We are Wormwood (7 page)

“Before I met your father, I was an artist,” she said, and
when she smiled, I saw she was wearing her purple lipstick. She’d gone mad
again.

She touched my face.

“You’re not looking well, baby,” she said.

“Do you remember what day it is?” I asked her.

“Wednesday,” my mother said, dancing the scissor electric
with one of her melted sculptures.

“Yeah,” I said, voice soft, “Wednesday.”

It was my sixteenth birthday and the only person to come
visit me was Phaedra, who gave me a Venus
Flytrap
she
named Terrance.

“Take care of him, he’s a shy one,” Phaedra said, and then
she left.

It was my sixteenth birthday and, on my dresser beside my
newly acquired carnivorous plant, I lined up forty benzodiazepines I’d bought
from a fourteen-year-old drug dealer. But by the time I’d set them all out, the
thought of having to swallow them seemed more tedious than it was worth. So I
grabbed Pluto, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed.

The lights flickered on.

“Happy Birthday,” the demon said.

The demon sat in a rocking chair beside the window, hair
lush and spilling from her shoulders, one thin leg draped over the chair’s
wooden arm. She smoked a cigarette she stole from the pack on my windowsill as
the chair creeeaked.

“I brought you a present,” she said.

She motioned toward the bureau, where she’d laid out a
dress.

It was not a dress made
of
silk or
cotton, but of insects; butterflies, spiders, and roly-polies, stitched
together and gleaming more delicately than lace. Such a dress must've taken
months to sew. I imagined the demon going through the woods with a killing jar,
capturing insects and smothering them. I saw her sitting in a burnt out husk of
a tree, sewing them together with her antenna-like fingers, singing softly to
herself
by rubbing her legs together.

"Put it on,” she said.

I pointed toward the door.

“Get out,” I said.

She lifted her head and wormwood took me.

It was as if she’d reached into my skull with phantom limbs
and set it on fire. I sat back down on my bed, trembling. My hand dropped to my
side and my head tilted back. I was at once boneless and bloodless. Warmth
spread throughout my body.

The demon held her hand toward my cat. Pluto jumped from my
lap to hers. She buried her face in Pluto’s thick fur. She whispered to her in
half-language and Pluto purred.

I’d had this dream so many times.
My cat
and the demon conspiring against me, the demon scratching at my window.
In my dreams, wherever she touched me she paralyzed me, and inside, I cried for
help.

Yet now with it happening, all I could think was:

Thank God.

Thank God this will soon be over.

The demon opened her hand and, from her palm, spilled chewed
up, withered pomegranate seeds.

She repeated her command with smoke spilling out of her
mouth.

“Put.

It.

On.”

The smoke enveloped me. I became a bubble of warm honey. For
the first time in days, my headache went away and the pressure behind my eyes
disappeared. I was no longer Lily, sixteen-year-old screw-up,
child
murderer. I was a glowing vessel, soft and malleable.

She hypnotized me. Her voice had hypnotized me.

I stood up, swimming. Everything seemed so easy. The air
pooled around me like still water, the dull colors of the room became vibrant.
I slipped out of my clothes and the air cooled on my skin, pulling at the tiny
hairs on my arms.

The demon dressed me. I pulled my hair in front of me, and
she laced up the back of the dress. Her nails tapped against my spine, clicking
like mandibles, as she pulled against the laces.

“You are beautiful,” she said.

In the mirror, the insects were bigger than me, more real
than me. The spiders at my throat were engorged and brilliant with colors. I
didn’t look like the grubby urchin that Miss Catherine chased out of her rose
garden, or like the schoolgirl with burnt fingers the science teacher said
would never amount to anything.

"I look like you," I said, my voice a whisper.

We went into the street and Pluto followed. I walked on the
hot pavement in my bare feet as the dress swayed, butterflies rubbing against
my skin.

We went into the abandoned lot and she lifted the train of
my dress so that I could climb over the barbed wire fence. Even though I’d
climbed that fence a thousand times, more than a thousand, I cut my bare foot
on a barb.

I felt the pain as a far away thing, a sensation that didn’t
pierce the warmth surrounding my body. Even pain could be a safe thing, a
golden thing.

I bled and we kept going.

We followed a light through the woods, a fairy light that
flickered and hovered like something alive. The woods stretched out further
than they ever had before, railroad tracks and factory smoke rings, gone. We
walked across the burnt remains of her tree.

Pluto mewed at my feet. Her wormwood eyes shone more
fiercely than I'd ever seen them shine before.

At the end of the tunnel we came to a dining table in a
clearing. The fairy light floated in the center of the table. Up close, I saw
it for what it was: an orb of fireflies stitched together and tethered to the
table.

"Won't you sit down?" the demon said, and directed
me toward a carved bone chair.

I melted into the chair. I don’t know why I’d never been
here before. I belonged in this chair.

The demon lifted up a glass of what appeared to be red wine.
It shone brighter than the fireflies, mottled and glowing.

"Have a drink,” she said.

She had to place the glass in my hands and close my fingers
around the stem.

"Happy birthday to me,” I said, the words bubbling up
like foam; I drank.

The wine was thick and sweet, congealing on my tongue. She
took the glass away. My hands fell to my sides. I wanted to slide down into the
dirt and grass and roll around. I wanted to know what it felt like to press my
mouth against the moist dew and have it tickle my lips. But the demon touched
my chin, bid me to look, and I stayed in my chair.

On the table, the demon laid out cuts of meat with eyes,
cakes made out of skin, and jellied currants made out of glowing metal. Black
crabs still quivered in their sauces. The demon carved for me a slice of
something red and sticky, pulsing, and placed it on my plate.

"Is this like fairyland?" I asked, "I eat the
food and I can never go home?”

“Lily, please shut up,” the demon said.

She placed a fork, carved from animal bone, into my hand.
Yes, it always belonged there.

Maybe if I managed to get home this night I would find
Mother on one of the days she could still speak. I would say, "Momma,
think back to when you were pregnant with me. Think as hard as you can. Did you
notice anything strange? Perhaps during the ultrasound the doctor noticed that,
along with me, you were housing a star from Revelation in your uterus. And when
I was born, did the doctors have to cut a dark little parasitic twin away from
my bones, and did you let her slither off into the dark? Is this where my
shadow has been all these years? No, no particular reason why I'm asking. I'm
just curious, Momma."

The demon placed the bone knife in my other hand.

Out in the woods, beyond the clearing, the grass rustled.

Something’s out there, but I didn’t care. I only wanted to
eat the food filling the table in front of me. I knew, going down my throat, it
would fill me with a pulsating light. Yet I couldn’t manage to use the fork and
knife, not with my muscles turning into fuzz and my face melting into soft
candy.

The demon leaned toward me, the table creaking underneath
her. Her skin glowed in the light of the sewn-together fireflies. She touched
my bottom lip and pressed a pulsing red fruit into my mouth. I swallowed; it
coated my stomach with musical notes.

Some little girls get stolen by the king
of the underworld
. I got a demon, smiling at me with fireflies stuck in
her teeth.

I smelled an acrid scent, like oil. The grass rustled once
more and Pluto bolted from underneath my legs. I lost control of the muscles in
my hands and dropped the knife and fork onto the ground.

"It's The Nightcatcher, isn't it?" I asked.

A fawn emerged from the grass trembling and wet.

I tried to call out for Pluto, but my tongue wouldn’t fit
into my mouth.

The fawn crept underneath the table. She rested her head at
my feet, and licked with her rough-sewn tongue at the blood pouring from my
barbed-wire wound. The demon placed a piece of fruit in my mouth, but I
couldn’t swallow.

The demon crawled across the table, knocking over dishes,
batting the ball of fireflies away. She weaved her hands through my hair. I
coughed and bones and fruit spilled out of my mouth.

The fawn licked and licked my bleeding foot. The demon
turned my head toward the trees.

“I don’t want to look,” I said as she pinched my cheek, my
jaw. “Don’t let me look.”

But just as I did with Baby Arachne, dying in the flowers
years and years ago, I looked.

The trees burned away. The ground trembled. This must’ve
been what my mother saw when she went mad. The sky tore apart and ancient
woodlands clawed its way out of the dirt, pushing itself through a million
years of strata and stone. It toppled the woods and the town. It ringed the sky
with ice. It showered me in flowers and black mud.

“Welcome home, Lily.”

Home. My forest. It was real. It was here and swallowing me.

The fawn bit my foot.

My limbs snapped back into place. The ancient woods
disappeared. The fawn bolted. The fruit spilled out of my mouth and I hauled
myself to my feet, choking. The demon jumped off the table.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Stay away from me.”

“Did you not like the dinner?”

“Stay away!”

The ball of fireflies hummed in my face. I slapped it away
and it exploded in a shower of light. The demon uttered a low whine.

I gathered the dead-thing dress in my hands and ran down the
tunnel of trees.

She didn't pursue me, but there was something else in the
woods that night.
Something watching me.
Its
machinating heart bore down on me.

The dress started moving. The butterflies squirmed and
fluttered, showering me with melanin dust. The beetles clicked. The spiders
squirmed at my throat. The moths fluttered, heave with panic. I crouched in the
dirt and groped for the laces on my back to untie myself, but I couldn’t reach.

The woods tilted, the grass and the dirt turned into a sky,
bearing its weight down on me.

I
grabbed for the collar of the dress and tore it away, showering the ground with
thread, lace, and insects. They fluttered and flailed and scurried away.

I DIDN’T SEE
the demon for several
years after that, and in those years, I went mad.
 

WHEN
I WAS TWENTY
, I met the artist with electric lights in his hair and butcher
shop blood on his clothes. Phaedra and I showed up at his house because a man
promised her a carnivorous pitcher plant. A Sarracenia rubra plant with
sweet-veined red skin and pretty black hair.

“He probably just wants to fuck me,” Phaedra said, “but I
saw it on Facebook. The plant, I mean. It’s real. He even time-stamped it.”

We’d driven almost an hour out of town for the plant and
found ourselves outside a broken house crushed by kudzu. Dance music from
inside pulsed underneath the tires of Phaedra’s car. The artist sat on the
front lawn with a mason jar full of port wine, his clothes frayed and
splattered, surrounded by blood portraits of skinless women.

A blue-haired girl with bleeding wrists posed as his model
in the wet grass. Light cords snaked down her throat, her wrists, and his wine
glass.
 
He tugged on the light
cords, telling her to turn over on her back.

“Wait here,” Phaedra said as she walked up to the porch.

Boys sat on the darkened porch under a kitchen window lined
with empty whiskey bottles. College boys, from the looks of it, skinny
intellectuals who drank because it was the closest thing they could get to
enlightenment. I overheard their words Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Typical. The
longer I looked at them, the less human they became.

Phaedra disappeared inside the house.

The artist took another sip of wine. Flies stuck in the
blood on his clothes.

“I know you,” he said to me, the lights straining against
his face. “My sister went to school with you. You were the murderer.”

“You’d like that, I’m sure.”

“What was your name?”

I wanted to say Lily bloodsucker. Lily schizophrenia. Lily
stay
away from me because I’ll eat your head.

I shrugged and headed toward the house.

The boys’ silhouettes twisted and transformed out of
proportion, like their heads should’ve snapped off of their necks. Their shadow
hands shrunk into their sleeves. They ignored me when I climbed the porch steps
and they continued speaking amongst themselves. Their voices were loud enough
to penetrate through the music coming from the house.

“Just postulate for a minute, that there is a negative and
positive balance to the world,” one of them said.

“Black and white thinking. That’s going to get you into
trouble.”

“Postulate? Stop being so goddamn pompous.”

“Most of us have equal negative and positive aspects. But,
what if someone enters the world, and their balance is all negative?”