We are Wormwood (9 page)

He crushed his cigarette between his fingers.

“I closed my eyes for only a moment, and when I opened them
once more, I saw it wasn’t a deer, but a girl. When I blinked, and it
transformed back into the deer. How does someone make that mistake? How does
someone mistake a deer for a girl?”

I didn’t know how to respond. The story he told was the
first thing he’d said that wasn’t a thinly veiled insult. And the
intensity
with which he spoke, biting the inside of his
cheek, his Adam’s apple petrified in his throat, left me paralyzed.

“It wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “I think there really was a
girl there. And maybe I was the only one who saw her, if only for a moment.”

He’d told that story like he’d rehearsed it. The lines too
smooth, the pauses like paragraphs. He knew I’d come. He knew, and had the
story waiting for me.

“What’s your game?” I asked him.
 

He pressed closer to me. I gripped a cracked wooden post
that broke underneath my fingernails, and I dropped my cigarette in the grass.

“I didn’t ask you to come here,” he said.

I tilted my head back to look him in the eyes, my throat
tightening.

“Surprise,” I whispered.

He finished his cigarette.

“Come back inside,” he said.

We went back into the bar. The blue-haired girl from the
lawn sat by herself, drinking from a large, blue mug. She pushed her sweater to
her elbows, revealing fresh scars, dirty and purple, all up and down her arms.

“Your girlfriend?” I asked.

“My sister,” Cignus said.

“Most people call me Elm,” she said, and she held out her
hand for me to take, “but my real name is Saint Peter.”

“Saint Peter,” I said, gripping her hand, “like the
prophet.”

“Not like,” she said. “Am. I am the prophet.”

Cignus pressed his hand against the small of my back. Little
sparks ran up my spine, and I wish they hadn’t.

“I’m taking her home,” he said.

Saint Peter drove us in an ancient, rust-colored van. Cignus
and I sat in the back seat, staring at each other, our backs pressed against
the windows. I drew my knees up. He drew his knees up.

He unrolled the window and lit another cigarette. He tried
to hide the fact he coughed blood onto his sleeve.

Saint Peter could’ve been driving us into the sea, I
wouldn’t have noticed.

“That picture in the wine bar?” he said. “’The Hunted?’ I
painted it after that night I found the dead girl in the woods.”

“You’re lying.”

“Why would I waste my energy lying to you?”

“It wasn’t me,” I whispered to him. “The girl in the woods
wasn’t me.”

“I know what I saw.”

“I’m not dead. I’m right here.”

He reached across the van and took my hand. He touched my
fingers one by one.

“Are you really?” he asked.

Saint Peter stopped in front of their house. It was the same
one Phaedra and I went to only a week before. Someone removed the blood
paintings from the grass, and the porch stood empty and quiet.

I stepped out of the car. Before I could follow Cignus into
the house, Saint Peter pulled me back.

“Be careful,” she said. “You know he has a reputation.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Maybe you only think that
because people have been hiding the truth from you.”

“Who are you?”

“Saint Peter,” she said. “Do you know who you are?”

I pulled my hand away.

“I don’t think about it.”

I went into the house, not looking behind me to see if she
followed. I passed the empty living room and the sterile kitchen. Every room
appeared hollowed out, cast into grey light. The speaker was gone. The mirrors
on the walls had been ripped off and scattered across the floor.

Cignus waited for me. Not at the door of his studio, but at
the door of his bedroom. As I walked toward him broken glass crunched
underneath me.

The house sighed as he took me into his room and shut the
door. It sighed as I slipped into cool red sheets.

We were fulfilling some unspoken contract between us.
A primordial agreement older than dark and stars.
Once you
invade someone’s dreams you’re a part of them forever. For the rest of their
life they’ll be spitting out little pieces of you.

I knelt in front of him and he pressed molly into one of my
nostrils.
Cocaine into the other.

“Don’t kiss me,” he said as my throat and mouth buzzed.

In the dark, I saw the photographs of women taped to the
walls, their eyes shining in camera flash. A thousand dirty punk girls.

“Would you like to go on my wall?” he asked me.

I leaned my head back and the room tilted. I squeezed red
sheets between my fists and the colors dripped onto me.

“Not yet,” he said. “You’ll give me a picture when you leave
me.”

He was rough, all angles and sandpaper. He burned away the
palm of his hands with chemicals and, though the drugs made me want to kiss and
kiss, his mouth was a stone.

He pushed my thighs apart with his knees. I fell halfway off
the bed and grabbed fistfuls of carpet. I spit out flies.

“Lily, can you hear me?” He asked.

He spoke to me from dimensions away. I was lost in textures,
burnt and soft, lost between his trembling knees.

“God, everything’s so soft,” I whispered.

“I used to talk to God,” Cignus said. “I thought he could
hear me.”

I rubbed my cheek against the carpet.

“Only an expression,” I murmured, my mouth being tickled by
fibers I never even knew existed.

“Be careful how you use your words,” he said. “Maybe I’m a
devil waiting to curse you.”

“You don’t want to meet a real devil.”

He fucked me as I lay with my head pressed into the carpet,
my toes gripping the bed sheets. He fucked me because that’s how you leech the
magic out of someone. I may be young, but I’m not an idiot.

I could have gouged his eyes out with my jutting chest, my
jutting hips. I wanted to rear up and bite his head off, but the carpet
underneath me was so soft. I breathed it in even as I lay twisted, my organs
bursting inside of me.

I wouldn’t tell him I hadn’t done drugs before, and he
wouldn’t believe me if I told him I was a virgin
  
so I lay quiet even though I
scarred the inside of my mouth with teeth marks and my thighs clenched and
shook.

Blood stained my legs and the color faded into red sheets.

Where were you on that night, little demon, when the artist
came across the deer? Did I disguise myself to hide from you? Maybe I thought I
could disappear between thick muscle and fawn skin, a slit throat, mud caked on
the back of my ears.

Or were you the one who killed me and dragged me up there in
the first place?

I don’t know how much time passed before Cignus released me
and I fell off the bed, shivering. I couldn’t move. He tore the red curtains
off his wall and wrapped me in them.

“Want me to draw you?” he asked, while I lay inert on the
floor.

“Go away.”

“I need a cigarette,” he said, and left me.

I’m glad you weren’t here to see me grow into an adult,
demon. Though I think we both knew it would always be like this. No fairytale cherry
popping for girls like me, not with my firework scars and Schizophrenia curse.
Knights do not rescue mad girls, because our crowns are invisible and made of
dirt. I did not deserve the palatial, golden bed of the man in polished armor.

And if he offered it to me, I would have laughed and
laughed.

I dragged myself across the floor, shivering, trailing red
curtains like the train of a dress. I crawled underneath his desk, near the
radiator.

Cignus came back into the room and found me sitting
underneath his desk.

“I’m so cold,” I said.

He reached out for me.

“Come here,” he said, the last sweet
thing
he ever said to me.

He laid me on the bed and rocked me to him, to his weak
heart and thin chest, until I fell asleep.

***

I awoke to a thud outside of Cignus' window, the sound of
wood splintering. I sat up with a start, gasping.

Another thud, followed by a CRACK, as of a tree splitting in
two. I reached for Cignus in the dark, but he was gone. I crawled off the bed
and searched for my clothes on the floor.

In the backyard I found Saint Peter shooting arrows with a
hunter’s bow. – An expensive thing, smooth draw, black liquid metal and
fiberglass. It was a bow to kill bears and boars with.

She notched another arrow and drew the string.

It shot into the trunk of the tree, dead center, into a
yellowing paper target.

She lowered the bow and brushed the hair from her face.
Blood dripped down her wrist. On the back of her hand was a braised scar in the
shape of a cross.

"You're bleeding," I said.

“So are you.”

I looked down and saw the blood smeared across my thighs. It
glowed blue in the moonlight, and when I touched it I found it dried and cool.

She turned back to the tree, drew another arrow, and
released.

WE’VE
BEEN HERE
before. The artist and me locked in the back room, his teeth
bared and his tongue clicking. I’ve sat on this floor, just like this, with my
knees clenched together and the red curtain draped around my shoulders. He held
the back of my neck like a mother wolf as I bent and snorted cocaine from a
piece of broken mirror.

The walls and the air glistened with grease; my skin was
dirty, my thighs ached, and I was rotting from the inside, but my eyes were
wide open.

Cignus turned toward his empty canvas. I thought I heard his
bones cracking, his skin too thin to contain him. I wondered how many nights he
spent here in the studio with the door locked, nothing but drugs and a red
light to guide him. Enough hours and his fingers started shaking, the painting
before him blurred. Maybe at the end of the night he couldn’t tell the
difference between the butcher shop blood, the light, his own hands.

As for me: my head was ready to pop and my eyes were
stretched a mile wide.

He threw the cover off his desk and revealed a small
refrigerator underneath. He stored bags of blood inside.

He ripped open a bag and spilled it into a tray, some
splashing across his hands.

I blinked, and the earth shifted underneath me. Cignus no
longer stood at the canvas, but back at his desk. He mixed paint and blood with
molten silver. He wiped his mouth as silver tinged his lips. When he spoke,
flecks of it dropped to the floor.

"I could transform you into anything I wanted," he
said, and I laughed.

He pressed silver and blood into my palms. He squeezed, and
the silver ran down my arms.

 
It spread cool
through my blood. I tasted his words traveling on spit particles in the air.

“I will remake you,” he said.

He squeezed harder, and the silver turned into rot. It
travelled fast through my bones, sprouting like fungi on the surface of my
bones. I tasted it on my tongue. If I breathed into someone’s mouth, I’d kill
them
with the poison in me. I was transforming, yes, into
something terribly wrong.

He bent down and snorted another line. He reared back up
like he’d been underwater for years,
then
returned to
his work in progress.

We’ve been here before.
Me and the artist.

But I’ve said that already.

He painted with his fingers. I rolled on the floor choking.
I asked for a glass of water, maybe some orange juice, anything to soothe away
the drip in the back of my throat. He gave me a piece of gum to keep me from
grinding my teeth together. I stuck it, chewed up, in the center of one of his
canvases.

"So disrespectful," he said. "Would you stick
gum on the Sistine chapel?"

"You're no Michelangelo," I said.

The rot slid through my stomach like a fat, diseased worm.
It pushed at my belly button where it formed its center, like a pulsating
jugular.

I grabbed the piece of broken mirror, cocaine-encrusted,
jagged on the edges, and I cut a hole into the center of me.

I dropped the mirror and wrapped the red curtains around me.
I crawled across the floor.

“Touch me. I’m changing colors. Touch me.”

Please, say that I’m still here. Say that I’m still human,
or I might be lost.

He peeled back my red curtain cocoon. Underneath I lay
naked, burning, and bleeding.

“Do you remember when we first met? What I promised you?” he
asked.

“No,” I spit out.

"Lie to me again."

We fucked on the floor. I hadn’t washed myself since the
last time, but he didn’t ask about the blood. Not that he could tell the
difference between my blood and that from the butchers. He touched me like I
was a dream. I was tearing. I was splitting apart.

I didn’t make a sound.

He withdrew from me without coming. A wide swathe of blood
and silver spread across his waist.

“You hurt yourself,” Cignus said.

“No,” I said softly, “you did.”

I found the hole I cut into myself, as if for the first
time. I touched the rim of the wound but couldn’t feel anything at all.

“I’m scared.”

“Come here,” he said.

I held my arms out to him and he picked me up. I smelled the
toxic rot bubbling out of the hole. My blood gurgled and spilled out silver.

“How long has it been since you’ve been able to admit that
you were afraid?”

He carried me to his canvas.

“No,” I said.

“Don’t you dare turn away.
”

“No.”

“I need this.”

The blood spilling out of me was no longer silver, but
yellow.