Read Online Swamplandia! by Karen Russell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Karen Russell
Ads: Link
secrets. I sent this letter to the Smithsonian, the state universities, the Florida Wildlife and Gaming Commission, along with a flap note: “Sir or madam, please do me the great favor of forwarding this letter to the correct bureau(s). Thank you!!!”
If they accepted me, I figured that I would be the youngest person, boy or girl, ever to compete at the national level. Five years younger than my mother, even.
That same month, a remarkable thing happened on our island: a miracle, a freak rainstorm of luck during a time of cash and tourist droughts. I got to watch this miracle unfold inside a glass case—not in our museum but in one of the reptile incubators. On Swamplandia! we hatched baby alligators under heat lamps, dozens a year, using incubators that the Chief got on the cheap from a bankrupt chicken-farming family in Ocala. We restocked the Pit with the largest and the hardiest of the alligators, and the rest we sold to St. Augustine reptile farms innorth Florida or released. Thermostats controlled the gender of the future alligators in their eggs, and the incubator I was polishing was set to 84 degrees Fahrenheit—a female brood. I breathed a tiny porthole onto the incubator glass and peered in.
This was
excellent
timing: as I watched, a tiny caruncle punctured the eggshell. Baby alligators are born with these, the “egg tooth,” a tusk on the tip of their snout that allows them to punch through the membrane of their eggshells. A Seth’s eggs are oblong and leathery, narrower than the eggs a hen lays. Next I heard the telltale squeal, a sound that came from inside the eggs—the alligators were pipping! The fetal gators coordinate their jailbreak by making a squeaky noise at a frequency that can be heard inside the shell; now the noise had begun, and the thirty-two hatchlings in this incubator were butting and rocking against the shell membrane.
The first alligator to hatch caused me to frown and lean in, because there was something unusual about her—the alligator’s hide appeared to be red. A tiny, fiery Seth. Her skull was the exact shape and shining hue of a large halved strawberry. At first I thought her pigmentation was a trick of the light and I was afraid even to touch her. The red on her skin seemed like a disease I could contract through my fingertips or a spell I could break, a color so pure and unreal that I thought it might rub off.
I put her on the kitchen scale we kept next to the extra lamps. She weighed seventy grams. She was nine inches from snout to tail.
Her claws scrabbled at the air when I picked her up. The door to the shed stood open, and her skin brightened like an ember. I half-expected her temperature to flare up, too. To burn and sizzle. But her scales were cool and damp. She curled flat against my palms, reminding me of the inlay of a dragon I’d seen once on Mrs. Gianetti’s fancy black Oriental dinette set. Her pupils were compass needles, thin and wobbly. Her camelia-pink eyes blinked and blinked, and I wondered if she was surprised to find a world outside her egg. Like any hatchling gator, her snout tapered into a look of flutey suspicion. A yawn revealed the paler watermelon chinks on her tongue, and I suppressed a laugh.
The Chief is going to turn a backflip!
I thought.
This alligator could save our park!
But when I thought about telling my family about her, my mouth turned to sand. I felt very certain that she was going to die. Thatnothing born this color could live for long in the open air. We’d hatched hundreds of broods on Swamplandia! and they grew very slowly, a foot a year. Few hatchlings made it to adulthood, even in captivity. (I still don’t know what melanistic fluke or mutation accounted for her. Her sisters were born the usual straw-yellow-banded black; they died later that same week, all thirty-one of them, of yolk sac infections.)
We had an old forty-gallon aquarium in storage and I dragged this out and swabbed it clean for her; I hid the tank in the
If they accepted me, I figured that I would be the youngest person, boy or girl, ever to compete at the national level. Five years younger than my mother, even.
That same month, a remarkable thing happened on our island: a miracle, a freak rainstorm of luck during a time of cash and tourist droughts. I got to watch this miracle unfold inside a glass case—not in our museum but in one of the reptile incubators. On Swamplandia! we hatched baby alligators under heat lamps, dozens a year, using incubators that the Chief got on the cheap from a bankrupt chicken-farming family in Ocala. We restocked the Pit with the largest and the hardiest of the alligators, and the rest we sold to St. Augustine reptile farms innorth Florida or released. Thermostats controlled the gender of the future alligators in their eggs, and the incubator I was polishing was set to 84 degrees Fahrenheit—a female brood. I breathed a tiny porthole onto the incubator glass and peered in.
This was
excellent
timing: as I watched, a tiny caruncle punctured the eggshell. Baby alligators are born with these, the “egg tooth,” a tusk on the tip of their snout that allows them to punch through the membrane of their eggshells. A Seth’s eggs are oblong and leathery, narrower than the eggs a hen lays. Next I heard the telltale squeal, a sound that came from inside the eggs—the alligators were pipping! The fetal gators coordinate their jailbreak by making a squeaky noise at a frequency that can be heard inside the shell; now the noise had begun, and the thirty-two hatchlings in this incubator were butting and rocking against the shell membrane.
The first alligator to hatch caused me to frown and lean in, because there was something unusual about her—the alligator’s hide appeared to be red. A tiny, fiery Seth. Her skull was the exact shape and shining hue of a large halved strawberry. At first I thought her pigmentation was a trick of the light and I was afraid even to touch her. The red on her skin seemed like a disease I could contract through my fingertips or a spell I could break, a color so pure and unreal that I thought it might rub off.
I put her on the kitchen scale we kept next to the extra lamps. She weighed seventy grams. She was nine inches from snout to tail.
Her claws scrabbled at the air when I picked her up. The door to the shed stood open, and her skin brightened like an ember. I half-expected her temperature to flare up, too. To burn and sizzle. But her scales were cool and damp. She curled flat against my palms, reminding me of the inlay of a dragon I’d seen once on Mrs. Gianetti’s fancy black Oriental dinette set. Her pupils were compass needles, thin and wobbly. Her camelia-pink eyes blinked and blinked, and I wondered if she was surprised to find a world outside her egg. Like any hatchling gator, her snout tapered into a look of flutey suspicion. A yawn revealed the paler watermelon chinks on her tongue, and I suppressed a laugh.
The Chief is going to turn a backflip!
I thought.
This alligator could save our park!
But when I thought about telling my family about her, my mouth turned to sand. I felt very certain that she was going to die. Thatnothing born this color could live for long in the open air. We’d hatched hundreds of broods on Swamplandia! and they grew very slowly, a foot a year. Few hatchlings made it to adulthood, even in captivity. (I still don’t know what melanistic fluke or mutation accounted for her. Her sisters were born the usual straw-yellow-banded black; they died later that same week, all thirty-one of them, of yolk sac infections.)
We had an old forty-gallon aquarium in storage and I dragged this out and swabbed it clean for her; I hid the tank in the
Similar Books
