Free Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

fenced-in shrubbery behind the shed. All day I’d invent excuses to go back there.
Keep breathing
, I’d command her through the glass. The rise and fall of the Seth’s belly scales could hypnotize me for an hour at a stretch.
    When a week passed and the red Seth was still crawling around in her tank, I felt a terrible hope begin to grow inside me, at pace with the alligator.
Two more weeks, and then I’ll tell
, I thought.
Three … If you tell him now, she will die
. What a dumb superstition! I knew that. When Mom was sick, I went around knocking on everything for luck, not just wood. I avoided black and even dark brown cats, I skirted the Chief’s ladder, I carried around Grandpa’s creepy, ostensibly lucky marsh rabbit’s foot, and did any of this make a difference? My mom died. But my new superstition didn’t care to hear about the earlier failure. It told me,
If you tell anyone about the red alligator, she will die or disappear
.
    At first I thought this fear might be like a gut cramp that would pass. Then my throat would relax in a day or two and then I would be able to share the miracle of the red alligator with the other Bigtrees. I tried to bargain with the fear:
Four more weeks
, I told it.
If this alligator lives another month, then it’s settled. I will definitely tell them
. If I could get her to nine months, she’d be eighteen inches long and out of the danger zone of predation. I figured I just had to keep her alive for long enough to prove my fear wrong.
    So as the World of Darkness usurped our place in the rankings, I became a hunter of minnows. I looked for life that my pet Seth could gulp: tadpoles loitering in the cattails, green anoles, clear slugs that I peeled from the trees. Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head. My pet,because she was mine, was at the top of the chain. I cared for the squirmy swamp rats in the most perfunctory way, with none of the love I felt for my red Seth. The rats and fish ate the small golden crickets, and the crickets seemed to live on air and chirpy fear, surviving for weeks on the pickleweed at the bottom of their cages, so that there was a whole food chain happening in the forty-gallon tank that culminated in my alligator, my lovely ruby girl.
    Three weeks after my red monster was born, on a warm and limpid Sunday afternoon, the Chief finally made good on his promise and took us on the ferryboat to the mainland to visit our grandfather. On the ferry ride over, I stayed on deck. I stood mute as a heron on the stern, rubbing seawater across my rashy left shin with the toe of one sneaker to create a sort of pleasant burn and staring backward at Swamplandia!, where I’d left the red Seth in her hiding spot. To even think “the red Seth” was like staring into a radiance I’d swallowed, a sun.
Maybe I will tell Grandpa Sawtooth about her, just as a kind of practice
. Grandpa Sawtooth would be a safe husk for that sun, a good secret-keeper, because right away the secret would go dark again. Right away he would forget her.
Listen, a red alligator and I are going to save your real home, Grandpa
, I wanted to promise him, but I bet that Grandpa wouldn’t even know my name this time. And Kiwi said that as soon as we stepped off the retirement boat Grandpa would lose the faces that had been talking to him.
    There had been a dramatic buildup to Grandpa Sawtooth’s eviction from Swamplandia!
    First he’d gotten confused during a tram tour and driven the whole train of eight cars in tight doughnuts around the stilted foundation of the Bigtree Swamp Café, his tramload of twelve strawberry blond Utah tourists waving at everybody in polite despair to
please come help them?
    Eight days later, Grandpa bit a man. On his face and neck, mostly. Just hanging there