Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another—bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death’s aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order?

Incredibly, Mom stayed dead but the sky changed.

You couldn’t lose a ghost to death.

moths are just a flying paper.

People thought the worst robbers stole the most, whole vaults. But it was the smallest denomination that you stole, he wrote later in the Field Notes, that was the real measure of your greed.

“He needs me to live,” she said mournfully, crunching into a pickle. “He needs me to hold on to his memories, and to move around the world … Death kidnapped him, Ava.”

“But should you listen to the bad birds that are always flying about you, and refuse to remove, I have directed the commanding officer to remove you by force.”

Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.

You could stand this close to a Bird Man, or any man, I thought with wonderment, and still not guess what was in his mind.

All his mom’s requests had become huge and tragic at the end of her life, like magnificent tropical flowers at the suicidal peak of their blooming.

I didn’t have any ideas left in my head, I was all clouds.

The yellow inside you that makes you want to live.

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