Free Lights Out in the Reptile House by Jim Shepard

Elsie, who was always talking about marriage and supported the regime because she liked the colors and because she’d gotten picked as a flower-bearer for the local celebrations of the Great Trek.
    Leda asked if he was so quiet because of what she’d said, and he said he guessed so. She apologized.
    He smelled flowers somewhere, and sage. Leda said that actually she was worried about Elsie and he said he thought it was a phase, and that Elsie would probably grow out of it. Leda said she thought that was really true and a good point.
    She indicated a cloud she thought was shaped like the outline of their country, and not only could he see no similarity but they couldn’t even settle on exactly which cloud they were looking at. She talked about a dream she kept having involving a tunnel inset with luminous windows. In the windows she could see coral, sea urchins, and champagne bubbles. She asked him why he supposed blue was a common color among reptiles but not among other animals. She asked him if he thought he wanted to work with reptiles when he grew up. He talked to her about exploring someday in the plateau deserts, about finding new species and setting up a Reptile House where they had everything they needed. She asked what sort of things they needed. He told her about gravels and drainage and vivarium design and food storage, registering her responses and noting with pleasure the way she opened her mouth a little the instant before laughing.
    She told him her mother admired his steadiness and devotion to the Reptile House. She said she really liked her mother more than it seemed sometimes. She told him about her nanny, whom she remembered as having a beautiful voice and being magical with injuries and animals. Not an old woman at all, pretty, with dark eyes and hair and a coffee smell. She used to tell Leda she was working to make money for her family. She talked along with the radio to improve her language and told stories about her brothers in the desert while she folded sheets and pillowcases. Leda’s mother just fired her one day, to save money, it turned out, though no one told Leda. Her mother said later she hadn’t considered the change important enough to merit discussion. Leda had been home sick from school for two weeks afterward and no one could figure out what was wrong. Everybody had been worried. She figured all the money her mother had saved firing the nanny had been turned over to the doctors. She loved her nanny and told her everything, as her mother said, all her secrets. Now all she had was her journal. When Karel asked what kind of secrets, she said she couldn’t say, or they wouldn’t be secrets.
    An article in The People’s Voice interested him: in the southern swamps the Civil Guard was using snapping turtles tied with rope to retrieve corpses. He tore it out to show Albert. It got him thinking about his old life in the city. It was in the city that he’d first seen a snapping turtle, in a traveling exhibit. It had had a big effect on his growing love of reptiles.
    Summers he and Leda played as often as he could talk her into it at the beach. She had other friends but liked him too. They were walloped by breakers when the waves were good, after storms, and scavenged along the shoreline when the sea was calm. Their favorite place was an underwater rock shelf filled with jellyfish slipping by on the action of the waves. They swam furiously with no style but a lot of splashing. Leda thought it was very funny to carry starfish out of the surf on her arms. The sand dried immediately after a wave’s departure. When they buried each other they would leave their faces bare, and arrange crosses of pebbles atop their chests.
    He remembered the pointed gables of the beachfront hotels and the green cypresses, and one hotel, the Golden Angel, with a painting they both loved in the common room. The subject was a cavalry charge they couldn’t identify. It involved a