We are Wormwood (12 page)

Halfway up the stairs, the mad girl found Phaedra’s mother
trapped in the trunk of a transparent tree. It must’ve grown through the
basement. It pushed through the broken roof.

The mother’s skin burned away and her hair disintegrated.
Her eyes had transformed into pills.

The mad girl pressed her hands to the transparent trunk; her
fingers burned.

“Where’s my friend?” the mad girl asked. “Where’s my
mother?”

Phaedra’s mother pressed her face to the tree trunk and
spoke, but the mad girl could hear nothing she said. Eventually the mother’s
lips and tongue fell apart.

The mad girl managed to crawl to the top of the stairs and
enter her friend’s room. But it wasn’t the room she remembered. Where Phaedra’s
bed used to be, there was a hole where acid ate its way through the
floorboards.

And In the center of the room, the mad girl found a
carnivorous plant with snakes for heads, a quivering mass of red stalks and
veins. The plant gurgled. The snakes opened and closed their mouths, snapping
at her.

The mad girl cried out for her mother.

And then from the middle of the plant’s mass, in a storm of
pumping acid, a pale hand reached out for her. A muffled voice called to her.

“Baby girl, is that you? Don’t be scared. Don’t worry about
a thing.”

Her mother’s hand scrabbled across the wooden floor
searching for something to grasp, to pull herself out of the plant. But she
couldn’t get a grip on the rotting floorboards. They disintegrated her
arthritic knuckles, the ones she always insisted they gave her no pain.

The girl knew if the plant ate her, it would’ve been like
she never existed.

The plant sucked her mother’s hand into its center.

When the mad girl saw her mother about to die, she became
me.

“Mommy!” I screamed.

The flooring cracked underneath me. I fell backwards into
the grass and rot.

Nightcatcher, did you lure my Momma up here? Did you reach
out with your spindly arms and promise her a cure?
 
Did you seduce Phaedra, that dark gothic
princess, impervious to any human’s allure, with these flesh-eating plants? Did
you lead me here so that the three of us could be devoured together?

I crawled toward the plant. Thorns, buried within the grass,
scratched at my fingers. The ivy unfurled from the walls and slashed at my
face, my legs.

Momma, we were so stupid.

We should have been anywhere but here.

A
snake head
bit me on the
collarbone. Its fangs tore into my skin and pumped me with poison. I kicked at
a head that reached out to bite my leg; ropy branches shot out of the center of
the plant and grabbed my ankles. It pulled me toward the pumping center, to be
devoured with my mother.

I tried to scream again, but a vine gagged my mouth. It
squirted acid into my eyes and nose, and I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed at the
grass and the wooden flooring underneath me, trying to pull myself away from
the plant, but the floor tore underneath my fingers, tore into my fingernails.

I grasped the vine in my mouth, driving my hands down into
the thorns, down into its fleshy stalk, and twisted until it tore in my hands.

I pressed my cheek against the floor where I could breathe,
and I called for her, my voice a hoarse whisper, my throat bleeding.

Let me die from a cocaine overdose, from a violent murder
from a jealous drug kingpin. Hell, even let me die in the dark woods, my throat
torn away by the thing that carried a cold shadow behind it. Tell my mother
that I died fighting the giant Fenrir wolf. Let her give me a funeral for a warrior,
set me ablaze, and send me sailing over a waterfall.

But don’t let us die here, not with acid in our throats and
snakes spit-hissing at our feet.

This is not how Vikings die.

A
snake head
tugged at my foot with
such a force that it dragged my face across the floorboards, lodging a dark
chunk of wood into my cheek.

“Help me,” I whispered.

I choked on black and blood.

“Help my Momma. Please.”

I kicked at the quivering center of the plant. Another
branch wrapped itself around my other ankle. Fangs drove into the back of my
leg. Poison tunneled through my blood, and the room started melting.

“Please.”

The demon came floating on her black hair, enchanted hair.
It crackled with energy as it filled the entire room. When the snakes saw her
they let me loose from their jaws. They tried to slither away as she floated
toward them. The vines withdrew themselves from her feet, but wilted and died
before they could get away. More of the floorboards crumbled, and grass and
flowers tumbled down into the hole where Phaedra’s bed used to be.

The giant plant gurgled, almost like a scream.

The demon stretched her arms toward me.

Her hair brushed my face and she plucked out the dark chunk
of wood embedded in my bleeding cheek.

It was the first time I’d seen the demon as beautiful. Her
body, untouched throughout the years, whereas I’d ruined mine, her skin like a
cumulus cloud, eyes bright, cheeks flushed a deep red. Her body rose higher,
lifted by her hair. She touched the ceiling with the tips of her fingers. All the
while her hair transforming, growing, silver and sharp at the edges.

She threw her head back and her sharp hair sunk into the
plant. It quivered and lost its color. She twisted her body and the hair
twisted deeper into the plant. The ivy crumbled into ash. The snake’s eyes
rolled up into their heads, still trembling after they died.

I crawled toward the plant. I plunged my hands into its
center and somewhere inside, among the poison and sharp, bristled hairs, my
mother reached for me.

I pulled her out.

She was barely breathing and wet, her skin covered in burns,
her eyes sealed shut with sticky ichor.

She couldn’t speak. She stroked my shoulders, my hair. She
kissed my bleeding cheek and my splintered forehead. And I clung to her like I
used to. Like when I was a child and I thought she would rule the world with
her stories. Like when we were Vikings.

The demon touched my shoulder. When I looked up from my
mother, I found the plant torn apart. The demon’s hair receded from the corners
of the room. She smiled faintly.

“Come here,” she mouthed.

She carried us from the house.

THE
PARAMEDICS ARRIVED
while I cradled my mother on the lawn. Her consciousness
wavered, but her smile never did.

“What the hell happened?” a paramedic asked.

He tugged at his chin where a few stray hairs grew. He
brushed my mother’s burnt hair aside and checked her pulse. I would have
mistaken him for a high school student if he hadn’t shown up in an ambulance,
wearing a uniform.
 

I pointed across the street. Could they not see the house
busted open, loam spilling from the windows, the dead tree sprouting out of the
roof?

“She’s in shock,” one of them said. “Bitch.”

“What did you call me?” I said.

Or what I thought I said. I couldn’t understand any of the
words coming out of my mouth.

“She may be delirious. Check her vitals.”

They spoke to me.

“You’ll have to uncurl your fist.”

“I can’t,” I said, shaking, but my fist relaxed.

They checked my pulse.

“A concussion maybe? We should take her to the hospital for
further assessment.”

When they took my mother away from me on a stretcher, I
screamed.

“Do you want to go with her?” they said. “You should be in
the hospital overnight for observation as well.”

I knew if they took me, they would find out something was
wrong with me, something worse than brain damage or a few poison scratches.

And they’d never let me leave.

“I’m not going,” I said.

They strapped my mother to the stretcher. God, was that even
her
? I couldn’t be sure anymore. Sickness and medicine
turned people into lesser things. They could bring her back to me stuffed with
cotton, like a plush toy, and it might take me years to notice. If I’d any
strength left in my legs, I would’ve torn her from the stretcher. I shouldn’t
have called the ambulance in the first place.

I could have taken care of her myself. I would have, if I were
a good daughter.

“You could be in danger. A serious concussion.”

“We don’t have time for this. Her mother is dying.”

“If we force her to come with us she could become violent.”

“No time.”

They hauled her away. In the dark, her face appeared like a spider
web big enough to trap the moon.

I went back into the house and shut myself in the bathroom,
then covered the mirror with a towel because I couldn’t bear to look at myself.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub with a pair of tweezers and started picked
splinters out of my skin.

She knocked on the door.

“Come in,” I said quietly.

The demon slipped into the room. An insect trilled in her
throat. She stood by the sink as I picked at my skin. Wooden shards and blades
of grass spattered the bottom of the bathtub. I leaned over the bathtub and
coughed up red mud.

I peeled skin off my cheek.

The insect in the demon’s throat went silent. When she
breathed she made no noise, or perhaps she didn’t breathe at all. I could’ve
forgotten she was there if not for the shadow of her hair cast over the
bathtub, twisting and lightning-coursed.

“I thought you were a dream,” I said.

“Don’t lie. You thought no such thing.”

I kept swallowing but I couldn’t get rid of the bitter taste
in my mouth. I gripped the side of the bathtub and one of my fingernails
cracked and fell onto the tiles. Taking a shower seemed impossible.

“I’ll just wash the sheets tomorrow,” I said.

I dropped the tweezers in the sink. My mouth felt dry, but I
didn’t think I could make it to the kitchen for a glass of water. Besides, I
didn’t want to touch anything or maybe my fingers would fall off as well as my
fingernails.

The pain came later, as it always did.

The walls spun in my bedroom. The room wanted to send me
flying off into orbit. I’d never be safe here again. I tried to undress, but my
fingers were seizure patients and my skull was a melting bowl. I couldn’t even
touch the buttons on the back of my dress.

The demon touched the back of my neck and tilted my head
down. She unbuttoned the back of my dress and I slipped out. I crawled into my
bed, startling Pluto out of sleep, and stained the sheets with grime.

She
lay
beside me, face to face,
this demon girl, with her teeth full of bugs, hair hissing, and body like a
wasp’s nest. When she moved, her skin rattled. She sighed, and spiders wove a
crown for her head.

I pulled her close to me.

I buried my face in her cold neck. She rocked me, but I
couldn’t sleep.

Downstairs the phone rang.

I imagined getting a call from the hospital, and being
forced to drive down there in the middle of the night. I’d cross the gray and
nearly empty parking lot to the sliding doors of the waiting room. The
receptionist would be sitting alone at the front desk, underneath a halogen
bulb casting a pool of sick light on her head.
 
She’d ask the name of the patient and
click her tongue at me when I gave her the answer.

“Yes, I know who that is. And why didn’t you bring her
earlier? There’s no chance of saving her now.”

If I had to watch my mother shuffle down that hallway in
paper slippers one more time, what would be left of me?

I leaned over the bed and started heaving, but nothing came
up. The phone downstairs stopped ringing.

I reached for my phone and called Saint Peter.

“Take me out of here,” I said.

I
packed what I could in a small duffle bag and changed my clothes. I took off
the demon’s mud-stained dress and dressed her in one of my ragged sweaters and
a worn skirt.
 
An hour and a half
later, Saint Peter drove up in her beaten down van. The demon carried Pluto. I
took the demon’s hand and together we ran down the stairs, out the door.
We climbed inside the van and, with the door still open
,
we drove away
.

IMAGINE
THIS: SAINT PETER
, with blue hair, a woman’s body, and scars of inverted
crosses on the back of her hands. Imagine she’s standing outside a gas station,
next to her van, holding her blue faux fur coat tight to her body, the wind
whipping her hair. She closes her eyes - she sees God; she opens her eyes
– she sees God. It’s been twenty-three hours and she keeps eating
psychedelic mushrooms to stay awake because there’s still a thousand miles to
go.

A man approaches and asks her what happened to the backs of
her hands and she says, “I’m the reincarnation of Saint Peter.”

“No kidding?” he says. “But that doesn’t explain how you got
those scars.”

“Do you really want to know?” she asks.

The man nods.

“I was sailing on a ship towards the end of the universe,
searching for God and the meaning of everything. And when I came to the end of
the world I found a void, a great emptiness waiting for me, heaving and
spitting, with God in the center of it all. But it was not God like you would
imagine him, some kindly bearded old man with big bare feet sitting on a white
throne next to white Jesus. This was a god of Technicolor vomit, noise, hissing
spit, and fluttering wings. And when I asked him the meaning of life, he could
do nothing but screech.”

This doesn’t explain the scars but the man doesn’t want to
ask anymore, doesn’t know how to ask anymore. And Saint Peter smiles and
shivers and her scars break open to bleed.