St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

1) "My sister and I are staying in Grandpa Sawtooth's old house until our father, Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. It's our first summer alone in the swamp. 'You girls will be fine,' the Chief slurred. 'Feed the gators, don't talk to strangers. Lock the door at night.' The Chief must have forgotten that it's a screen door at Grandpa's---there is no key, no lock. The old house is a rust-checkered yellow bungalow at the edge of the wild bird estuary. It has a single, airless room; three crude, palmetto windows, with mosquito-blackened sills; a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain. I love it here. Whenever the wind gusts in off the river, the sky rains leaves and feathers."

2) "It seems to me that nobody's asking the hard questions here. For example, what if ghost-Olivia doesn't have eyes anymore? Or a nose? What if an eel has taken up residence inside her skull, and every time it lights up it sends the unholy electricity radiating through her sockets? [...] 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 the 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. And nothing left of our sister to find."

3) "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. Frogs jump from the branches like spry blemishes. We flinch beneath the leaf-swung shadows, the winged attack of lunatic moths. The forest gives me all sorts of reasons to reach out and hold Emma's hand."

4) "Badger's mother was very, very sick. It looked like she caught a bad dream from somebody."

5) "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."