Read Florida for Free Online Page B

snuffeditself out. Despite his pain, the skin on his legs and arms blistered with sunburn and great, itching mosquito welts, he later realized he must have fallen asleep because, when he opened his eyes again, the stars were out and the johnboat was nosing up against the shore.
    He stood, his bones aching, and wobbled to the shore.
    And now something white and large was rushing at him, and because he’d sat all day with his father’s ghost, he understood this was a ghost, too, and looked up at it, calm and ready. The lights from the house shined at its back, and it had a golden glow around it. But the figure stopped just before him, and he saw, with a startle, that it was his wife, that the glow was her frizzy gray hair catching the light, and he knew then that she must have come back early, that she was reaching a hand out to him, putting her soft palm on his cheek, and she was saying something forever lost to him, but he knew by the way she was smiling that she was scolding him. He stepped closer to her and put his head in the crook of her neck and breathed his inadequacy out there, breathed in her love and the grease of her travels and knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more.

DOGS GO WOLF

    The storm came and erased the quiet.
    Well, the older sister thought, an island is never really quiet. Even without the storm, there were waves and wind and air conditioners and generators and animals moving out there in the dark.
    What the storm had erased was the silence from the other cabin. For hours, there had been no laughing, no bottle caps falling, none of the bickering that the girls had grown used to over the past two days.
    This was because there were no more adults. They’d been left alone on the island, the two little girls. Four and seven. Pretty little things, strangers called them. What dolls! Their faces were exactly like their mother’s. Hoochies in waiting, their mother joked, but she watched them anxiously from the corner of her eye. She was a good mother.
    The fluffy white dog had at least stopped his yowling. He had crept close to the girls’ bed, but when they tried to stroke him, he snapped at their hands. The animal wastorn between his hatred of children and his hatred of the wild storm outside.
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    —
    The big sister said, Once upon a time, there was a—
    —princess, the little sister said.
    Rabbit, the big sister said.
    Rabbit princess, the little sister said.
    Once upon a time, there was a tiny purple rabbit, the older sister said. A man saw her and scooped her up in his net. Her family tried to stop him, but they couldn’t. The man went into the city and took the rabbit to a pet store and put her into a box in the window. All day long people stuck their hands in to touch the purple rabbit. Finally, a girl came in and bought the rabbit and took her home. It was better there, but the rabbit still missed her family. She grew and slept with the girl in her bed, but most days she stared out the window all sad. She began to forget that she was a rabbit. One day, the girl put a leash on the rabbit and they went out into the park. The rabbit looked up and saw another rabbit staring at her from the edge of the woods. They looked at each other long enough for her to remember that she was not a girl but a rabbit, and the other rabbit was her own sister. The girl was kind to her and gave her food, but the rabbit looked at her sister and she knew that this was her only chance. She slipped out of the collar and ran as fast as she could over the field, and she and her sister hopped into the forest. The rabbitfamily was so happy to see her. They had a party, dancing and singing and eating cabbage and carrots. The end.
    The little sister was asleep. The two fishing cabins rocked on their stilts, the dock ground against the shore, the wind spoke through the cracks in the window frames, the palms lashed, the waves shattered and roared. The older girl held her little