We are Wormwood (2 page)

"I'm never falling in love,” I said.

"You'll be a beautiful woman," she said,
continuing on as if I hadn't spoken, as if I was another character in her
stories, "once your face grows into those spark-devil eyes. You'll topple
cities."

During that time it was easy to forget that she took pills
to keep her from going insane — Risperdal, Haldol, antipsychotic drugs
with names that sounded like those of old Southern gentlemen. One time, when I
was still an infant, she'd been in a mental hospital. She laughed about it now,
mimicking her Trichotillomania, how she pulled her hairs out one by one. She
told me about the nurses with fat, frowning lips
who
injected her with sedatives when she started to scream.

"You need to practice your coping mechanisms," she
said, mocking their sweet-sick voices, "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as
your personal savior?"

She told me about how they attached her to machines that she
thought were singing her lullabies in the night, via tiny voices rattling
through electrical nodes. How she told other patients she was their
deliverance; a robot-god imbued with a divine message. One woman fell trembling
in front of her, in dazed worship, and had to be carted away by frantic,
chittering nurses.

“I’m better now,” Momma said.
 
“There was no way I’d stay for long in a
place like that.”

I should’ve seen the warning signs. Her pills disappeared
from the kitchen counter. She started staying up at night, unable to sleep,
even when the moon wasn’t full. Once, during a reading, her hands shook as she
gripped the wolf book and a seizure passed across her face. For a moment, only
a moment, she forgot her story. I was the only one who noticed, but on the ride
back home, she sat listless, like her head was barren.

“The best storytellers die young before they learn how to
forget,” she said.

Before, she used to let me roam everywhere by myself,
telling me warriors learned to forge their own paths. If mother’s stayed too
close, they created children that were chained and fearful. Yet now, she
started to hover, pulling me into her robe.

“Don’t stay out too late. Monsters eat the best children,”
she said in a hushed, crackling voice.

One night I awoke to find her sitting on the windowsill near
my bed, with the window cracked open and the cool night air blowing through. It
was quiet. She held her breath and stretched out her claw-cracked hands.

“Momma?”

I sat up and pulled my blankets around me. She let her
star-sewn robe fall to the floor; underneath she wore a stained nightgown,
exposing her scratched collarbones. Her eyes reflected like animal eyes in the
light, and when she spoke, her tongue bled.

“Did you know, on the night you were born all my father’s
horses died? Their necks caught in the barbed wire fence behind the barn. Their
legs chewed by wolves.”

I drew my legs up underneath the blanket. The room had grown
small, too small, and the window bared at me like an angry wolf's mouth.

"I want you to know where we came from, baby."

I thought if I moved the window would chew me apart.

"We were once great hunters, and we can be again. This
world isn't meant for us. I've seen the place where your great-grandmother
tread
cloven-hoofed over the grass. She had eyes like wet
diamonds and she sang in a language
forgotten,
so
beautiful it would cause her prey to lay down, paralyzed, in the grass for her
to kill. She killed a great snake, a python,
who
fed
on virgin's blood and had terrorized a village for hundreds of years; its skin
became her crown. They worshipped her as a goddess."

Momma rose from the windowsill and moved toward me. I
suddenly didn't want her to touch me, the way she rubbed her fingers together,
violently, until her nails broke. She must've seen me seize up, and stopped at
the foot of the bed.

"Are you listening? Because this isn't a story."

"I'm listening," I whispered.

"When I was pregnant I knew you were a girl, because of
how fiercely you kicked. You are my little huntress. When you were inside me, I
was followed by fire. When I left the hospital after a sonogram, half of the
building burned to the ground. I started to have dreams of you and the lives
you lived before.

"Would you like to know? Would you like to know who you
once were?"

"No," I said.

I didn't dare raise my voice. Was this my Momma who stood
before me, speaking in this dark language, in a voice like boiling water?

She reached for me, as if to smooth the hair from my face,
but then suddenly stopped. Her body shook as if electrified. She stood
paralyzed for a second. Two.

“Momma?

“Oh god, you hear that? She’s gotten into the refrigerator,”
she said.

She tore out of the room and down the stairs. I heard the
refrigerator door as she slammed it against the wall. I heard the food hitting
the floor as she threw it out, then the bottles, then the water purifier. She
screamed, an inhuman wail that went on and on.

The next morning I crept downstairs expecting to find a
murder scene, the wolf Fenrir's fur in the window jam and my momma's severed
hand on the kitchen tiles. But there was only Momma, humming and cooking French
toast. She wore her robe of stars and her Wolf-Book sat on the counter beside
her. There was no food on the floor, no broken glass. Everything had been
cleared away.

She tried to hand me a plate of French toast, but I didn't
take it. I searched her for battle scars, missing fingers. Nothing. I started
to tremble.

"Are you not feeling well?" she asked, setting the
plate on the counter.

She pulled me to her, smoothing my hair, feeling my temple.

"You feel fine. But it's been too long since we've had
a sick day together. I'll cancel."

She whisked her Wolf-Book away. We ate breakfast outside on
the porch, in sunlight. Everything seemed so far away. My hands out of
proportion to my body, the glass of orange juice a thousand years away. She
told me it was a lovely morning, a fine morning, and the flowers were beginning
to bloom. She and I would go to the fields, out in the woods, and pick them
together. We could weave garlands for our heads.

Maybe last night had been a dream.

But the next night she was back at my windowsill with her
eyes ringed red. She ripped out blank pages from her Wolf Book and scattered
them across my bedroom floor.

"The Nightcatcher knows we're here," she said.
"The Wormwood star led her to us. I don't have much time."

"Momma? Are you still taking your medicine?" I
asked.

She sat down on the edge of my bed, took both of my hands
and clasped them between hers.

"In my dreams, you were the daughter of a witch, and
the two of you lived in a cottage out in the woods. She taught you to walk
between reality and dreams. The village folk nearby called you deer-girl,
because of how silent and quick you were. Nobody could catch you, or see you,
if you didn't want them to. Every day you were becoming less and less human.
You made your own hunting bow from a great black cedar. You could strike a deer
in the heart and kill it instantly. You wore the blood and bones of a stag so
the does would follow you, believing you to be one of them. Once a king came
into the village, demanding your hand in marriage, your soul, because you were
beautiful and powerful. With an arrow, you struck the crown from his head. You
forced him to kneel before you and promise never to bother you again.

"When you came of age, The Nightcatcher arrived in the
village looking for you. She is made of night and eats the stars for
nourishment."

"She's evil," I said, despite my effort to ignore
her, the story taking hold of me.

"Not evil, but selfish and powerful. You would know her
by the cities she ruined that sat upon her shoulders, and by the river that
ushers from her mouth whenever she speaks. The Wormwood star belongs to her,
her emissary, and it poisons the earth at her command. It took all the gods to
drive her from the sky, so she made her home in the underground place, between
hell and earth.
In the hush place.
The night sky used
to be so much brighter in the old days. That is, until she took half of the
stars and brought them down into the hush place with her to light the walls.
She captured heroes and great hunters and made them slaves.
To
play with.
To amuse her.
That's why she came
looking for you."

"But she didn't get me," I said.

Tell me she didn't get me.

"You could best a king with your strength, but not The Nightcatcher.
She collected rooms and rooms of heroes to enslave as her pets. She played with
gods like they were children. She hunted you in your own forest, like you
hunted the stag. She was fast upon you. She twisted your dream world so that it
no longer belonged to you. It became a labyrinth of nightmares. She took the
ground from underneath you. There was no escape."

"That's it?" I said.

"No, baby.
Because you are clever, as
well as strong.
Just as The Nightcatcher was upon you, you cut your
shadow from your body. It grew into the shape of a girl, your dark-half with
night for hair and eyes. The Nightcatcher seized the shadow, and you were
free."

When Momma finished her story, a great and empty noise
roared in my head. My momma's eyes were like swirling plates. I felt hot, a
fever slamming into my skin.

"It's taken a thousand years, baby, but she's back for
us. And you've only got one shadow."

I shivered in her stare and waited for the moon to collapse.

***

She insisted that I go with her to her next storytelling. I
sat in the front row of a sloped auditorium, next to the teachers. She crossed
the brightly lit stage holding her Wolf-Book and magic staff.

She wore the gazelle skull to hide her face.

"Once there was a girl, the daughter of a gravedigger,
who was known for her ability to talk to the dead. She used to sit in the piles
of bones and whisper to them for long hours until they gave up all their
secrets. It was even rumored that, in the nighttime, that special time when the
sky was dark and the moon gone, she assembled the bones and, together, they
danced in the graveyards. She fell in love with a boy with blue eyes like cloud
light, with dancing sparks for fingertips. She taught him how to speak to the
dead. “Be quiet,” she said, “and they will sit on gravestones. The trick is to
be quiet."

Momma lurched forward. She was trembling all over, and her
eyes were red and raw underneath the mask.

"Do you know why we tell stories?" she asked the
children.

She no longer spoke like Saga, the storyteller, wise and
calm. No, this was a new voice. An older voice, that spoke from the
bone, that
shifted underneath the dirt with blisters on its
tongue.

The teacher sitting next to me squirmed in her seat. She had
nails ready to chew away. She whispered to the man next to her. I wanted to run
up to the stage, drag Momma away, and pull the mask off her face. I could
scream at her, “You are not my mother. I want the voices back that I remember.”

But I stayed where I was, and Momma continued speaking.

"Plato once said that storytelling was a sin because it
mocked true creation. Stories would lead people away from wisdom. But Plato was
an old fool who spit on the backs of his slaves and called it philosophy.
Stories are the essence of human experience. They teach us where we've come
from and who we can be. Storytellers are not only here to entertain, but to
give you a chance in the fight for reproduction. Through stories you learn to
avoid eating the blue mushrooms. To pray to the right gods."

The children’s silence was like a whip.

"It's why you feel so cheated when a story ends badly.
What was supposed to become a guide for you to successfully route through life,
has become a dead-end. A husk. It isn't just the story that dies, but you who
dies
with it.

“So what happened to the little girl and the boy who fell in
love in the cemetery? They who danced with the dead? Should I give you a comfortable
evil to fight?
Perhaps a jealous suitor, with mined coal for
a heart?
A bitter grave-digging father, who buries the boy in a crypt so
that the girl must free him?"

No, I mouthed. No. I don't know what you're planning but
nothing good could ever come from that deepening voice, that skull mask.

"You shouldn't trust a comfortable story. You should
know by now that only the heroes get to win, and even then, one day they will
come across a force so great and so vast that they're consumed by it. I want
you to know that the boy brought together the bones of a dead thing to dance
with him in the moonlight. But it was not a dead thing at all; it was an old
god with a mouth of crystals. With hands forged in the fires underneath the
Great Mountain that burned anything they touched.

“Every story you will ever be told will be a story of
possession. Every story will be about a love that you throw a chain around to
keep, and the thing that can steal her away. The boy was not ready to confront
the world of the dead, and he could do nothing to fight back. The old god
touched him and burned him alive. The girl felt him die, and awoke with a start
in her bed. She ran across the meadows and fields to the cemetery. She tried to
bargain with the god. She was reduced to one long shivering scream. ‘I will do
anything you want to bring him back.’ The god laughed. ‘I am older than the DNA
that was formed at the beginning of the universe to sew together your fingers.
You have nothing I want.’ Then the god threw her in an open grave and buried
her alive."