St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Ava Wrestles the Alligator Haunting Olivia

I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.

There’s Felipe, a parasomniac with a co-incidence of spirit possession. He caught his ghost after stealing a guanabana from a roadside tree, unaware that its roots had wound around a mass grave of Moncada revolutionaries. He’s been possessed by Francisco Pais ever since. This causes him to sleep-detonate imaginary grenades and sleep-yell “Viva la Revolución!” while sleep-pumping his fist in the air. He is a deceptively apolitical boy by day.

We don’t have any garlic bulbs, so I bring the cauliflower, and hope that any vampires I encounter will be of the myopic, easily duped variety.

Ms. Huerta, our science teacher, likes to lisp, “is what separates us from the animals.” But that’s just us humans being snobby. Alligators talk to one another, and to the moon, with a woman’s stridency.

This tug-of-war goes on for a foamy length of time, while the crowd whoops and wahoos, cheering for our species.

The forest at night is full of friendly menace. It blurs and ashes all around us, a dark dream of itself. Rain runs down the skinned black hands of the trees, down the white mushrooms that push their tiny faces from the logs.

She looks all mussed up and livid and adorably mortal, these violet half-moons under her eyes.

What can you do but take a girl at her word? But I hope she really is ready. Being unconscious with somebody, that’s a big deal.
I take a deep br

say nothing. But I keep thinking: It’s been two years. What if all the Olivia-ness has already seeped out of her and evaporated into the violet welter of clouds? Evaporated, and rained down, and evaporated, and rained down. Olivia slicking over all the rivers and trees and dirty cities in the world. So that now there is only silt, and our stupid, salt-diluted longing.

There are ghost fish swimming all around me. My hands pass right through their flat bodies. Phantom crabs shake their phantom claws at me from behind a sunken anchor. Octopuses cartwheel by, leaving an effulgent red trail. A school of minnows swims right through my belly button. Dead, I think. They are all dead.