Vintage Contemporaries / St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Ava Wrestles the AlligatorMy sister and I are staying in Grandpa Sawtooth s old house until our father, Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. It s our first summer alone in the swamp. You girls will be fine, the Chief slurred. Feed the gators, don t talk to strangers. Lock the door at night. The Chief must have forgotten that it s a screen door at Grandpa s there is no key, no lock. The old house is a rust-checkered yellow bungalow at the edge of the wild bird estuary. It has a single, airless room; three crude, palmetto windows, with mosquito-blackened sills; a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain. I love it here. Whenever the wind gusts in off the river, the sky rains leaves and feathers. During mating season, the bedroom window rattles with the ardor of birds.Now the thunder makes the thin window glass ripple like wax paper. Summer rain is still the most comforting sound that I know. I like to pretend that it s our dead mother s fingers, drumming on the ceiling above us. In the distance, an alligator bellows not one of ours, I frown, a free agent. Our gators are hatched in incubators. If they make any noise at all, it s a perfunctory grunt, bored and sated. This wild gator has an inimitable cry, much louder, much closer. I smile and pull the blankets around my chin. If Osceola hears it, she s not letting on. My sister is lying on the cot opposite me. Her eyes are wide open, and she is smiling and smiling in the dark. Hey, Ossie? Is it just you in there? My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses. Ossie? Is it just us? I peer into the grainy dark. There s the chair that looks like a horned devil s

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Philadelphia.

A San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
 

A master of tone and texture and an authority on the bizarre, Karen Russell writes with great flair and fearlessness. Carlo Wolff, The Denver Post

  How I wish these were my own words, instead of breakneck demon writer Karen Russell s, whose stories begin, in prose form, where the jabberwock left off. . . . Run for your life. This girl is on fire. Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  Karen Russell is a storyteller with a voice like no other. . . . Laced with humor and compassion. Lauren Gallo, People

  One of the strangest, creepiest, most surreal collections of tales published in recent memory. . . . Her writing bristles with confidence. June Sawyers, San Francisco Chronicle

  Twent-five--year-old wunderkind Karen Russell . . . proves herself a mythologist of the darkest and most disturbing sort. . . . Ten unforgettable, gorgeously imaginative tales. Jenny Feldman, Elle