Excerpt of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
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Then he closes them around Seth’s jaws. I smile and smile at the tourists.
Inside my tight fist, the Seth strains and strains against the tape. The Chief
keeps his meaty hands on top of my own, obscuring the fact that I am doing any
work at all. The Chief likes to remind me that the tourists don’t pay to watch
us struggle.
At some point, I must have dozed off, because when I wake up the screen door is
banging in the wind. I glance at my watch: 12:07. When Mom was alive, Ossie had
a ten o’clock curfew. I guess technically she still does, but nobody’s here to
enforce it. She lets Luscious possess her for hours at a time. It makes me
furious to think about this, and a little jeal- ous, Luscious taking Ossie’s
body on a joy ride through the swamp. I worry about her. She could be deep into
the slash pines by now, or halfway to the pond. But if I leave the house, then
I’ll be breaking the rules, too. I pull the covers over my head and bite my lip.
A surge of unused adrenaline leaves me feeling sick and quakey. The next thing I
know, I’m yanking my boots on and running out the door, as if I were the one
possessed.
Strange lights burn off the swamp at night. Overhead, the clouds stretch across
the sky like some monstrous spider- web, dewed with stars. Tiny planes from the
Mainland whir towards the yellow moon, only to become cobwebbed by cloud.
Osceola is much easier than an animal to track. She’s mowed a drunken path
through the scrub. The reeds grow tall and thick around me, hissing in the wind
like a thousand vipers. Every few steps, I glance back at the receding glow of
the house.
Several paces ahead of me, I see a shape that turns into Ossie, pushing through
the purple cattails. She’s used hot spoons and egg dye to style her hair into a
lavender vapor. It trails behind her, steaming out of her skull, as if Ossie
were the victim of a botched exorcism. The trick is to catch Osceola off guard,
to stalk her obliquely behind the dark screen of mangrove trees, and then ambush
her with my Flying-Squirrel Super Lunge. If you try to stop her head-on, you
don’t stand a chance. My sister is a big girl, edging on two hundred pounds,
with three extra eyeteeth and a jaguar bite. Also, she is in love. During her
love spells, she rolls me off her shoulders with a mindless ox-twitch, and steps
right over me.
What is she going to do with Luscious? I wonder. What does she do out there with
Luscious for hours every night? I’m more fearful than curious, and now she is
waist-deep in the saw grass, an opal speck shrinking into the marsh. At odd
intervals, rumbling above the insect drone, I hear one of the wild gators
bellow. For a monster, it’s a strangely plaintive sound to make: long and
throaty, full of a terrible sweetness, like the Chief’s voice grown gruff with
emotion. Ever since he left us, I am always listening for it. It’s a funny kind
of comfort in the dark.
As I watch, Ossie moves beyond the clarity of moonlight and the silver-green
cattails, subsumed into the black mangroves. A new noise starts soon after.
I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first
time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I’ll go for Ossie.
We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that
I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning
precision. I walk along the dots of the invisible line, peering after her.
There’s a syrupy quality to this kind of night: it’s humid and impenetrable,
pouring over me. I stand there until Ossie is lost to sight.
“Ossie . . . ?” It’s only a half-yell, the very least I can do. Then, spooked by
the sound of my own voice, I turn and walk quickly back towards the bungalow.
It’s her body, I think, it’s her business. Besides, Ossie likes being lovesick.
How do you treat a patient who denies there’s anything wrong?
Excerpted from St. Lucy's Home for Girls
Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell Copyright © 2006 by Karen Russell.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
