We are Wormwood Read online

  Eventually Momma gave up trying to move Arachne. She wiped the blood spilling from the spider’s mouth with her dress. Then she sat down in the flowers beside me, huddled in her parka, and buried her head between her knees. It’s the last time I remembered Momma crying.

  Arachne reached for me.

  Her bristly black spider limb touched my palm. Gently, slowly, I closed my fist around it, so small in my hand, and it trembled. Arachne looked at me, opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Her eyes were the color of the azaleas.

  Then she died.

  For the longest time I wouldn’t let go of her, even when she stopped trembling. Momma cried into her sleeves. I didn’t remember letting go, but Arachne’s arm, limp and drying, slipped down into the flowers.

  Momma took me home and I remembered opening and closing my hands; they were black. They were black where Arachne touched me. Later I searched for her, nothing left except the crushed flowers where I fell. Maybe I was becoming schizophrenic like my mother. The disease’s acid had started to eat its way into my brain.

  But I remembered my hands were black where she touched me. I remembered the black on my mother’s dress that never washed out.

  Part Two: Colic Poison Pyro Baby

  Chapter Five

  WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN years old the cats in the neighborhood started losing their eyes. My friend Phaedra owned a cat named Miss Margot - a lean spitting thing that’d writhe and scratch whenever I tried to pick her up. Miss Margot went missing for a night and came back in the morning with her eyes gone, two soft shelled-out places in her head. She never bit again after that.

  We blamed Charlie for stealing the cat’s eyes. Charlie because of his chubby body, pale quivering lips, black glassy eyes, and hands too big for the rest of his body. His parents were behavioral scientists who thought John B. Watson should’ve won the Nobel Prize for teaching his son to be afraid of rats. When Charlie was an infant his parents rattled his crib so he couldn’t sleep. They rang loud bells in his ears so he wouldn’t touch the flowers. When he got too close to a stuffed teddy bear he called Little B, they set it on fire to study his coping mechanisms.

  That’s fucking science for you.

  By the time he was fourteen years old, Charlie couldn’t sleep for more than an hour without rolling out of his bed and sleepwalking out of his house. Sometimes he rapped on windows and jiggled doorknobs, calling out for Little B. Other times he sat in the middle of my lawn, reading an invisible book, chain smoking his sister’s cigarettes, and laughing at text that no one else could read.

  “Everyone knows it was you,” Phaedra said to him.

  She picked up Miss Margot who’d grown listless. Soft. Phaedra fed her tuna from her open palm. Charlie jerked his head as if someone startled him awake from a long sleep.

  “How could you?” Phaedra asked.

  “I don’t know why. How can I when I’m asleep?”

  The eyeless cats wandered the neighborhood: the Calico with silky fur and red leather collar, the pregnant brunette, and the pair of orange colored twins with fat beige nails. One by one they came back from the woods, meowing and panting. That is, all of them except for my black cat Pluto.

  Pluto came to me because of Miss Catherine. Miss Catherine called me a dirty little loveless thing; she didn’t like the mud crusted underneath my fingernails, my urchin hair, my jacket that smelled like weed. Once I skipped school to smoke with her gardener in her backyard. He didn’t speak any English except for the words “hello” and “drugs”. Miss Catherine came outside with a rose between her teeth, little puncture marks on her lip, uttering some incantation meant to revive her dead husband.

  “You used to be such a nice girl, before your father left,” she said when she caught me.

  I sneered and crushed the joint between my fingers.

  “You can’t even apologize? Get out of here before I call the police on you! And this is the last time I’m hiring someone from PrimCare.”

  That night I went back to her garden with an armful of summer fireworks and set her rose bushes on fire. While the flowers burned, the black cat rushed out from behind the garden shed, smoke in her whiskers. I caught her in my arms. She scratched ribbons into my bare skin, but I held fast. She mewed, hissed, and spit but I covered her in my jacket and took her home. I locked her in the laundry room and slid some moist tuna and water under the door.

  I kept her that way for a few days, waiting for her to quiet down. But every time I turned the doorknob she hissed. Then Momma, on one of her better days, let her out and told me to let her smell the back of my hand.

  “Speak softly to her,” Momma said. “Shh.”

  Momma crouched with her hand held out in front of her. The cat crept toward her with tentative steps, her pink nose like a cool, floating pearl. She touched Momma’s fingers with her whiskers.

  “Her name is Pluto,” Momma said.

  As though on cue, Charlie, sleepwalking again, appeared on my lawn. He walked with halting, jerky, hypnotic steps as if his feet were about to pop off. His clumsy troll-like shadow followed behind him. Just like his hands, the shadow seemed too big for his body.

  He lurched to my window and pressed his face to the glass.

  “Little B,” he called out, “Little B.”

  Pluto hissed at him as I wrapped her in the sheets.

  “Little B,” he called out once more.

  Charlie rapped on the glass. Once. Twice.

  “Leave my cat alone!” I said.

  I held tight to her in the night. I knew that, whatever waited outside in the dark, even if it was a fat, depressed, adolescent boy like Charlie, was waiting for the chance to grab Pluto; waiting to tear her eyes out and leave her blind and stumbling.

  In the morning Momma came to me with skin flushed and bleach burning her gums. She smelled of blood and tin.

  “You’re leaving again,” I said.

  “I’m going to Alaska,” she said. “I’m going to start a colony there, to build Skuldelev warships and take over the United States.”

  She threw on her selkie skin and smiled. I knew that smile. It meant she’d left her body, OBE, gone to wrestle the moon.

  “Fine,” I said. “Have fun.”

  When she left I screamed. I kicked a hole in her bedroom door. I smashed the living room lamp against the floor, broke the coffee pot and dumped the kitchen drawers out onto the tiles. I smashed wine bottles against the wall, and overturned the kitchen table, which shattered the flower vase that had been on top. I strewed flower stems and dirt across the floor, the windowsills, and the chairs, and then ripped open bags of flour and sugar and over the carpet.

  Charlie found me outside huddled on the curb with Pluto in my arms, my arms covered elbow-deep in flour. He came to me with his mother’s funereal veil pressed across his face and a book of ancient mythology in his hands.

  “They’re going to lock you up one of these days,” Charlie said.

  “Well, you look ridiculous,” I said.

  He outstretched his hands against the veil.

  “Nobody can see your face when you’re dead. When I get to the spirit world, I’ll ask Persephone for a kiss.”

  I pressed my face into Pluto’s fur and sighed.

  “Do you want to walk with me?” he asked.

  “Not when you’re wearing that.”

  He didn’t move. I remembered when we were eight his mother tied a snake to his wrist and told him it was poisonous. When we were ten, he ran screaming into my yard because his father taught him to fear the cottontail that lived in the mulberry bushes.

  “Wait here,” I said.

  I ran inside and grabbed Momma’s car keys. I never knew why she thought she’d be able to get to Alaska without her car, and I didn’t care. I went back outside, unlocked the car door, and got into the driver’s seat

  “Get inside,” I said, pulling the seat up so I could reach the pedals, “and hold Pluto for me.”

  I drove out of the neighborhood with
Charlie, past the grocery store, then down Main Street. We lived in a small, murky town with crumbling buildings and withering trees. An insect-ridden, rotting town. The trains poisoned the ground. The factories poisoned the sky. As a child I remembered blue flowers and lush grass growing here. Now there was nothing left but whipped-back trees and the ashes of Miss Catherine’s roses.

  I drove onto the highway and sped away from town. Charlie, underneath his mother’s funereal veil, sat beside me for a long time without speaking, stroking Pluto’s thick black fur.

  “You’re not a cat killer,” I said.

  He pressed Pluto into his chest.

  “Do you have any weed?” he asked.

  “No. Miss Catherine fired her gardener.”

  “Want a cigarette then?”

  He handed me one from the pack in his pocket. I stuck it in the side of my mouth.

  “Keep driving, I’ll light it for you.”

  He pulled out a lighter, flicked it on and brought it to the tip of my cigarette. I inhaled and started to cough. The cigarette dropped down onto the floorboards. I tried to stamp it out with my foot and the car swerved. A black-flamed, hell-on-wheels Cadillac cussed at us as it careened past.

  I pulled over into the grass, retrieved the cigarette from the floorboards, and threw it out the window. Charlie exhaled. He’d been holding his breath.

  “Hey, you said you wanted to get to the spirit world, right?” I said.

  He laughed. A pale, shuddering kind of sound. I couldn’t remember a time before when I’d heard him laugh. Misery child. Dead teddy bear connoisseur.

  I kissed him through the veil.

  I grasped his cheeks, his hair. I smeared flour over his skin. It wasn’t the first time I’d kissed anyone, you know. There’d been the gardener with the cracked-chasm lips, whispering “drugs” in my ear like a love story. And the boy from the nearby high school that I’d revenge-kissed for calling me ugly. But never like this. Not with the heat and the veil between us. Not with his eyes rolling up in his head as if he was dreaming; not with the blood draining from my face; and not with my flour-encased hands turning us into ghosts. My hands felt like bear traps. If I weren’t careful I’d break my own bones.

  I leaned back into my seat and wiped at my mouth. Charlie, panting, pulled the veil back over his face. I drove back home.

  I pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition. I took Pluto out of his arms and she snuggled into the crook of my arm. Everything seemed quiet, in a painful way, away from the blistering noise of the highway. There was no engine to cross the space between the two of us.

  Charlie held his hands up in front of his face, the fingers outstretched.

  “Trying to figure out if your hands are still attached?” I asked.

  Speaking felt like breaking a sacred thing.

  “I’m trying to wake up.” He said. “It’s how you know if you’re dreaming.”

  “Your hands tell you all that?”

  “In a dream you never know where your hands could be.”

  He stretched his fingers further, further. I touched his wrist. His hand was so taut I thought the veins might burst.

  “The woods,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  All romance happened in the woods. Yes, we could be alive together, climbing up trees and rolling in the grass. I’d toss off that veil. Only the dead and boring, like our parents, made dates in coffee shops and fancy Italian restaurants. Pass the wine, baby, no sex until I’ve eaten my fill of garlic bread.

  We’d be alone there.

  The next night as I headed for the woods, I thought of the story that I’d tell him. A ghost story, about a demon that I once met in these woods. It would be almost comical, I thought, to get him to believe that I met a girl who hissed like an insect. “And did you know,” I would say, “that I found her in the hollowed out trunk of a dead tree? She opened the folds of her dress and showed me the shining spiders she kept? She was playing hide-and-seek with me.”

  And when he trembled, I would laugh and say, “Don’t be afraid, she doesn’t exist. It was only a story. It was only a dream.”

  In the woods I found the demon with him.

  She hung upside down from the trees dangling a teddy bear from one arm. Teasing him, taunting him. Charlie reached out toward the bear, his eyes those of the sleepwalker.

  “Little B,” he called out. “Little B.”

  She’d grown as I’d grown in the last few years, except she was taller, leaner. Her dark hair fell across her eyes, twisted and dripping. A spider crawled from her hand into Charlie’s hair.

  She tilted her head back toward me and opened her eyes. Those wormwood eyes.

  And just as I did when I was six years old, I ran.

  “Little B!” Charlie called, his voice a metallic echo.

  I only stopped when I heard a familiar meow behind me. I stood at the mouth of the woods, near the barbed wire. A wet nose touched the back of my leg.

  “Pluto?”

  She meowed again, a soft, weak sound. I picked her up from the ground. Blood trickled down her eye sockets and stained her snout.

  The demon replaced her eyes with wormwood, shining stars.

  Chapter Six

  I DID NOT TELL ANYONE about the demon that stole Charlie from me; I already knew what they’d say.

  “Little girl, those are not demon eyes inside of your cat’s head. That is not a spider-headed child dying in the weeds. Schizophrenic - just like your mother. We should’ve seen this coming.”

  I’d be crawling across the floor in hospital ties, spit on the cusp of my lips, eyes gurgling like a fountain, my mouth full of soft pills.

  Charlie didn’t mention the demon hanging upside down from the tree with his teddy bear, but then again, he never remembered what happened in his sleep. He could barely keep his eyes open in those days, even when he walked barefoot across a carpet of sharp stones in his backyard.

  “I’ll be a Houdini,” he said as the stones cut into his feet. “I’ll be a Sufi mystic, transcending pain.”

  Maybe he believed he could transcend the pain, even when he started to walk like a cripple, bow-legged, wincing with every step. I asked him why he no longer read from the book of mythology and why he no longer pressed his mother’s funereal veil against his mouth. “Lost them,” he said. In a place he couldn’t remember.

  In the woods.

  He took his shirt off. Streaks of sweat shimmered on his back and his pale, chubby body quivered over the stones. When the stones no longer hurt, he moved on to hot coals.

  “I’m going to need you to light the coals for me,” he said.

  I nodded, crouching in the grass, matchsticks in my hands. I only ever saw the whites of his eyes since the pupils always rolled back into his head. Maybe when we kissed, flour on my hands, black mesh on his lips, he’d been asleep. Maybe he didn’t remember anything.

  He stepped off the stones.

  “I have a gift for you,” he said.

  He gave me a pomegranate and showed me how to open it, revealing the red glowing seeds inside. I ate one.

  “Hades gave Persephone a pomegranate,” Charlie said, “and when she ate it, she had to stay with him forever.”

  “I know the story,” I said.

  “Those are the seeds of hell. Now you’ll never again need the sun to see.”

  The more he sleepwalked, the more his voice cracked, as if speaking to me from inside a collapsed cavern.

  I gripped the pomegranate in both hands. I saw the demon’s spider crawling on his neck. Her hair unraveling from the trees, her hips the hips of a witch.

  “Now,” he said, retrieving a bag of charcoal from the patio, “I think I’m ready.”

  I whispered, “Okay,” but I knew that, even if he reached Nirvana through bare feet on burning coals, it wouldn’t save him. He belonged to her. She who bewitched him with Little B. She who plucked out my cat’s eyes. She who made him reach out for her in the dark.

  ***

 
Momma came back home a few days later with her selkie skin shredded and her hair in knots.

  “Lily!” she called, “What have you done to the walls? My lamp?”

  I kept my hands at my sides. They still smelled of lighter fluid and charcoal. Momma ricocheted through the kitchen, smearing flour on her arms and face, flying through broken glass, flowers, and spilled wine. Scraps of her selkie skin fell to the tiles.

  “Baby, are you angry with me?” she asked.

  I stepped barefoot on broken glass, and it sliced into my heel. I stiffened.

  “Why don’t you look at me?” She asked.

  I didn’t want to tell her it was because I thought poison would drip from her eyes to mine.

  “Look at me.”

  Why did my mother have to be a warrior chartered with keeping the moon and sun from crashing into each other? Why did she have to plant an acid seed in my brain, my sister Schizophrenia?

  “Baby,” she said. “Oh, baby.”

  Her mad red hair shot up to the ceiling. She danced in mid-air like Jesus.

  “Stop calling me that,” I said.

  I felt dizzy and dry-mouthed, but why?

  “You’re bleeding everywhere.”

  Ah, yes, that was why. Paralyzed from the waist down. My blood congealed in between my toes.

  Momma caught me before I fell.

  She set me down on a kitchen chair. She spoke but I heard only a ringing in my ears. She knelt and pulled the glass out of my foot, a big, bloody shard of glass. From the looks of it, a piece of Momma’s special Saint-Aignan wine I smashed, spraying it up the walls.

  “There it is,” Momma said. “My Lily’s devil smile.”

  I wanted to ask if she knew Charlie’s parents were behavioral scientists - and by the way, can you tell that we kissed in your car and the smoke smell will never come off the leather seats? And have you seen Pluto lately?

  I lolled my head back, curled my toes. Pluto jumped up onto my lap. Momma saw her wormwood eyes, the blood on her snout, and stroked her black fur.

  “Someone’s looking out for you,” she said.