We are Wormwood (6 page)

Laughing.

I often stayed at Phaedra’s house after Charlie’s death. She
let me throw knives at her old boy-band posters; I got to be a pretty good
shot. I could drink her mother’s vodka as long as I filled the empty space with
water afterwards.

On her bed she clutched a book between her knees called
“Beautiful Killers: Carnivorous Plants of the World.” She cradled a Venus
Flytrap
in her arms.

Phaedra was somewhat of a legend in town. She ran from the
cops by crossing a muddy creek, in Valentino heels, branches in her hair, and
weed in her purse. She looked the epitome of a gothic Americana princess; her
eyes like Oklahoma Dust Bowls, her cheeks Great Depression sharp. And she ran
faster than any boy, even in Valentino heels and a torn dress.

I always knew her as the girl who grew up faster than the
rest of us. She sat with boys in the back of her mother’s Volkswagen in her
muddy heels, naked from the waist up, smoking a cigarette that turned her teeth
the color of spit. She made the boys dress up in her skirts and lipstick before
she went down on them. She whispered grim and romantically cliché things in
between their legs. Things like, “Each heartbeat brings us closer to death,” or
“This is the last chance we’ll ever have to be truly alive.”

From a young age, Phaedra’s mother, like mine, had done a
disappearing act. Whereas my mother was insane and refused to believe it,
Phaedra’s mother couldn't get enough of being crazy. For the majority of her
adult life, she lounged in doctor’s waiting rooms and therapists’ couches. For
years she lay upside down in bed, high on codeine and clonazepam, watching
foreign films.

“Dear, bring me a headache pill,” Phaedra said, mocking her
mother. “Bring me that ‘Singing in the Rain’ DVD. Bring me a hit of acid.”

Phaedra’s mom used to be a fashion designer in Paris. Or
maybe she once had a dream that she was a fashion designer in Paris, I couldn’t
quite remember. Phaedra insisted she remembered being backstage during Fashion
Week as a child, while her mother fitted sixteen-year-old anemic girls with
dresses made from razor blades.

“The sicker the better, that’s what she used to say,” said
Phaedra. “Real beauty is a reptile. My momma used to nurse me while they
snorted cocaine. The designers and the hairstylists and the models, they all
did blow together. Momma turned into a monster on cocaine. Her hair stood up on
end. Put the models in dresses two sizes too small and bloodied their backs.”

Phaedra snorted.

“And now she thinks she’s so righteous. She’s grown up.
Matured, right? Whatever. She just can’t afford blow anymore. She caught me
once in my room with some Russian exchange student. She wanted me to go to
therapy, just because I made him wear a dress before we fucked. You know, the
shiny silver one? He looked good in it. Anyways, can you believe her? Go to
therapy? Like Hell!”

“They always want you to go to therapy,” I said.

Shortly after the Russian exchange student ordeal, Phaedra
met her true love: a Venus flytrap with moist little mouths, planted in a red
glazed pot and purchased for a dollar at a farmer’s market. She shut the boys
out of her room. She stopped smoking in the backseat of cars and reciting
gothic faux philosophy to devote more time to tending to the carnivorous plants
she kept in her room. They were monstrous plants with unhinged jaws that waited
for insects to land on their velvet lips. They lined her desk and windowsill.
She slept with them in her bed.

“Why the plants” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, “they’re pretty.”

Of course, I thought, the gothic Americana princess would
think of the moist, carnal, wet innards of a carnivorous plant as pretty.

Soon the common Venus
Flytrap
wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted the big leafy demons of plants that ate
deer and jaguar
;
the roped, sweet smelling bellflowers
that housed stomachfulls of half-digested children.
 
She dreamed of owning the legendary
Madagascar Man-Eating Tree, a roped veiny myth of a tree with serpents for
limbs that tore off people’s heads and digested them whole. One of these days I
would find her being eaten alive.

But seeing that would be better than going to school to have
children throw rocks at me, or having my teachers tell me that Schizophrenia
was like the modern Greek cannibal’s curse. In five years time, they said, I’d
be eating my mother like Tantalus ate his son. I’d butcher her, cook her in a
stew, and then try to feed her to Zeus.

That myth, of course, I’d learned about from Charlie and his
books.

I dreamed of him sometimes, shivering wet on the edge of my
bed. His chubby pale skin turned blue. Not dead, but trapped in Hades with a
silent, lipless mouth.
A sleepwalker on the ground and a
sleepwalker underneath the water.

I dreamed of the pomegranate he fed to me, and sometimes
when I awoke in the middle of the night, I thought he came back from the river
and slipped it underneath my sheets.
 

“Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.”

“Phaedra, something’s after me.”

She turned the glossy page of Beautiful Killers.

“There’s this girl,” I said, and then paused,
 
“well, I’ve never told anyone this. I
don’t really know where to begin.”

I scratched at my knees, but I didn’t feel it.

“I’ve known her for a long time.”

For once Phaedra set her book down. I continued.

“She tormented Charlie. She made him chase her. It was like
a game to her. But I think she was only trying to get to me through him.”

“Yeah, well. Good riddance.”

“Forget it,” I said.

I went home and Momma found me in the kitchen with my head
in my hands, tears ebbing at my eyelids. She said, “Baby girl, warriors don’t
cry,” and held her arms out toward me.

“Someone left this for you,” she said.

In her arms she held a stuffed teddy bear.
A pink ribbon around its neck.
Ears singed.

THAT
NIGHT I WENT
to the woods and found her dead tree. It shuddered as I
spilled gasoline over its hollowed out trunk. The insects screamed when I
wedged the fireworks inside. A fat, silver beetle landed on the back of my
hand. The rest of the insects - centipedes, spiders, and roly-polies - scurried
away across my feet.

I knelt in the dirt and struck the first match. I threw it
on the ground but it didn’t catch. The silver beetle crawled up my arm. My
neck. It had the demon’s eyes lodged in its back. I lit a second match.

The tree burned slowly at first. The fire started at the
base, where the wood was the soggiest. The tree burned so slow and pale, I
thought the fire might die out. I knelt and blew on it. The roots, poking out
of the ground like grafted bones, caught fire as well, curled inwards and
turned blue.

The flames shot up the trunk. It seared an angry face on the
wood and climbed higher. I took a step back, nearly tripping in the dark.

I didn’t want to look away and miss anything.

I stood in the hunched shadow of the tree as the trunk split
apart. I threw my head back and spots burst in my eyes as the limbs burned. The
fire unrolled them like scrolls and they crashed to the ground at my feet.

The fireworks went off and the tree exploded, showering me
in silver sparks. They struck my face, my arms. The heat felt good. I could’ve
been blinded, but I didn’t care, I was crazed by Phaedra’s vodka and Mommy’s
schizophrenia that night. I wanted the demon to come screeching out of the
woods so I could spit in her eyes and rub dirt in her face. I’d laugh as I spun
her around by her thick black hair, taunting her, “Do you remember when I crawled
in here to find you? I hope you burn with what’s left.”

This was your real funeral, Charlie. This was the best I
could do.

The beetle crawled onto my face. I slapped it away. In my
peripheral vision I saw her silhouette appear. She held the funereal veil, and
when I turned towards her, she threw it over my face. I tore it away and it
fell into the fire.

CRACK. The branches broke and crumbled. A wounded moan
escaped from the demon’s throat.

She ran through the trees; I chased after her. Branches
reached out to grab me, like in a bad fairy-tale. I twisted my ankle in the
dirt. Sparks flew off my fingers. I grabbed her hair but it hissed like a
rattler, so I let go. I chased her to the edge of the woods and she leapt
across the barbed wire.

She fled down the street, into my yard, and then climbed up
the side of the house to my mother’s bedroom window. She pressed a finger to
her lips, as if to say “Shh,” then climbed through my window.
 

I tore the door open, ran into the kitchen, and grabbed a
paring knife. Upstairs, Momma screamed. I ran to the top of the stairs and
burst into her room with smoke in my hair and fireworks on my tongue. A storm
of ash and flowers blew through my Momma’s room. She sat at her vanity with the
demon hunched over her, whispering as she set something down in front of her.

A dead bird.

Momma wept with the gazelle skull cradled in her arms.

“Fucking creep,” I said.

I lunged at the demon. She snatched the knife away from me
as if with no effort at all. Momma continued to weep, not even looking up from
her vanity. The demon chased me into the hallway.

I ran toward the stairs, but before I could go down a single
step, her hair hissed behind me. I hesitated for only a moment, but that was
too long. The demon threw me against the wall and pinned me with her throat.

“Our tree,” she whispered.

“Life’s a bitch, bitch,” I said.

I forced a smile.

She poised the knife at my face, her pupils growing,
growing. Her eyes were bigger than a twin cosmos. Momma started screaming
again. “Poison.” Screamed. “POISON.”

I’d never seen the demon’s face this close before. I
expected a gnashing vampire, a howling dog, a face with Moscow and bitter
winters written in the veins. Not this soft and wounded girl; not unlike Baby
Arachne dying in the flowers, mouth puckered, breathing quietly as her eyes
grew.

She dropped the knife at my feet.

“Calm down,” she said.

She opened her hand and blew ash and sparks into my face.

“I could be your slave.”

***

The demon fled and Momma stopped screaming. She sat at her vanity,
tying on her gazelle skull mask with ash and branches in her hair.

“Baby girl,” The Exorcist said, “go play outside.”

I went outside so my mother could play dress-up and clean
the house until she bled. I expected the demon to wait for me in the dark,
maybe with a blade on her tongue and my mother’s skin in her teeth, but she was
gone.

A police siren wailed, and a fire truck sped past. The sky
over the woods appeared dark orange. A column of smoke billowed upwards.

Surely they’d be after me soon. They’d find the empty quart
of gasoline beside the burning tree. They’d smell the ash and smoke in my hair
and pluck the matches out of my pocket.

I ran toward the river. I ran as if a shadow pursued me.
Maybe this was how Charlie felt when he sleepwalked - sleeping but not sleeping
- amorphous shapes charging at him in the periphery of his vision.
A dark, disembodied claw.
A demon.
Nothing
at all.
The back matter going black in the brain.

Maybe if I looked down I’d see a cat-o-nine tails gripped in
my hand. Thwack!
Blood in my ears.

I passed through the tall weeds to the bridge where the
river ran purple. I leaned against the side of the bridge and tossed the
matches.

My cigarettes and my lighter had to go too. There couldn’t
be any evidence on me. I fumbled in my jacket until I found them.

I tossed them into the water, shaking. I couldn’t help but
think of the time Charlie and I smoked together in my mother’s car, thinking we
were so dangerous. I couldn’t give him that bouquet of blue flowers at his
funeral; a pack of cigarettes was more fitting anyway.

I leaned over the edge of the bridge, almost expecting his
voice to bubble up to the surface. The demon said I could’ve jumped in to save
him. Yes, I could’ve saved him.

A roaring noise swelled in my ears. I wondered if Momma ever
came down here to speak to the gods, to The Nightcatcher. You could hear
anything you wanted in the noise of this place. I leaned closer to the water as
the wind sucked my hair down.

I could’ve saved him.

But baby, you don’t understand, it’s pitch down there.

IT
WAS MY SIXTEENTH
birthday and the librarian
was
in
love with me. He recommended I read Bukowski because, in spite of him being a
misogynistic asshole, he was a brilliant writer. I told him there was no “in
spite of”. Bukowski hated women and was therefore probably a terrible fuck,
which made him a terrible writer.

It was my sixteenth birthday and my science teacher asked
me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I told him a biologist and he said, “You have to pass
science class to be a scientist.”

I don’t remember his name anymore. Mr. Sands or Mr. Sick or
some other sort of noun with an “S”, a kind of name that made me taste
everything sour if I said it. He had a face to match his sour name, and sour,
yellow-nailed hands. After class I tore up my science textbook in the hallway
and threw it in the trashcan; I promised myself I’d never go back to school
again.

It was my sixteenth birthday and my mother did not bring me
a present or bake me a cake. Instead she took me into her bedroom where she lay
out her half-melted ceramic sculptures she wanted to sell in Mexico. She told
me they were sculptures of dead men with their faces being eaten by sea
monsters.