Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

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.

The asterisk, the Chief taught us, was the special punctuation that God gave us for neutralizing lies.

He went on accumulating beginnings.

How could you make a mistake when you had one option?

but I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell.

I grinned back at him, happy in spite of everything to be bundled into the word “we.”

The neighborhoods went from bad-historic to bad-dilapidated, then recovered their lawns and flowering trees again in mere minutes of highway travel.

this was another new mainland experience for Kiwi: to feel immediately hated, to be anonymous and hated.

“You know, my father trained himself to be my mother’s sun, electrically speaking.” That was exactly how my dad described the job of love.

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.

“Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic—a “damn fool math”—in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery on Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water. At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.

Whip gave me what I guess you’d call a rueful smile, which I understood as a kid to be a smile without joy. A smile with a pretty bad joy:knowledge ratio.

He had decided to believe me, I guess, but I think it must have been the sort of believing that requires a special paradox, a vigilant blindness.

He couldn’t hate any of them, he couldn’t find one person to use as a tether; the rage was like a balloon that drifted heavenward and broke free of its string.

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.

The Bird Man rubbed at the creases on his forehead. Why did adults always do that? I wondered. What if a face really worked like that, like rumpled trousers, and you could smooth out your bad thoughts from the outside in?

where salt water and freshwater mingle, and it’s a crazy party down there: manatees and ten-foot saltwater crocodiles and freshwater alligators, bottlenose dolphins and bluegill, soft-shell turtles.

somehow I wasn’t adding up right anymore. My parts weren’t summing into myself.

When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence.

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

My heart sank; my life wasn’t going to be long enough to reach the end of this place. But I walked anyways. I tried not to know that I wasn’t going to make it, to undo that knowledge like a knot.

because the strength I felt then was as huge as the sun. 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.