Swamplandia! by Karen Russell Read Free Book Online Page B

house—I carried the huge book to our bathtub, thinking that I would turn the faucet on it. When I set it down, a skinny velvet bookmark dropped out like a tongue. I screamed and threw a washcloth over it.
    “Ava?” my sister called suspiciously later that evening. “Do you think one of the ghosts flew my book into the bathtub?”
    “Yes. I do.” In my comic book another radioactive superhero had just saved the planet Earth. Why couldn’t Ossie read cheerful stuff like this? “Probably it was an ex-boyfriend of yours.”
    I developed a weedy crop of superstitions regarding
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
. If accidentally I glimpsed one of the ink drawings of the Victorian Spiritists in their lizard-frilled dresses, or of one of the purple “daemons” built like pugilists, I had to knock twice on something real to ease a bad feeling inside of me.
Not-real
, I’d recite.
One-two
. I knocked on wood, food, the wavy black soap dish with melted pink soap flakes, even Tokay, our house gecko.
    “Ava? Ahh, chickee, why are you knocking on your
sneakers
?” Ossie was standing in the door frame. “You are such a weirdo.”
    “That’s not what I was doing.” I pretended to do a sit-up. “See? I was exercising.”
    My sister wrinkled her nose at me, amused. For a second I was happy, because it looked like my stupidity had knocked her back into being regular old Ossie again.
    “Hey, Ossie? Have you heard from Mom yet?”
    “No, Ava. I haven’t heard anything.” She smiled an old, brave smile at me. “I’m looking.”
    Somehow I had worked it out in my mind to where I could believe in our mother without having to believe in ghosts exactly. In fact, I was discovering all sorts of beliefs and skepticisms turning like opposite gears inside me, and little drawers of hopes and fears I had forgotten to clean out. Sometimes while wandering around the park I’d still catch myself praying in an automatic way, like a sneeze, that my dead mom’s blood test results would come back okay.
    * * *

    After the Chief unrolled his Carnival Darwinism scheme, I tried to speed my own evolution into a world-acclaimed wrestler. The Chief did rehearsals with me, and I got him to let me try Mom’s old routines, which I ran so repetitively that I felt like my muscles were becoming hers. I held the tape loop under my right arm, like she did; I timed myself against Mom’s best times. Once, with only a minimum of help from my dad, I got a Seth’s jaws taped shut in four minutes and twenty-two seconds. (Hilola Bigtree could win a match in thirty seconds flat.) The Chief wouldn’t let me climb up her diving board—he said I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer yet—but I kept pleading my case. Pretty soon, if my plan succeeded, I’d be performing the Silent Night and possibly even Swimming with the Seths for a lot of people.
    One morning on my way home from wrestling practice in the Pit, I saw my sister sitting at one of the picnic tables outside the Swamp Café. Her hair was a weird and glittery beacon viewed through the dense brush at the end of the wood-chip trail. I stared across the outdoor seating area: a sea of empty tables, several studded with blackbirds nibbing around for crumbs. Ossie was slumped over with her head on the table, eyes closed, the heavy clouds pushing seaward above her.
    “Ossie,” I hissed through my teeth. “Ossie, wake up! Nobody thinks that’s funny but you.”
    Two tables over a cormorant was pecking at a dessicated potato chip, its head as glossy as a seal’s; then it hopped onto Ossie’s pile of books and began to stab its beak serenely near my sister’s frozen face. I screamed. Ossie’s nose twitched but her eyes stayed shut. I screamed but I couldn’t get her eyes to open, I couldn’t even startle the cormorant; it cocked its head at me impassively and then continued to nick at the table.
    “OSSIE, WAKE UP!”
    Ossie opened her eyes, three strands of pale hair striping her face. The bird flew off. My