Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

Judy Garland’s fur looked like a scorched rug—my brother said she had ursine alopecia. She could do a trick, sort of: the Chief had trained her to nod along to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Everybody, without exception, hated this trick. Her Oz-nods terrified small children and shocked their parents. “Somebody, help! This bear is having a seizure!”

We islanders worried about the menace of the melaleuca woods—the

they lassoed the killing horns of steers and smoked like Dad, drank like Grandpa, wore Mom’s secret smile.

Kiwi felt a stab of the unpredictable homesickness.

suddenly I missed my mom again with a pain that was ferocious. She was everywhere and nowhere in the kitchen.

Twinkling lakes. Estuaries, where freshwater and salt water mixed and you could sometimes spot small dolphins.

“You sure this is the river to hell? This place would be heaven to my father,

(we used to tease Kiwi when he woke up with Amadeus Mozart hair, for example),

Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore.

I peered into the thick brush and got angry at the future: it seemed there was not one good thing left to hope for.

tear apart and eat that final lobster. It would be a moment of savage forgiveness. No words required. It would be barbaric and a little gross, eating that lobster, but it would have the transformative effect of a new ritual on them. After the meal, they would be reconciled.

I wasn’t scared now; my insides still held the space of the shape my mom had filled.

We talked over one another while the older couple watched from the dock’s edge, babbling about Seths and Louis Thanksgiving and the Chief in what must have sounded like a foreign language—behind

All of us, the four of us—the five of us if you counted Mom inside us—we were home.

things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning.