Authors: Autumn Christian
The flowers jostled inside my head. My shadow walked the
path in front of me, and she kissed the blue azaleas, kissed my bleeding
hooves.
Pluto slipped in between my feet, mewling. Her wormwood
eyes
were
a map of the woods
. My
woods. I followed her through trees. I drank from the water that formed, heavy
and crystalline, on cupped leaves. Pluto sipped droplets from my fingers.
It was nighttime at the end of the path, star-time, glowing
bright enough to leave a bruise. The woods dropped into deep space. Mercury
with her burnt face rose above the trees, her eyes mad celestial marble, her
lips made of hot-blooded craters. Mars stood behind her with a frozen crown of
twin moons - Phobos and Deimos - vampire asteroids.
The demon promised me a palace of living jewels, but there
was more out there than either of us imagined. I didn’t need a throne, I didn’t
need to eat rubies that dripped like juice, or keep slaves that licked at my
cuts. Not when I could be the first scientist to float to the edge of the
cosmos, picking up planets in my gravity. Maybe beyond the trees I’d find
Wormwood. I could chart a new course there and back. I would give its poison to
every punk girl, loser, and child murderess, and its secrets could no longer
harm us.
And when I opened my mouth, I could swallow the world, cover
continents in my saliva. I'd breathe new colors onto the dirty, polluted
waters.
I smiled, and the demon inside me smiled.
I kept going.
If you enjoyed
We
are Wormwood (or
want to express to me your displeasure), feel free to leave a review at
Goodreads
or
Amazon
.
You can also contact me personally at
[email protected]
or visit my website at
www.autumnchristian.net
.
Read on for a short story I’ve written exclusively for the
novel.
IN
MY STRANGE GARDEN
lives a man-eating tree with limbs of snakes. When I take
my midnight walks through the garden, it rears its writhing head above the
walls, an oscillating hissing mass of fanged mouths and veined muscles. The
tree calls my name in fourteen languages, one for each head.
Phaedra.
Phaedra, let me tell you the things I’ve devoured today.
I open my arms and the snakes come to me, slithering through
dust, through the air, through fuchsia roses I planted years ago that never
wither. They sniff my arms and my neck. I throw my head back. Some of them rest
their heads on my chest and warm themselves. Their bodies are cool and black,
like the membranous bark of a tree’s trunk. Others wrap around my legs, my
thighs. They embrace me tightly and lift me off the ground. They rock me in the
soft cradle.
She is the great Madagascar Tree, the hungry Ya-te-veo of
the Mdoko tribe. Ya-te-veo means “I see you already,” and she once lived as a
goddess in the jungle, thirstier than bloody Kali. Now she lives with me.
Phaedra, you’ve never known love like this.
I was born in Georgia, but Mama taught me to say I was born
in Paris. Mama was thin and always shaking. She listened to French tapes but
never learned to say anything except Bonsoir, and Comment allez-vous? And
anorexie. The last one means, of course, anorexia.
“Beauty in sickness. You’ll understand when you’re older,”
she said, “real beauty is a reptile.”
She told me she was a fashion designer in Paris. She nursed
me while she fitted children with dresses made of razor blades, crystals, and
lace. They were girls as young as twelve, recruited from poor villages in such
places as the Ukraine and Estonia.
Easier to control that
way.
Once healthy, now anemic and starved from
pressure.
When they bent over so Mama could tie them into their dresses,
their bones pushed against their skin like angry faces.
“Mama, none of this is true,” I said.
“Does it need to be?” she said, and collapsed onto the
couch, “bring me another headache pill, my baby.”
Headache pill meant codeine. Mama loved her drugs. For a
while she even did cocaine with her therapist as some sort of “experimental
therapy.” She’d come home laughing and sniffing and grinding her teeth
together. She talked so fast that I couldn’t understand anything she said,
except “breakthrough”. Another breakthrough. Half an hour later she’d lock
herself in the bathroom and start screaming. She sat on the floor and kicked at
the bathtub until the plaster broke.
That didn’t last long, because experimental therapy is
expensive and the alimony ran out. Back to codeine and klonopin. Downers suited
my mother better anyways. She wrapped herself in a towel from the dryer and lay
down in front of the television for hours. She looked so warm.
The most important thing Mama taught me was this:
You don’t have to be the stupid girl born in dust-choked
Georgia. Born in the backseat of a broken-down Chrysler twenty miles away from
the city while your father, or what was left of him, is trying to wave down
passing vehicles. You don’t have to be the girl who came out of the womb under
the eyes of a man who drove up in a tractor. The only man who stopped for you,
a redneck with tobacco spit dribbling down into his beard, wearing coveralls
coated in dust and grime, chipped fingernails, cancer-spots on his tongue.
He never had to say, “That’s going to be an ugly girl
someday,” when I came out, crying and wheezing.
So when I went to school for the first time, I became the
girl from Paris. I didn’t know the first thing about Paris, except that it meant
elegance - haute couture and coffee shop beignets. It meant I’d slipped into
the pulsing center of something significant. I could be a writer, like
Hemingway or Gertrude Stein or Sartre. I could model in cold dresses underneath
cold cameras, thinning into a sick, scale-flecked beauty. I could be homeless
on a street corner, wearing the same thin cotton dress for five years, begging
for change so that I could buy a bottle of wine. I could be the wife who sat in
the corner of a living room, holding my cat, Miss Margot, knitting sweaters for
children that never came. Whatever I chose, I would be safe from the factory
smoke of this small town.
From crying during every Father’s day.
From becoming my mother.
I drew the outline of who I wanted to be over my door and I
forced my body to grow into its shape.
Let me tell you the things I’ve devoured today.
Once, in middle school, I was applying my mascara in the
bathroom when Samantha Hall charged in, slamming the bathroom door.
She was a dark-haired cheerleader. She was a lightning
factory, always charged, bursting in and out of rooms and breaking doors. She
slipped across the floor in her hurry to get to me and point her finger, with
its nail-bitten cinnamon red polish, in my face.
“Stay away from my boyfriend, you fucking Jezebel.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t given Samantha Hall’s boyfriend
a second thought. I put down the mascara, but before I could respond, she
whirled around and charged for the bathroom exit. Slam. The door swung shut. I
heard her stomping down the hallway. I turned back to the mirror and touched my
cheek, accidentally smearing mascara on my skin.
I imagined myself a Jezebel. I wondered if I owned the face
of a Jezebel - dark skin, rouge cheekbones. I wondered if I could be a princess
of Baal, a slut,
a
whore who danced on the decapitated
heads of men. I wondered if I had the eyes for a whore.
The
lips, pursed.
Then slightly parted.
Maybe with a vampy
lipstick, smoky eyes.
I could drift in and out of opium dens and the
bedrooms of kings - laughing. Yes. A Jezebel.
The smell of cigarette smoke drifted out from one of the
stalls.
“Lily,” I said, “give me one or I’m telling.”
“Fuck,” she said.
I’d known her since we were in preschool - she lived across
the street in the haunted house. I used to wish we could trade places, because
her mother wore a velvet cloak like a queen and talked to me like an adult.
Then her mother went crazy and ended up in the hospital, thought a monster
followed her. She tore her cloak apart and grew blisters on her tongue. Lily
grew into a dirty kid who smoked too much and hung out with the neighborhood
weirdoes.
She started fucking the school janitor too. Or, at least
that’s what I heard.
She passed me a cigarette underneath the stall. I slipped it
into my purse and left.
Later at a house party, I found Samantha Hall’s boyfriend,
drunk on blue Mad Dog. Amateur move. A football player, if you can get any more
cliché.
Kind of skinny, but with broad shoulders and a broad
chest.
He had a Georgia peach kind of smile. He stood by the stereo and
a broken houseplant, surrounded by his football team friends.
When he went to the bathroom, I waited a few moments and
slipped in after him. He was trying to piss, his hand against the wall to
steady
himself
. He left grimy, soaked handprints against
the wallpaper.
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. I took out the
cigarette Lily gave me a few hours ago.
“Do you have a lighter?” I asked.
In the mirror I caught his reflection. His eyes rolled back
in his head, trying to escape. Strange, how drunken men resembled sick dogs.
“Hey,” I said, “I asked you a question.”
“I know what you’re doing,” he said, “I have a girlfriend”
“We’re only fifteen,” I said. “Do you want to be dead before
we’re alive?”
It sounded like something a Jezebel would say. In truth I
stole the line from Sartre.
He finished pissing. He stumbled a bit, knocking over the
soap holder on the counter. Some poor girl’s parents were going to ground her
for the rest of her life after this party.
“Lighter?” I said.
He moved toward me, trying to zip up his pants.
“So what you’re telling me is that this wouldn’t be
cheating.”
“I’m saying you shouldn’t care.”
“About Samantha?”
“Who?”
The cigarette broke against his chest and pieces of tobacco
crumbled and fell down my shirt.
I leaned back to check my reflection in the mirror. Yes,
that lipstick would do fine.
Up close his Georgia fuzziness melted away. He was a sharp
mass of limbs, all bony elbows and bony knees. He was a bad kisser.
The next day, Samantha Hall came screaming into the bathroom
with the rest of her cheerleader friends. She could’ve knocked over a radio
tower with her frequency. She slapped me, and my ears started to ring. A taste,
like salt, rushed into my mouth. I fell backwards into the bathroom sink and
grabbed the faucet to try and steady myself.
“Fucking slut,” Samantha Hall said. “Whore.”
“So what? At least I wouldn’t be caught dead in that stupid
dress you’re wearing.”
She spit on me. Her friends, like a carousel of skinny,
teeth-bared animals, spit on me. They pulled my hair until it tore. I slapped
Samantha Hall in the face, leaving a blushing red mark.
Another
round of curses.
Slut. Whore. Like a Hindu mantra, calming almost, as
the words lost all meaning.
“We’re only fifteen,” I kept repeating. “We’re only
fifteen.”
Samantha Hall hit me across the nose. Blood spattered her
knuckles. They ran.
I leaned against the sink and spit blood. I avoided looking
at my reflection, afraid they’d wiped off my lipstick and mascara, afraid I’d
look and see a monster,
Lily came out of a bathroom stall, smelling like weed.
“Wow. That’s going to leave a bruise,” she said.
I leaned my head against the sink. Cool.
“Is that all you can say?” I said, gritting my teeth, “and
you stink. You’re not subtle, at all.”
I wouldn’t cry because I was from Paris. I was the other
woman, the dark half thief who could disappear into mirrors, boudoirs. Look at
this mouth; I’ll eat you alive.
“Let’s skip fourth period,” Lily said, “I’ll take you home.”
I wiped the blood off my face with a wet tissue, and we snuck
out the side entrance, behind the buses, where the hall monitors wouldn’t be
waiting. We ran across the street and climbed over barbed wire, into the woods,
to take the shortcut home.
We went into my kitchen. I warmed a towel with hot water and
pressed it to my face.
“Want any help?” Lily asked.
“No.”
“Want any weed?”
“No.”
Mama came out of her bedroom, one towel wrapped around her
head and one around her body. Her eyes might as well have been Percocet pills.
“Oh hello, Lily,” Mama said.
Mama did not notice the bruise welling up on my face, or my
nose crusted with blood.
Miss Margot slunk through the kitchen. She scratched at the
door, and before I could speak, Lily opened the door.
“Don’t let her out.”
Miss Margot dashed out into the garden.
“Oh, stupid. Sorry,” Lily said.
I wanted to lash out at her, but I couldn’t speak because a
blinding pain crushed the bones in my face. I thought that, if I opened my
mouth, my jaw might swell and burst my teeth. I went into Mama’s bedroom and
stole one of her Percocet pills. I swallowed it without water.
While I waited for the Percocet to kick in I went back into
the kitchen. Lily pulled a frozen blueberry pie out of the fridge.
“Can I eat this?” she asked my mama.
Without waiting for an answer, Lily sat down at the table
and started eating it with her fingers. Her grimy, dirt stained fingers with
her encrusted nails. Stupid punk kid, she’d probably go to hell and back and
refuse to wash her hands before her next meal.
“Want a glass of milk, baby?” my Mama asked Lily.
The Percocet must’ve started to kick in. I felt trapped
behind a warm, rippling mirror. I didn’t belong in my life anymore, if I ever
did. I could not be the redneck from Georgia, and I could not be the socialite
from Paris. I’d built myself up from a simulacrum. I did not know my favorite
color or my favorite food. I only knew what people expected me to be. How
easily anyone could tear me apart, because I had never really existed.