Swamplandia! Read Online Free PDF Page A

supposed to be
your body
?”
    There were dozens of drawings in the appendix. Ossie showed me an old anatomical sketch of a woman floating with her arms akimbo, her private parts inked in. Her eyes were pupilless, serene, like the Egyptian sculptures I had recently discovered in a kid’s World Wonders book of my own. THE SPIRITIST RECEIVES A MESSAGE , read an ornate scroll of Bookman type that furred her collarbone.
    “Can I read it?”
    “You’re too little.” She saw my face and relented. “You can flip through it. You can flip through it
once
, and
fast.
”
    Together we spun through a hundred chapters: foxed pages, strange drawings, an appendix of gibberish. All these witchy psalms about a place called the underworld, which was neither the heaven nor the hell that I had learned about from Little Rabbit cartoons and Bandits of the West comics and the Bible. It sounded instead like a vague blue woods:
    In the Underworld, all suns and lanterns are unwelcome. The transfer of light is an unforgivable breach from Acheron to Lethe. One matchstick, one fingersnap of light, can feast on those shadows and blaze into a conflagration. Young Spiritists: you must gag your vision.
Do not even say the word “sun” here, Aspiring Spiritists, or the trees of the Underworld will punish you for it: to do so would be like telling kindling the epic of fire, or whispering
lamp
to the dark.
—from
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
, pages ix–x

    “There’s no such place, honey,” said my father when I asked him about this underworld. His voice was like a shell with something oozing and alive inside it. “There’s no such thing as heaven, no hell. That’s a Christian fantasy. That’s a very old fairy tale that your sister is reading.”
    “It’s a book for witches, Dad. And the underworld isn’t heaven or hell, it’s like a whole separate country. Like a, a Germany under the world.” I frowned; this description was nothing like the painting in my mind, which was like a woods but also in some uncommunicable way not like a woods at all. I defaulted to: “Like a woods, Dad. You can visit dead people there. It’s always nighttime and the trees get angry if you bring flashlights or candles …”
    “You girls want an underworld?” The Chief’s booming laugh was directed at our sofa; there were no other adults in the house to echo it back to him. Our parents used to find each other this way, via laughs and gasps, an echolocation of incredulity and horror. “How deep do you want to go? You tell Osceola this: we are already underwater. Okay? Tell her that we live below sea level.”
    “Da-ad. That’s not what the
underworld
is. The book says …”
    “Ava Bigtree, why not let your sister have her hobby, huh?” His voice was wry and ordinary, but he looked at me with real pleading: “You and I, we’ve got the Seths, we’ve got the whole park to run, right?”
    One picture in
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
I stared at for hours, until I could see it fork behind my eyelids: a river cut a lightning shape through jagged, enormous boulders. Strange creatures lived in the margins of the mountains. The artist’s brushstrokes had added shapes into the clouds: snouts and wings and eyes, a long whiplike tail. Obsidian flakes snowed over the entire range. This painting was titled
Winter on the River Styx
.
    About this time, Ossie and I started playing Ouija every afternoon. We made the board ourselves. It had a blue painted alphabet and little suns and moons modeled on a picture from
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
.
    “ ‘The language of the living rains down on the dead,’ ” Ossie read to me from
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
, “ ‘and often our communications can overwhelm them. The hailstorm of our words can be too intense for them to bear …’ ”
    SO GET AN UMBRELLA, MOM , I wrote to her a little angrily.
    Weeks passed and we didn’t hear back. Sometimes to make me feel better Ossie would pretend to be our mother— I LUV