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4e79680
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It's go time.' He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier- ... -and launch over the water. It's my favorite moment: when I'm one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. And I'm flying, I'm rushing to me..
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karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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d8cd0fd
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There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a ..
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history
prejudice
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Karen Russell |
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f2d85d8
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America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
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Karen Russell |
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1b88441
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I dropped the candies into the children's bags, thinking: You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
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halloween
vampires
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Karen Russell |
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cf73ad2
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Our mother performed in starlight.
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Karen Russell |
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897de53
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On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial deja vu, like I'm watching a dream return to my body. It wings towards me with a slow, avian grace. Its long neck is arced in an S-shaped curve; its lizard body is the size of Granana's carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels colored light. I try ..
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Karen Russell |
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6ad570a
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I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.
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loss
sisters
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Karen Russell |
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288c0b1
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I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.
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karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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58073e7
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Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. "Help!" she screams to a sky full of crows. "He's not actually from Europe!"
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Karen Russell |
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2b05094
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I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.
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Karen Russell |
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9d5d683
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What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.
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women-authors
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Karen Russell |
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32656c5
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We sang at the chapel annexed to the home every morning. We understood that this was the humans' moon, the place for howling beyond purpose. Not for mating, not for hunting, not for fighting, not for anything but the sound itself. And we'd howl along with the choir, hurling every pitted thing within us at the stained glass.
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karen-russell
st-lucys-home
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Karen Russell |
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b4ce5fa
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I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.
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Karen Russell |
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3f2171e
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She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, "I wanna go home! I wanna go home!" Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home."
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Karen Russell |
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51747b8
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Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.
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Karen Russell |
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b33281f
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Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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Karen Russell |
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d3e208e
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It's our suspicion that there's another, better Heaven behind the cumulus screen,' he murmurs into the grass, bending and tearing at a root that tastes beautifully yellow. 'That's the trouble. That's what keeps us trapped here, minds in animals.
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Karen Russell |
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4cb8998
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Uncle Fitzy!" the girl yells. "Gingersnap is being bad!" Eisenhower hates it when she calls him Gingersnap. He complains about it with a statesman's pomp: "Gentlemen, there exists no more odious appellation than"--nose crumpling, black lips curling-- "Gingersnap." From "
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Karen Russell |
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fe2c340
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Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he'd called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak.
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Karen Russell |
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ef7f19e
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There's something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat. ... This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles. I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that. At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.
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karen-russell
occurrence-00-422
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Karen Russell |
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979b9b5
|
I had to explain to him Mom's death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.
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Karen Russell |
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acfe606
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We keep giggling, happy and nervous, tickled by an incomplete innocence. We both sense that some dark joke is being played on us, even if we can't quite grasp the punch line.
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karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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6037413
|
Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
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karen-russell
st-lucys-home
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Karen Russell |
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dbfd5b3
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On Sundays, the pretending felt almost as natural as nature. The chapel was our favorite place. Long before we could understand what the priest was saying, the music instructed us in how to feel.
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karen-russell
st-lucys-home
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Karen Russell |
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ef8a1e1
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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fdcc16e
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But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.
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Karen Russell |
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0ce3d00
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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.
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sleep-disorders
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Karen Russell |
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4d3d157
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The same spine that has been inside her since babyhood is hers today, the exact same bones from the womb, a thought that always fills her with a kind of thrilling claustrophobia. So much surface wrapped around that old stem. She watches her hands smear the water droplets on her stomach. It's strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.
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Karen Russell |
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4530f97
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Some team! The Chief was doing so many jobs alone. I'd fix on the Chief's raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I'd suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was probably an ulcer and Ossie diagnosed as lovesickness. Or rather a nausea produced by the "black fruit" of love--a terror that sprouted out of your love for someone like rotting oranges on a tree branch. Osceola knew all about this black fruit,..
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Karen Russell |
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6382b4e
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I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage. In the cave I think she must have lent me some of it, because the strength I felt then was as huge as the sun. The yellow inside you that makes you want to live. I believe that she was the pulse and bloom that forced me toward the surface.
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Karen Russell |
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26119f4
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Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he's become tight-lipped as an oyster. But he can feel the worlds pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.
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out-to-sea
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Karen Russell |
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971149e
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Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency, and also pandering to a powerfully desperate new voting block.
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Karen Russell |
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e173962
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She doesn't know how to answer the man's question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there's something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year. Big Red curls up in a cold recess of the conch. That's the way to do it, the grown-up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.
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Karen Russell |
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e223056
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She was right. The purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose, in order to give us an advantage. 'King me,' I growled, out of turn. 'I say king me!' and Felicity meekly complied. Beulah pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique, fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to ribbons. I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity, and always homesick for a dimly sensed..
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homesick
wilderness
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Karen Russell |
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afa908f
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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 ... 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...
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karen-russell
sleep-away-camp
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Karen Russell |
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6dc8194
|
the gravity of wound to fist
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abuse-survivors
pain
rape
relationships
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Karen Russell |
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ce8ee27
|
What bird are you calling?' I ask, finally, when I can't stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water. 'You.
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Karen Russell |
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dc039b2
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But if it turns out that she really can adjust them from without? Reshuffle the deck of his past, leave a few cards out, sub in several from a sunnier suit, where was the harm in that? Harm had to be the opposite, didn't it? Letting the earliest truth metastasize into something that might kill you? The gangrenous spread of one day throughout the life span of a body-- wasn't that something worth stopping?
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Karen Russell |
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8cb0cd8
|
And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.
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Karen Russell |
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3927078
|
She was still loping around on all fours, her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. " " She'd sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd say softly, again and again. "What are you holding on to? Nothing, little one. Nothing."
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karen-russell
st-lucys-home
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Karen Russell |
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5a724c7
|
Etiquette was so confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella-her fists balled together like small, white porcupines, her brows knitted in animal confusion-I felt a throb of compassion. I wondered. Then I congragulated myself. This was a Stage 3 thought.
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karen-russell
st-lucys-home
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Karen Russell |
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427064b
|
I could have warned her. If we were back home, and Mirabella had come under attack by territorial beavers or snow-blind bears, I would have warned her. But the truth is that by Stage 3 I wanted her gone. Mirabella's inability to adapt was taking a visible toll. Her teeth were ground down to nubbins; her hair was falling out. ... her ribs were poking through her uniform. Her bright eyes had dulled to a sour whiskey color. But you couldn't sh..
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karen-russell
st-lucys-home
|
Karen Russell |
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f6c9144
|
Una volta Beverly ha letto un articolo di una rivista scientifica sulla bioluminescenza, il bagliore naturale emesso da organismi come le lucciole e le meduse, ma sa che anche i morti emanano una strana luce, un fosforo che puo danneggiare in modo permanente gli occhi dei vivi. Necroluminescenza - la luce degli scomparsi. Un pensiero retrospettivo prodotto dal corpo del defunto. I tuoi fallimenti retroilluminati dalla morte dei tuoi cari.
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Karen Russell |
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dbfa36d
|
A scuola, Camp Dark picchiava i ragazzini come un quartetto. Lo facevamo in un silenzio animale. Trascinavamo un ragazzino isterico dietro l'edificio di scienze in mattoni rossi - di solito qualcuno piu piccolo, delle classi precedenti - e poi martellavamo e pompavamo i nostri pugni nel suo corpo che si dimenava graffiando e gridando, finche il ragazzino non si afflosciava come uno straccio. Sentivo quelle urla come se provenissero dalla mi..
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Karen Russell |