your eyes at Ossie’s love spells. At night everything changed. Then something shifted in our house’s atmosphere, and I felt outnumbered. Ghosts silked into our bedroom like cold water. Ossie sucked in her breath and twisted in the yellow sheets, just like my fantasy picture of a hurricane being born. Sometimes she called out strange names. Then a ghost would enter her. I knew it, because I could see my sister disappearing, could feel the body next to me emptying of my Ossie and leaving me alone in the room. The ghost went moving through her, rolling into her hips, making Ossie do a jerky puppet dance under her blankets.

Get out of here, ghost , I’d think very loudly across the chasm between our two beds. Get back in your grave! You leave my sister alone!

Ossie told me that when she left our room at night she was going on “dates” to meet these ghosts in the woods. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell the Chief. “You have to cover for me, Ava, okay?” I nodded queasily, hoping that Kiwi was right, that the séances were just silly pageantry, an excuse Osceola made up to wear her homemade purple turban with the gold felt star. By noon her terrifying “possessions” became as unrecollectable to me as a dream and the whole problem seemed goofy. So what if she went on these “dates”? Probably it was just a new permutation of the game, and at least this way I got to play it with her again, albeit in the sidekick position of secret-keeper.