St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  Beyond the thin halogen glow of the bathroom, the Blizzard raged in earnest. Downdrafts, snowfall, the black sparkle of the rink. The Palace had grown subzero cold. I thought we must be near the cages—you could hear the monkeys howling above the wind.

  “Badger, wait up! What was that…?”

  “Forget it, forget her. Anyhow, I don’t think she was the right one. Come on. We need to get on the ice. We need to turn this dumb storm off.” He hopped the counter and grabbed us skates.

  “Are you nuts? We can’t go out there. Look how dark it is. I can barely see you!”

  Which was a lie. Badger was kneeling in front of me, forcing my feet into skates.

  “There, stand up. Lace those up. I wondercould you wiggle your toes?”

  “I don’t think so; I don’t think—”

  And then it was too late, we were right in the thick of it. I could feel the Blizzard working on me, too. As soon as we got on the ice I felt a cold thrill of happiness, an instant forgetting. I flung myself into the wind. So this was the Blizzard. It looked different once you were inside it. Snow-flakes rushed in jet streams all around us. It was wonderful, the speed, the shocking cold of it; it was like outskating an awareness of gravity! We let the gales push us forward and double us back. Sparks leapt from our skates, tiny flecks of light on the black ice, the blades cutting quick and faster beneath us. Overhead, machines were sharpening the wind.

  Shortly thereafter, though, the chill grew intolerable. I think that windchill was a deliberate effect, one of the Ice Witch’s spells for profit. It goaded us forward, towards one another. It turned each skater into a heat seeker, a human comet. There was a terrible pleasure to this, getting pelted and bruised, pelting and bruising in circles. All of us went crashing around the rink. Midge was flat on her back with her skates in the air. Coach Crotty did a series of unsightly lutzes. Mrs. Saumat slid into Badger and pulled him down into the safety snow with her, roaring with laughter.

  Where was the DJ booth? We’d been around the rink a dozen times now, and we couldn’t find it. I felt a cold, dark lunge in my throat.

  Phil Collins started playing from the speakers again. For a while I could still make out Phil’s tinny optimism, threaded through the Arctic winds: “You can’t hurry love, oooh, you just have to wait….” And then it was just shrieking and the screech of fan blades and black ice on the sides of the rink, wind and darkness, snow-drunk faces screaming out at us, distorted beyond recognition. Walls and bodies came at us out of nowhere.

  “I got you, Reggie.” Badger’s hands on my shoulders felt warm and secure. “Hang on, Reg, I got you….” We skated forward. Dodging and swerving, bodies whizzing into us and then contracting back. We’d be rounding corners and briefly alone; then lunging forward, helpless, towards another stranger on the ice.

  “Sorry!” I slammed into somebody and slid forward. Badger got knocked facedown beside me, jostling a tooth loose. I watched the tooth slide away, too dazed to stop it. When I looked up, Badger was gone. I caught a glimpse of him blowing backwards across the dark rink, his face a diminishing oval.

  Something had gone very wrong with the Blizzard. Bodies collided, borders vanished. The spindrift sent freezing eddies through the air, and for the first time I was afraid of real blindness. After a few more loops around the rink, I couldn’t tell where the room ended and my own body began. I struggled to regain my balance. Women sped by me with their makeup running. Men collapsed into the safety snow with their bruised legs tangled together. Poor Badger, I thought, and my pity warmed me. To know your father was a participant in this kind of weather!

  And then I heard a laugh that I recognized.

  Fear blurred the glass. Not my pops! I thought. Definitely not. It was Mr. Swanson, Mr. Yjonsun, some other kid’s father. But I didn’t stick around to investigate. Backwards skate! I used muscles that I didn’t know I had to push myself backwards, into the dense white center of the Blizzard. I wasn’t like Badger, I didn’t want some monster confrontation. I didn’t even want to be there.

  After many numbing, numberless revolutions, I finally spotted the DJ booth and skated towards it. But Lady Yeti had vanished. She’d left a huge white suit with no obvious zipper. Wisps of fur and snow, and no clues. A few mints. I didn’t even know who to look for. Lady Yeti could be anybody out on the ice.

  The Indoor Weather Manufacturer was ablaze with tiny lights, making its own manic music of beeps and adjustments. I ran my finger over the hot pointy bulbs. I picked up the headset and pushed the button marked MAINTENANCE. It rang four times before somebody answered.

  “Lady Yeti?” My pops sounded sleepy, and far away. I could hear some dumb sitcom on our TV behind him. “That you?”

  Snowflakes were erasing the headset, my left hand, the coiled black wires. I grinned into the receiver. The Blizzard whirled around me, but it didn’t matter now. All this time my pops had been asleep, at home.

  “There some kind of malfunction? You need me to come out to the Palace?”

  “Huh!” I did my best to imitate a Yeti bark. “No! Thanks!”

  Then I hung up the phone.

  You know, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have tried to Modulate the Snows on my own. It was an abominable technology, that control panel, full of riddles and switches. But I didn’t know then that the Blizzard was on a timer. If I’d known that we were only minutes away from the Meltdown, I would have waited it out.

  Instead, I pushed the biggest, most luminous button. And I knew from the first iron shriek, the clang of unseen metal, that I’d made a mistake. Somewhere, the doors to the metal warrens flew open. The apes shook off their malaise. Within moments I saw orange shapes, blue feet flying in the Palace rafters high above me. Coppery twinkles went shooting through curtains of ice. The orangutans were brachiating around an invisible network of pipes. Every few moments, I’d catch a glimpse of their feet dangling and grasping above me. The indoor world had gone very wrong tonight. An ape fell shrieking into the snow.

  Maybe the pipes had grown too cold for the apes to hold on to. Maybe Phil Collins’s percussion was shaking them loose. Whatever the trouble, they were falling all around me, the orangutans, in twos and threes. They made inadvertent snow angels where they fell. Their bodies flailed into one another; and when they tumbled up, you could see their wide simian wingspan, red hair in the white trenches. Pffft! spat one of the fallen orangutans. It was Cornelius. He looked the way I felt: the blue sag of his face in its wild red frame. Frost hung from his arms. He’d been too cold, for too long, too far from his jungle home. I was sorry I’d released him.

  Now great sheets of sleet pelted the rink in waves, hard pellets clattering to the ice. Bodies were whistling all around me, behind the snow, and I could feel the dense atomic wake of them as they passed. They made their own music, a darker weather.

  One woman was skating stark naked, her red hair flaming out behind her. Or possibly I was watching an escaped orangutan; inside the ice clouds, it was impossible to judge.

  “Lady Yeti?”

  I skated after her.

  As I whipped around the rink, I got periodic jolts of color. A few of the orangutans were stirring in the safety snow. They stared at me from the melting heaps, looking battered, bright-eyed, alive. Snow spattered the males’ gray cheek pads. They slid forward in crazed ocher maneuvers, eager to return to their cages. A lucky few made it safely to the other side. Tang went skidding past me on all fours, clawing at the ice with her long spindle fingers.

  Where was Lady Yeti? The Blizzard was getting louder and wilder. The music was getting louder, too, until I thought my sternum would burst with it. I forgot about Badger, his father, Lady Yeti, my failure at the control panel, every body but my own. Everything conspired to convince me that the storm was on the verge of swirling us somewhere better: the music rising and the music swelling, the deceptive up-tick of rhythm, the smooth give of the ice, a roaring white sound that made me think that the storm was breaking, that some crescendo wa
s coming, a final mechanical gale that would white-out the entire Palace….

  It never came. The vents sucked back the snow. The wind switched off. I couldn’t believe it: the Blizzard was over.

  A neon sign blinked on the far wall: MELTDOWN!

  When the fluorescent lights came back on, I saw Lady Yeti first. She was newly costumed, standing in the center of the ice. Glassy bits of factory snow winked down around her. One of the men was embracing Lady Yeti, the soft citadel of Lady Yeti, taking shelter behind her bulky silhouette. Her back was turned to me, and I could only see the man’s short, thick arms straining to close around her. His fists were lost in her fur. The knuckles looked familiar. Lady Yeti looked over her huge shoulder and saw my face.

  “Don’t worry, baby, huh?” she said. “We’re just finishing up here.”

  I skated around her to get a better look. Next to Lady Yeti, Badger’s father looked like a stout, wizened child. He was standing on his tiptoes, his face lost in the white curls of Lady Yeti’s chest. He fumbled for a zipper that he couldn’t find.

  Lady Yeti was ticklish. She chuckled off gray clumps of snow. Her big shoulders shook in ripples, seamless, of luster and muscle. It amazed me that Lady Yeti had been able to shed her fur and rearmor so quickly. She moved as if her costume were sewn onto her skin with invisible stitches. Badger’s father tugged harder. His own workshirt was missing buttons, and I pictured Badger’s father skating with Lady Yeti, both of them flying naked and weightless over the ice. Behind me, I heard a new roaring begin.

  “I wondercould you get out of my way, Reg?”

  I turned and saw Badger sitting high astride the pink Zamboni. He wasn’t smiling, so I couldn’t tell which tooth was missing. Badger had black, snow-blind eyes and no hat. His face looked stung and frozen. Snow was melting down his hair, his cheeks. He was bearing down on his father.

  The auger bit down on the ice with a fresh menace. A very large, very sharp blade, similar to those used in industrial paper cutters, shaved up the ruined surface of the rink. My fevered shouting No! and Please! and Stop! got swallowed in the Zamboni’s engine. Badger’s father never even saw him coming—he was still burying his face in Lady Yeti’s costume. At the last minute, Badger swerved. Blue light bounced off the metal blade. Then Badger drove the Zamboni in careful circles around the entire surface of the rink. Dirty ice and russet orangutan hair flew backwards into the Zamboni’s vacuum. Water sewed up the white cuts behind him. Badger filled in the gashes from so many skate blades, line by line, until the rink became a perfect mirror once again, frozen and blank.

  The City of Shells

  Barnaby is busy hosing down Paundra, that hoary old carapace, when he first hears the screaming. He tells himself that it’s just the wind. Barnaby has spent the whole day scrubbing seagull excrement with a Sisyphean fury, and now it looks like the storm is going to hit after all.

  “Goddamn it,” he mutters to the smirking gulls. “Never fails. As soon as I suds up these bitches, it pours.”

  The City of Shells closed to the visiting public over an hour ago. Now the boardwalk is deserted. Silent, except for the medleyed roar of the waves and the distant rumble of thunder. Gray, rain-bellied clouds are rolling in. Farther out, the sea is sluicing into night. There’s a hushed, tingly feeling in the air, as if the whole world is holding its breath. Only the silvery gulls dot the horizon. They peck at used condoms and empty Dorito bags with a salt-preened serenity.

  Barnaby stares at the massive thunderheads, full of misgivings. Ever since closing time, he’s been on edge. He generally tries to punch out right at seven. You’ve probably heard the rumors, too: there are strange noises in the City after dusk. Legend has it—if you can use legend to describe the booze-fueled tales that get passed laterally within a janitorial staff of two—that the Giant Conchs are haunted. On stormy nights, they echo with the radular skitterclatter of their extinct inhabitants. The teenage kid who works this job on weekends, Raffy, gets all lyrical-hysterical on the subject. “This place turns into a motherfuckin’ ghost town after hours! The shells start singing.”

  Raffy says that if you hear the ghost music, it earworms into your brain and infects you like an auditory virus. It plays at subliminal levels, alien and resonant as insect song. The boss dismisses Raffy’s reports as inner-ear dementia. “Had an uncle who suffered from musical hallucinations,” the boss once told Barnaby sadly. “Poor bastard. Spent the last decade of his life deaf to everything except the opening bars of ‘Who Can Be a Toucan? You Can!’” He shook his head. “I don’t envy that Raffy. Must be a tough row to hoe.”

  The screaming is coming from inside Cornuta. Not real, Barnaby thinks. He leans on his broom and wonders, for a delicious, sky-tilting second of vertigo, if he might be going crazy. But this is no phantom music. This sound is scary in a different way. Too real, too human.

  Cornuta is off-limits to guests, roped off on the other side of the park. She got banged up during Tropical Storm Vita and is currently under repair. The boss rented a crane and lowered her so that she’s lying sideways on the beach. Now she’s a bitch to clean, cracked at the tip of her nacreous dome and always filling up with trash and irascible crabs. For a Giant Conch, Cornuta is one of the island’s tiniest, forty-five feet from end to end, about the size of a small trailer. The overlapping whorls that lead into the shell never widen beyond the circumference of a sewer pipe. It’s not exactly the kind of rabbit hole you can tumble down by accident.

  “Who goes there?” The ancient elocution bubbles up out of nowhere, making Barnaby blush. “I mean, is somebody in there?”

  Abruptly, the screaming stops. Barnaby takes a shaky breath and peers inside the Giant Conch. All he can make out are two glittery eyes, blinking out of the preternatural darkness at the bottom of the shell. It’s back, he thinks, feeling foolish even as he grips the toilet brush like a weapon, the thing that used to live in the shell is back.

  “Excuse me!” a child’s voice honks miserably. “I’m stuck. Do you have any Band-Aids, or food?”

  Big Red had been looking forward to this field trip all month. The City of Shells is touted as “A Merman’s Stonehenge!” They have to take the ferry to get there. It isn’t, technically, a city: it’s a megalithic formation of Precambrian Giant Conchs. The brochures make it look like some Neptunian version of Easter Island. The cover illustration shows a dozen of the Giant Conchs, arrayed in a weird half-moon formation along the beach. Each of the shells is a swirly, pearly licorne, some the height of a house. Gulls wheel in wicked circles around their marble parasols. Salt-bleached skyscrapers, the caption says, cast onto the shore by Cretaceous tsunamis, and set upright by our very own island progenitors! And there they are, in a photo inset: the ancestors. A small, furry people, their cheeks swollen like those of prudent rodents, lighting holy fires in the shadow of the giant shells.

  Grades five through seven take a field trip there every August. The City of Shells is owned and operated by Laramie Uribe’s father, and he gives the kids paper conch hats and a special discount. Laramie sat next to Big Red on the bus ride over. She and Big Red are best friends by default. Although she is only two grades above Big Red, puberty has been inordinately kind to Laramie. Teachers refer to Laramie as “sophisticated” and “mature for her age,” but Big Red knows that Laramie is neither of these things. Laramie still snorts milk through her wide nostrils. She reads at a fourth-grade level. She defends herself against bathroom calumny by flicking snot berries at her detractors. What the teachers actually mean is that Laramie has huge boobs; that she smells like coconut oil and unfiltered Camels; and that she gives it up to high-school boys named Federico.

  “Wait’ll we get there.” Laramie grinned slyly at Big Red. “I’ll give you a tour of all the shells where we did it.”

  Big Red bit her lip and stared out the window. She had only a squeamy, abdominal sense of what “it” could be.

  When they got there, Big Red pushed past Laramie and thundered off the bus. She raced do
wn the beach, raced right into the sunlit center of the City, and then stopped short. She shielded her eyes and blinked up at the Giant Conchs, oblivious to the other children swarming around her. She thought: What the heck is this? These conchs were giant disappointments. The City had fallen into seedy disrepair. The pinky-white turrets were covered with seagull excrement; the interiors shimmered with grout. Mayo packets and pickle sticks slimed the axial ribs. Mr. Uribe had rigged the conchs with miniature speakers so that the tourists could hear the roar of the primordial seas—but the electricity was on the fritz. Tintinnabula was the only one working. She sounded like a giant refrigerator. If these shells had ever been the Fourteenth Wonder of the World, as touted on the tattered banners, they had definitely slipped in the rankings. Sweaty women took glamour shots in front of Sweet Venus. A froggy man rubbed his cigarette out on her speckled ventral side.

  The kids yawned through a lecture on conchology. They ate a picnic lunch of corn dogs and strawberries. A hairless woman snapped their class photo in the City center—“Say chelicerae,” she rasped—below the barnacled awning of Possicle. They gathered their things to go.

  “Wait a sec!” Big Red interjected, tugging at sleeves. “When do we get to go inside the shells?”

  “Well, of course we’re not going inside them, Lillith.” Sister John patted her head affectionately, as if Big Red was a sainted retard. “Who promised you that we were going inside the shells?”

  Big Red bit her lip. She couldn’t remember who had made her that promise, although she felt certain that someone had. Big Red felt a dull, cuckolded rage, but she wasn’t surprised. For her first nine years on the planet, Big Red had lived a life of compromise. She wanted to be beautiful, but she’d had to settle for being nice. She wanted to see the Aquanauts for her birthday, but she’d had to settle for the gimp lobsters at the Crab Shack. She wanted a father, but she’d had to settle for Mr. Pappadakis. Mr. Pappadakis smells like Just for Men peroxide dye and eucalyptus foot unguents. He has a face like a catcher’s mitt. The whole thing puckers inward, drooping with the memory of some dropped fly ball. Big Red’s mother has many epithets for Mr. Pappadakis: “our meal ticket,” “my sacrifice,” “vitamin P.” He is an obdurate man, a man of irritating, inveterate habits. He refuses to put down toilet seats, or quit sucking on pistachio shells, or die.