Swamplandia! by Karen Russell Read Free Book Online

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!”

CHAPTER THREE
Osceola K. Bigtree in Love

    S hortly 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