Karen Russell, "Haunting Olivia"

Two boys go searching for their missing sister, but all they see are fish ghosts.

(from The New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2005)

This was dreamy and marvelously inventive and yeah yeah yeah. It's set up as a sort of children's story, a twisted almost-fairy tale, a nigh Roald Dahl grotesque adventure where you didn't feel like you were in the same world with its chracters. I dug its supernatural moments and its half-nihilistic attitude, if that what it is when you feel like there's no rhyme or reason to behavior, science, life, death, worldview, whatever.
I also liked the saracasm and idiosyncracies the boys exhibited in their speech and actions and thinking. It was deeper than the water.
At time, parts of it screamed for a little streamlining, the gentle strokes of the editor's scalpel to cut out redundancies and awkward parts. I don't think it would have hurt.
Here's a link to the story.

Damien Jurado, "Lottery," as heard on WPRB via Brian Howard's No Culture Icons show.