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The diabolical goggles represent the way that love and loyalty can persist even across the boundary of death. Timothy and Wallow Heartland find the goggles as a piece of flotsam in a sunken boat, and the goggles allow them to see the ghosts of marine creatures and even find the ghost of their dead sister Olivia. They also offer a pointed reminder of one of the collection’s main ideas, that the world is far stranger and more magical than most people realize, in the way the goggles allow the brothers to peer into the deep past and to communicate with the ghosts of dead animals.
Diabolical Goggles Quotes in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
The St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves quotes below all refer to the symbol of Diabolical Goggles. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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2. Haunting Olivia Quotes
Getting used to aquatic ghosts is like adjusting to the temperature of the ocean. It takes a few more close encounters with the lambent fish before my pulse quiets down. Once I realize that the ghost fish can’t hurt me, I relax into something I’d call delight if I weren’t supposed to be feeling breathless and bereaved.
I spend the next two hours pretending to look for Olivia. I shadow the spirit manatees, their back scored with keloid stars from motorboat propellers. I somersault through stingrays. Bonefish flicker around me like mute banshees. I figure out how to braid the furry blue light of dead coral reef through my fingertips, and very nearly giggle. I’ve started to enjoy myself and I’ve nearly succeeded in exorcising Olivia from my thoughts, when a bunch of ghost shrimp materialize in front of my goggles […]
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The question has been weighing on my mind more and more heavily of late. Because let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that there is a Glowworm Grotto, and that Olivia’s ghost haunts it. Then what? Do we genie-in-a-bottle her? Keep her company on weekends? I envision eternal Saturday nights spent treading cold water in a cave, crooning lullabies to the husk of Olivia, and shudder.
“What do you mean?” Wallow says, frowning. “We’ll rescue her. We’ll preserve her, uh, you know, her memory.”
“And how exactly do you propose we do that?”
“I don’t know, bro!” Wallow furrows his brow, flustered. You can tell he hasn’t thought much beyond finding Olivia. “We’ll…we’ll put her in an aquarium.”
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?
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Diabolical Goggles Symbol Timeline in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
The timeline below shows where the symbol Diabolical Goggles appears in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
2. Haunting Olivia
...water, his recently-broken arm in its plaster cast held high above his head, the “diabolical goggles”—snorkel gear designed for a little girl, which he found in a derelict boat earlier in...
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A frustrated Wallow clambers onto the pier and passes the goggles to Timothy, saying that it’s too hard to swim with his cast. It’s at this...
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Although Timothy doesn’t want to admit that Wallow was right about the diabolical goggles, he knows that he’s seeing ghost fish, too. He quickly becomes used to the sensation...
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...size, and distance from the rest. He can’t touch the bottom. He puts on the goggles and slips beneath the surface. A little blue fish (a living one) swims up and...
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