Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  * * *

  “Will you have a talk with him?” Gillian begged Sean. “Something is going really, really wrong with him!”

  “First love, first love,” Sean murmured sadly, scratching his bubonic nose. “Who are we to intervene, eh? It will die of natural causes.”

  “Natural causes!”

  She was thinking that the poor girl had been garroted. Her bright-red hair racing the tail of the noose down her spine. You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.

  * * *

  In mid-October, a stretch limousine pulled up to the cottage to take Cillian and the Bog Girl to the annual school dance. A techno-reggae song called “Bump de Ass!” filled the back seat, where half a dozen teenagers sat in churchlike silence. The Bog Girl’s reticence was contagious. Ambulance lights sparkled through the tinted windows, causing everyone to jump, with one exception: Cillian Eddowis’s date, the glamorous foreigner, or native—nobody was sure how to regard her.

  Since acquiring his far-older girlfriend, Cill had begun speaking to his classmates in the voice of a bachelor who merely tolerates children. “Carla,” he said, clearing his throat. “Would you mind exhaling a little closer to the window? Your smoke is blowing on us.”

  Two girls started debating whether or not a friend should lose her virginity in a BMW that evening. What was the interior of the car like? This was a very important question. The girl’s boyfriend was a twenty-six-year-old cocaine dealer. Prior to the Bog Girl’s arrival on the scene, everyone had found his age very impressive. The dealer boyfriend had been unable to accompany the girl to the school dance, so she had taken poor Eoin, her sophomore cousin, who looked near fatally compressed by his green cummerbund. The twenty-six-year-old would be waiting for her in the BMW, postfestivities. Should she deflower him?

  “Wait. Uh. I think he’s deflowering you, right? Or maybe you’re deflowering each other? Who’s got the flower?”

  “Just do it, and then lie about it.” Carla shrugged. “That’s what I did.”

  “My advice,” Cillian said, in the unfamiliar voice, “my advice is wait. Wait until you find the person with whom you want to spend all your earthly time.” The Bog Girl leaned against his shoulder, aloof in her sparkly tiara. “Or until that person finds you. If that’s this guy, well, kudos. But, if not, wait. You will meet your soul mate. And you will want to give that person every molecule of your life.”

  The attempted conversion of the high-school gymnasium into an Arabian-themed wonderland had not been a success. Cill and the Bog Girl stood under a palm tree that looked like an enormous toilet brush, made of cellophane and cardboard tubes. Three girls from the limo came up and asked to dance with Cillian, but he explained that his girlfriend hated to be left alone. All were sulkily respectful of her claim on him.

  The after-party was held in an old car-parts warehouse on the west side of the island, where everything was shut or abandoned; the population of the island had been declining steadily for three decades. The music sounded like fists beating at the wall, and the floor was so sticky that Cillian had to lift and cradle the Bog Girl, looping her silver dress around one arm. Cillian had never attended an after-party before. Or a party, for that matter. He surveyed his former tormentors, the seniors, with their piggish faces and their plastic cups. Some were single, some had girlfriends, some were virgins, some were not, but not one of them, Cillian felt very certain, knew the first thing about love.

  Eoin the sophomore came over, his date nowhere to be seen. He was breathless in the cummerbund, in visible danger of puking up Bacardi. He rolled a bloodshot eye in Cill’s direction, smiling wistfully.

  “So,” he said, “I’m just wondering. Do you guys—”

  Cillian preempted the question: “A gentleman never tells.”

  It was a phrase he’d once read in a men’s magazine while waiting to get a root canal. In fact, his mother needn’t have lost so much sleep to this particular fear. At night, Cillian lay beside the Bog Girl, barely touching her. A steady, happy calm radiated from her, which filled him with a parallel euphoria.

  Cillian carried the Bog Girl onto the dance floor, her braided noose flung over his shoulder. And even Eoin, minutes from unconsciousness, could see exactly who the older boy believed himself to be in this story: Cillian the Rescuer.

  “Oh, damn! Wise up! She’ll make you wait forever, man!” The lonely laugh of Eoin died a terrible death, like a bird impaled on a spike.

  * * *

  At 3 a.m., the lights were still on. Uh-oh, Cill thought. Mom got into the gin again.

  Drinking made her silences bubble volubly. He almost got the hiccups himself, listening to her silences. Oh, God. There was so much pain inside her, so much she wanted to share with him. Cillian and the Bog Girl tried to tiptoe past her to the staircase, but she sprang up like a jack-in-the-box.

  “Cillian?” She looked child-small in the dark. Her voice was tremulous and young, and her slurring reminded him of his own stutter, that undead vestige of his early years. His mother sounded like a sleepy girl, four or five years old. Her feet were bare, and she rose onto her stubby toes to grip his arm. “Where are you coming from?”

  “Nowhere. The dance. It was fun.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Aw, Mom. Where do you th-th-think?”

  “Good night!” she called after him desperately. “I hope you had a good time! You look so handsome! So grown up!”

  * * *

  By early winter, the Bog Girl’s stillness had begun to provoke a restlessness in Cillian, a squeezed and throbbing feeling. He was failing three subjects. His mother had threatened to send him to live with Aunt Cathy until he “straightened out.” He didn’t care. Waiting for the bus in the freezing rain, he no longer dreamed about owning a car. He knew what he would do with the summer money he’d earned from Bos Ardee: run away with her.

  He’d flunk out of school and take the Bog Girl with him to the mainland. She’d be homesick at first, maybe, but they’d go on trips to urban parks. It was the burr of peace, the burr of happiness, goading him on to new movement. Oh, he was frightened, too.

  In his fantasy life, Cillian drew the noose tighter and tighter. He imagined, with a strange joy, the narrow life they would lead. No children, no sex, no messy nights vomiting outside bars, no unintended pregnancies, no fights in the street, no betrayals, no surprises, no broken promises, no promises.

  Was the Bog Girl a cosigner to this fantasy? Cillian had every reason to believe so. When he described his plans to her, the smile never left her face. Was their love one-sided, as the concerned and unimaginative adults in his life kept insisting? No—but the proof of this surprised no one more terribly than Cillian.

  One night in mid-December, lying in bed, he felt a cobwebby softness on his left cheek. It was her eyelashes, flicking over him. They glowed radish red in the moonlight. Cillian swatted at his face, his own eyes never opening. Still sunk in his dreaming, he grunted and rolled over.

  Cillian.

  Cillian.

  The Bog Girl sat up.

  With fluttering effort, the muscles of her blue jaw yawned. One eye opened. It studied itself in the dresser mirror for a long instant, then turned calmly back toward Cillian. Very slowly, her left arm unhinged itself and dropped to the plaid bedspread. The fingers curled around the blanket’s edge and drew it down. A blush of primal satisfaction colored the Bog Girl’s cheeks as the fabric moved. She tugged more forcefully, revealing Cillian curled on his side in his white undershirt. Groaning in his sleep, he jerked the covers back up.

  “Cillian,” she said aloud.

  Now Cillian was awake—he was irreversibly awake. He blinked up at her face, which was staring down at him. When they locked eyes, her frozen smile widened.

  “Mom!” he couldn’t help screaming. “Help!”

  The Bog Girl, imita
ting him, began to scream and scream. And he could see, radiating from her gaze, the same blind tenderness that he had directed at her. Now he was its object. Something truly terrifying had happened: she loved him back.

  For months, Cillian had been decoding the Bog Girl’s silences. He’d tried to translate her dreams, her fears, her innermost thoughts. But her real voice was nothing like the voice that he’d imagined for her—a cross between Vicki Gilvarry and Patti LaBelle. Its high-pitched ululations hailed over him. In the kitchen, the dog began to bark. The language that she spoke was no longer spoken anywhere on earth.

  He stumbled up, tugging at his boxers. The Bog Girl stood, too. The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life. An invisible woods was in the bedroom with them, the scent of trees multiplying. Some mental earthquake inside the Bog Girl was casting up a world, green and unknown to him, or to anyone living: her homeland. Her gaze drove inward, carrying Cillian with it. For an instant, he thought he glimpsed her parents. Her brothers, her sisters, a nation of people. Their cheeks now beginning to brighten, every one of them alive again inside her village. Pines rippling seaward. Gods, horned and faceless, walking the lakes that once covered Cillian’s home. Cillian was buried in water, in liquid images of her; he had to push through so many strata of her memories to reach the surface of her mind. Most of what he saw he shrank away from. His mind felt like a burned tongue, numbly touching her reality.

  “W-w-who are you?”

  Heartbreak is the universal diagnosis for the pain that accompanies the end of love. But this was an unusual breakup, in that Cillian’s mind shattered first. The fantasy that had protected him began to fall away. Piece after piece of it clattered from his chest, an armor rusting off him. What are you?

  The Bog Girl lurched toward him, her arms open. First she moved like a hopping chick, with an unexpected buoyancy. Then she seemed to remember how to step, heel to toe. She came for him like an astronaut, bouncing on the gray carpet. The only English word she knew was his name.

  Almost weightlessly, she reached for him. For wasn’t she equally terrified? There was no buoy other than this boy, who had gripped her with his thin, freckled arms, bellying her out of the peat bog and into time.

  Cillian hid behind the dresser.

  Her fingers found his hand, threaded through his fingers.

  He screamed again, even as he squeezed the hand back.

  Her words rushed together, a thawing waterfall, moving intricately between octaves; still the only word he understood was his name. Perhaps nothing he had said to her, in their six months as a couple, had been comprehended. Cillian worked the levers in his brain, desperately trying to find the words that would release him.

  “Unlock the door,” his mother’s beautiful voice called.

  Cillian was frozen in the Bog Girl’s grip, unable even to call out. But a moment later he heard the key turning in the lock. Gillian stood in the doorway in her yellow pajamas. With a panoramic comprehension, she took in what had happened. She knew, too, what must now be done. If she could have freed these two from the embrace herself, she would have done so; but now she understood the challenge. The boy would have to make his own way out. “Take her home, Cillian. Make sure that she gets home safely.”

  Cillian, his eyes round with panic, only nodded.

  Gillian went to the Bog Girl, helping her into a sweater. “Put a hat on. And pants.”

  His mother shepherded them downstairs and onto the porch, switching on every yellow bulb as they moved through the cottage. It was the warmest December on record, rain falling instead of snow, the drops disappearing into the rotted wood. Cillian carried the Bog Girl to the edge of the light before he understood that his mother was not coming with him.

  “Let her down gently, son!” his mother called after them.

  Well, she could do this for him, at least: she held a lantern steady across the rainy lawn, creating a gangplank of light that reached almost to the larches. She watched them moving toward the inky water. The Bog Girl was howling in her foreign tongue; at this distance, Gillian felt she could almost understand it.

  Oh, she hoped their breakup would stick. She had divorced Cillian’s father, then briefly moved into his new house; it had taken years before their affair was truly over. You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.

  This was a bad breakup. A quarter mile from the cottage, under a bright moon, Cillian and the Bog Girl were rolling in the mud, each screaming in a different language. Their screams twined together, their hands reaching for each other; it was during this undoing that they were, at last, truly united as a couple. His flashlight rolled with them, plucking amphibious red and yellow eyes out of the reeds. “It’s over. It’s over. It’s over,” he kept babbling optimistically, out of his mind with fear. Her throat was vibrating against his skin. He could feel the echo of his own terror and sorrow, and again his mind felt overrun by the lapping waves of time. She clutched at the neck of his T-shirt, her body covered in dark mud and cracked stems of bog cotton, blue lichen. At last he felt her grip on him loosen. Her eyes, opaquely glinting in the moonlight, liquid and enormous, far larger than anyone could have guessed before their unlidding, regarded him with what he imagined was a soft surprise, and disappointment. He was not who she’d expected to find when she opened her eyes, either. Now neither teenager needed to tell the other that it was over. It simply was—and, without another sound, the Bog Girl let go of Cillian and slipped backward into the bog water. Did she sink? It looked almost as if the water were rising to cover her. Her cranberry hair waved away from her scalp. As he watched, her body itself began to break up.

  Straightening from where he was kneeling on the ledge of mud, he brushed peat from his pants. His arms tingled where her grip had suddenly relaxed. The clear rain drenched his clothing. The bog was still bubbling, pieces of her sinking back into the black peat, when he turned on his heel and ran. For the next few days, he would be quaky with relief; he’d felt certain, watching her sink away, that he would never see the Bog Girl again in this life.

  But here he was mistaken. In the weeks and years to come, Cillian would find himself alone with her memory, struggling to pay attention to his droning contemporaries in the cramped classroom. How often would he retrace his steps, wandering right back to the lip of the bog, peering in? Each dusk, with their primitive eloquence, the air-galloping insects continue to speak the million syllables of her name.

  “Ma! Ma! Ma!” That night, Cillian came roaring out of the dark, pistoning his knees as he ran for the light, for his home at the edge of the boglands. “Who was that?”

  Madame Bovary’s Greyhound

  I. FIRST LOVE

  They took walks to the beech grove at Banneville, near the abandoned pavilion. Foxglove and gillyflowers, beige lichen growing in one thick, crawling curtain around the socketed windows. Moths blinked wings at them, crescents of blue and red and tiger yellow, like eyes caught in a net.

  Emma sat and poked at the grass with the skeletal end of her parasol, as if she were trying to blind each blade.

  “Oh, why did I ever get married?” she moaned aloud, again and again.

  The greyhound whined with her, distressed by her distress. Sometimes, in a traitorous fugue, the dog forgot to be unhappy and ran off to chase purple butterflies or murder shrew mice, or to piss a joyful stream onto the topiaries. But generally, if her mistress was crying, so was the puppy. Her name was Djali, and she had been a gift from the young woman’s husband, Dr. Charles Bovary.

  Emma wept harder as the year grew older and the temperature dropped, folding herself into the white monotony of trees, leaning farther and farther into the bare trunks. The dog would stand on her
hind legs and lick at the snow that fused Emma’s shoulders to the coarse wood, as if trying to loosen a hardening glue, and the whole forest would quiver and groan together in sympathy with the woman, and her phantom lovers, and Djali.

  At Banneville the wind came directly from the sea and covered the couple in a blue-salt caul. The greyhound loved most when she and Emma were outside like this, bound by the membrane of a gale. Yet as sunset fell, Djali became infected again by her woman’s nameless terrors. Orange and red, they seemed to sweat out of the wood. The dog smelled nothing alarming, but love stripped her immunity to the internal weathers of Emma Bovary.

  The bloodred haze switched to a silvery-blue light, and Emma shuddered all at once, as if in response to some thicketed danger. They returned to Tostes along the highway.

  The greyhound was ignorant of many things. She had no idea, for example, that she was a greyhound. She didn’t know that her breed had originated in southern Italy, an ancient pet in Pompeii, a favorite of the thin-nosed English lords and ladies, or that she was perceived to be affectionate, intelligent, and loyal. What she did know, with a whole-body thrill, was the music of her woman coming up the walk, the dizzying explosion of perfume as the door swung wide. She knew when her mistress was pleased with her, and that approval was the fulcrum of her happiness.

  “Viscount! Viscount!” Emma whimpered in her sleep. (Rodolphe would come onto the scene later, after the greyhound’s flight, and poor Charlie B. never once featured in his wife’s unconscious theater.) Then Djali would stand and pace stiff-legged through the cracked bowl of the cold room into which her mistress’s dreams were leaking, peering with pricked ears into shadows. It was a strange accordion that linked the woman and the dog: Vaporous drafts caused their pink and gray bellies to clutch inward at the same instant. Moods blew from one mind to the other, delight and melancholy. In the blue atmosphere of the bedroom, the two were very nearly (but never quite) one creature.