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

remember our dreams! That’s a great thing.” I blink furiously, glad for the dark. “Really.” I reach up to give him an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Really, Ogli. It is.”
    Ogli grins down at me, relieved. “Look, let’s go to sleep? Maybe if I concentrate really hard I’ll remember them tonight?”
    “Nah, Ogli,” I sigh. “I appreciate your volition. But I don’t think the dreams work that way. You go get sleeping without me.” I turn back towards the woods. “I need to be awake for a while.”
    “You’re not going back out there tonight, are you?” he yells after me. “After what we just saw?”
    You mean what
I
just saw?
I think, a deafening, echoing thought. It roars around me, the new solitude within my own skull. And I am angry, so angry at Ogli, for his forgetting. It’s worse, somehow, that it wasn’t deliberate, that the dream sickness just left him like a fever lifting. It means I don’t even get to hate him. Ogli gets to wake up to cheery blankness and cereal, and I’ll spend the rest of my life counting dead sheep.
    This time I do a slow, listless shuffle through the woods, crunching into the leaves. All the happy fear has ebbed out of me. The leaves sound like leaves; the lake looks glassy and flat. When I startle a young stag in the middle of my path, I stand my ground and hurl some sticks at it. I climb into the Insomnia Balloon and curl my body like a fist. Now that I really am ballooning solo, I’m afraid to pull the rip cord. At least with Emma I could feel the warmth of another body in the basket.
    Far away, I can hear Mouflon, our last sheep, bleating in the dark. I wonder if Annie is still out to protect her, still scouring the woods in barefoot pursuit of those dogs. I feel sorry for Annie, alone with a rabid pack of her own delusions. I feel sorrier for Mouflon. She’s alone with Annie.
    Eventually the dark gravity of the postmonitions begins to tug at my eyelids, a first oracular shimmer. I shiver and lie flat against the basket. My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world: Oglivy erasing his dream log; Annie’s blank eyes filling with phantom dogs; Merino’s milky gray belly resurfacing with a terrible buoyancy. I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. Oglivy really spoiled me. I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams. Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry.

The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime
    My job is to be the lookout.
    Raffy’s job is to give out jobs.
    Marta’s job is to get Petey choreographed and in costume.
    Petey’s job is to be the moon.
             
    I didn’t come out here tonight expecting to join a Comical Ironical Crime Ring. I’m here because my dad set me up on a date to see Alcyone. Dad made some sly references to her long blue light filaments and her extraordinary nebulosity, and boy was I excited. I polished my pocket planisphere. I read up on all the expert tips for locating her star cluster center in my
Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy—For Kids!
I logged her spectral type prematurely in anticipation of one luminous night. That’s how Molly and I got suckered into coming out to the touristy side of the island in the first place. Dad promised us that it would be a Junior Astronomer’s beach paradise. But then I crested this dune and saw Petey, and now all my thoughts of Alcyone have been eclipsed.
    Petey is dancing on the