Free St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

his shoulder.
    Annie takes hold of Merino’s cloven hooves and grunts. I take up her forelegs, careful not to touch her still-warm body. I nearly drop her, shocked by the tactile revelation that beneath the airy wisps of fur, she is gristle and bone. Merino is easily the heaviest weight I have ever carried.
    “Come on, Elijah,” Annie huffs. “Good job, Elijah. We’re almost to the sinkhole. Unh!” Her muscles shudder. “This is what’s necessary, you know, for the little ones to sleep easy.”
    I wonder which part of this Annie considers to be “necessary,” the murder or the cover-up. I wish Ogli had stuck around to help me carry the body. I feel Merino’s damp nose brush against my thigh and let out an involuntary groan. When a blood-glutted tick jumps down her haunch and onto the white rim of my thumbnail, onto my sweaty wrist, it’s all I can do not to scream.
             
    The sinkhole is a boggy pit on the edges of Zorba’s property. Elastic bubbles pop along the puckered brown skin. Lightning-scored cypress trees surround it, a greenish phosphorescence sparking along their submerged roots. And it occurs to me that throwing a dead sheep into the sinkhole, this is not our best idea. The sinkhole is a window to the camp’s aquifer. Anything you throw into the sinkhole remains in our water system indefinitely. Eventually, Merino is going to come back to haunt our drinking supply. Annie’s not protecting anyone by dumping the body.
    “Are you ready?”
    Peering over the edge of the limestone cavity, I have an otherworldly certainty that I have been here before. It’s one of those rare moments, the air thick and perfumed with memory, when the imagined world and the real world seem to overlap. A catatonic calm takes hold of me.
Oh, no,
I think, staring into the swirling, milky center, the blind eye of the sinkhole. We should not not not be doing this.
    “Ready.”
    With a strength I couldn’t have predicted, I help Annie to swing Merino’s body into the murk. She hits the sinkhole with an awful thwack, her pale belly facing us. Annie and I watch in a grim, conspiratorial silence as she sinks beneath the surface. I wonder how much of this Annie will remember in the morning.
             
    When we get back to the cabin, I wash my hands eighteen times. Then I loofah them. Then I wash them again. Then I wake Oglivy up and drag him outside and heave him up against the rain-slick wall, my palms still smarting.
    “Why did you lie to her?” I hiss. “Were you
trying
to make us look like sheep killers?”
    “Jesus, Elijah,” Oglivy gasps, squirming away. “Calm down. I was going to tell you, you know.” There’s a pained expression on his face.
    “Tell me what?”
    “I think I might possibly be, uh, getting better? Our dreams, the fires…” He gives me a helpless shrug. “I haven’t been remembering them.”
    My hands drop from his shoulders. “What?”
    “I mean, I still get the shakes, and everything,” he says quickly. “I just can’t remember what I augured, you know?”
    “No,” I growl. “I don’t know. You faker! You mean you’ve been lying to me all summer?”
    Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp is divided down all kinds of lines: campers who can’t sleep vs. campers who sleep too much, campers who control their bladders vs. campers who do not, campers who splinter through headboards vs. campers who lie still as the dead. Now Ogli and I are separated by one of the greatest rifts: campers who remember in the morning, and the ones who forget.
    “You didn’t have the Trail of Tears dream, with the ice floes and the frozen squaw?”
    He shakes his head.
    “The Inundation of Ur dream? All those alluvial, egg-smooth Sumerians?”
    He shakes his head.
    “What about the Great Peruvian Firequake of 1734—”
    “Look, Elijah. It’s a good thing.”
    “Oh, sure. It’s great!” I kick the side of the cabin, feeling stupid even as I do it. “You’re getting better! You don’t