Twenty-Seven Bones by Jonathan Nasaw

perception of why we’re here, why you’re entering into therapy, and what you hope to get out of it.”
    Lewis, who could charm the birds from the trees when he set his mind to it, flashed the shrink a shy, skewed grin. “I’m afraid the better half insisted on it.”
    Vogler, a plump bespectacled man who favored bow ties and seersucker sport jackets, nodded understandingly. “Tell me about yourself.”
    Lewis began, as any Apgard would, with his pedigree. “My great-grandfather was the last Danish governor of St. Luke, my grandfather and father were the first two American governors. I was born in 1968. Scorpio, not that I believe in that shit. I’m an only child. My mother died two days after my birth. Something called eclampsia—you ever heard of it?”
    “I received my MD from Johns Hopkins,” said Vogler, providing a little pedigree of his own.
    “I guess that means yes. Anyway, my earliest memory is being hauled around by my wet nurse.”
    “Wet nurse,” Vogler echoed, blinking furiously behind his thick lenses—wet nurse stories were catnip to psychiatrists.
    “Her name was Queen Charlotte. When I wasn’t sucking her titis, I was riding her big old round hip like a little white monkey. Which is what she used to call me—her little white monkey. She used to take me everywhere—to market, to the washhouse, to church on Sunday morning. I cried like a baby—well, I was a baby—when the Guv canned her.”
    “The Guv?”
    “That’s what I called my father. That’s what everybody called my father. And his father before him. Anyway, the Guv declared unilaterally that my titi days were over, and I was put in the charge of his maiden sister Agneta.
    “Given a choice, I’d have preferred a wicked stepmother. Auntie Aggie was of the opinion that children should be seen and not heard, and from what I could tell, she wasn’t all that crazy about seeing them, either. Or maybe she really liked children in general and it was only me she couldn’t stand. For whatever reason, she was a royal pain in the bumsie, from the day she moved into the Governor’s Mansion to the day she was raped and murdered.”
    “Raped and murdered,” muttered Vogler, scribbling intently in his notebook.
    “During Hurricane Eloise. You want to hear about it?”
    “If you’d like to tell me about it.”
    “I probably should—it was my fault.”
    “Definitely, then.”
    “Okay, well, I remember the rain and the wind, for sure, the bruised look of the clouds, that astonishing blue sky and the way my ears popped when the eye passed over us. Which happened twice—from what I understand, after stalling over St. Luke, the storm circled the island in a clockwise spiral and hit us a second time. I also remember how surprised I was and how strange it seemed when I looked out the window of my room on the third floor of the Governor’s Mansion and saw that Sugar Town had disappeared, swallowed up by the rising water.
    “We lost phones and power the first day. On the second day we lost our water and ran out of batteries for the transistor radio, and by nightfall everybody had fled to higher ground except for Aggie, myself, Mr. Featherston, my father’s houseman, and his wife Bougainvillea, who was our cook. The Guv was in Washington, on government business, but he called just before the phones went down and told us to hold the fort.
    “So hold the fort we did, but with Sugar Town gone and Dansker Hill half underwater by the third morning, looting had already begun. Then the looters freed the surviving prisoners from the holding cells in the basement of the police station, and all hell broke loose. The prisoners who’d survived, we later learned, had done so only by killing, stacking, and standing on the bodies of the ones that hadn’t, which meant that nature had Darwinned out all but the meanest of the mean and the toughest of the tough. And of course having been left by the authorities to drown in their cells hadn’t done