“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.
Chapter Nine
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.
Chapter Ten
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.
“Before I met your father, I was an artist,” she said, and when she smiled, I saw she was wearing her purple lipstick. She’d gone mad again.
She touched my face.
“You’re not looking well, baby,” she said.
“Do you remember what day it is?” I asked her.
“Wednesday,” my mother said, dancing the scissor electric with one of her melted sculptures.
“Yeah,” I said, voice soft, “Wednesday.”
It was my sixteenth birthday and the only person to come visit me was Phaedra, who gave me a Venus Flytrap she named Terrance.
“Take care of him, he’s a shy one,” Phaedra said, and then she left.
It was my sixteenth birthday and, on my dresser beside my newly acquired carnivorous plant, I lined up forty benzodiazepines I’d bought from a fourteen-year-old drug dealer. But by the time I’d set them all out, the thought of having to swallow them seemed more tedious than it was worth. So I grabbed Pluto, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed.
The lights flickered on.
“Happy Birthday,” the demon said.
The demon sat in a rocking chair beside the window, hair lush and spilling from her shoulders, one thin leg draped over the chair’s wooden arm. She smoked a cigarette she stole from the pack on my windowsill as the chair creeeaked.
“I brought you a present,” she said.
She motioned toward the bureau, where she’d laid out a dress.
It was not a dress made of silk or cotton, but of insects; butterflies, spiders, and roly-polies, stitched together and gleaming more delicately than lace. Such a dress must've taken months to sew. I imagined the demon going through the woods with a killing jar, capturing insects and smothering them. I saw her sitting in a burnt out husk of a tree, sewing them together with her antenna-like fingers, singing softly to herself by rubbing her legs together.
"Put it on,” she said.
I pointed toward the door.
“Get out,” I said.
She lifted her head and wormwood took me.
It was as if she’d reached into my skull with phantom limbs and set it on fire. I sat back down on my bed, trembling. My hand dropped to my side and my head tilted back. I was at once boneless and bloodless. Warmth spread throughout my body.
The demon held her hand toward my cat. Pluto jumped from my lap to hers. She buried her face in Pluto’s thick fur. She whispered to her in half-language and Pluto purred.
I’d had this dream so many times. My cat and the demon conspiring against me, the demon scratching at my window. In my dreams, wherever she touched me she paralyzed me, and inside, I cried for help.
Yet now with it happening, all I could think was:
Thank God.
Thank God this will soon be over.
The demon opened her hand and, from her palm, spilled chewed up, withered pomegranate seeds.
She repeated her command with smoke spilling out of her mouth.
“Put.
It.
On.”
The smoke enveloped me. I became a bubble of warm honey. For the first time in days, my headache went away and the pressure behind my eyes disappeared. I was no longer Lily, sixteen-year-old screw-up, child murderer. I was a glowing vessel, soft and malleable.
She hypnotized me. Her voice had hypnotized me.
I stood up, swimming. Everything seemed so easy. The air pooled around me like still water, the dull colors of the room became vibrant. I slipped out of my clothes and the air cooled on my skin, pulling at the tiny hairs on my arms.
The demon dressed me. I pulled my hair in front of me, and she laced up the back of the dress. Her nails tapped against my spine, clicking like mandibles, as she pulled against the laces.
“You are beautiful,” she said.
In the mirror, the insects were bigger than me, more real than me. The spiders at my throat were engorged and brilliant with colors. I didn’t look like the grubby urchin that Miss Catherine chased out of her rose garden, or like the schoolgirl with burnt fingers the science teacher said would never amount to anything.
"I look like you," I said, my voice a whisper.
We went into the street and Pluto followed. I walked on the hot pavement in my bare feet as the dress swayed, butterflies rubbing against my skin.
We went into the abandoned lot and she lifted the train of my dress so that I could climb over the barbed wire fence. Even though I’d climbed that fence a thousand times, more than a thousand, I cut my bare foot on a barb.
I felt the pain as a far away thing, a sensation that didn’t pierce the warmth surrounding my body. Even pain could be a safe thing, a golden thing.
I bled and we kept going.
We followed a light through the woods, a fairy light that flickered and hovered like something alive. The woods stretched out further than they ever had before, railroad tracks and factory smoke rings, gone. We walked across the burnt remains of her tree.
Pluto mewed at my feet. Her wormwood eyes shone more fiercely than I'd ever seen them shine before.
At the end of the tunnel we came to a dining table in a clearing. The fairy light floated in the center of the table. Up close, I saw it for what it was: an orb of fireflies stitched together and tethered to the table.
"Won't you sit down?" the demon said, and directed me toward a carved bone chair.
I melted into the chair. I don’t know why I’d never been here before. I belonged in this chair.
The demon lifted up a glass of what appeared to be red wine. It shone brighter than the fireflies, mottled and glowing.
"Have a drink,” she said.
She had to place the glass in my hands and close my fingers around the stem.
"Happy birthday to me,” I said, the words bubbling up like foam; I drank.
The wine was thick and sweet, congealing on my tongue. She took the glass away. My hands fell to my sides. I wanted to slide down into the dirt and grass and roll around. I wanted to know what it felt like to press my mouth against the moist dew and have it tickle my lips. But the demon touched my chin, bid me to look, and I stayed in my chair.
On the table, the demon laid out cuts of meat with eyes, cakes made out of skin, and jellied currants made out of glowing metal. Black crabs still quivered in their sauces. The demon carved for me a slice of something red and sticky, pulsing, and placed it on my plate.
"Is this like fairyland?" I asked, "I eat the food and I can never go home?”
“Lily, please shut up,” the demon said.
She placed a fork, carved from animal bone, into my hand. Yes, it always belonged there.
Maybe if I managed to get home this night I would find Mother on one of the days she could still speak. I would say, "Momma, think back to when you were pregnant with me. Think as hard as you can. Did you notice anything strange? Perhaps during the ultrasound the doctor noticed that, along with me, you were housing a star from Revelation in your uterus. And when I was born, did the doctors have to cut a dark little parasitic twin away from my bones, and did you let her slither off into the dark? Is this where my shadow has been all these years? No, no particular reason why I'm asking. I'm just curious, Momma."
The demon placed the bone knife in my other hand.
Out in the woods, beyond the clearing, the grass rustled.
Something’s out there, but I didn’t care. I only wanted to eat the food filling the table in front of me. I knew, going down my throat, it would fill me with a pulsating light. Yet I couldn’t manage to use the fork and knife, not with my muscles turning into fuzz and my face melting into soft candy.
The demon leaned toward me, the table creaking underneath her. Her skin glowed in the light of the sewn-together fi
reflies. She touched my bottom lip and pressed a pulsing red fruit into my mouth. I swallowed; it coated my stomach with musical notes.
Some little girls get stolen by the king of the underworld. I got a demon, smiling at me with fireflies stuck in her teeth.
I smelled an acrid scent, like oil. The grass rustled once more and Pluto bolted from underneath my legs. I lost control of the muscles in my hands and dropped the knife and fork onto the ground.
"It's The Nightcatcher, isn't it?" I asked.
A fawn emerged from the grass trembling and wet.
I tried to call out for Pluto, but my tongue wouldn’t fit into my mouth.
The fawn crept underneath the table. She rested her head at my feet, and licked with her rough-sewn tongue at the blood pouring from my barbed-wire wound. The demon placed a piece of fruit in my mouth, but I couldn’t swallow.
The demon crawled across the table, knocking over dishes, batting the ball of fireflies away. She weaved her hands through my hair. I coughed and bones and fruit spilled out of my mouth.
The fawn licked and licked my bleeding foot. The demon turned my head toward the trees.
“I don’t want to look,” I said as she pinched my cheek, my jaw. “Don’t let me look.”
But just as I did with Baby Arachne, dying in the flowers years and years ago, I looked.
The trees burned away. The ground trembled. This must’ve been what my mother saw when she went mad. The sky tore apart and ancient woodlands clawed its way out of the dirt, pushing itself through a million years of strata and stone. It toppled the woods and the town. It ringed the sky with ice. It showered me in flowers and black mud.
“Welcome home, Lily.”
Home. My forest. It was real. It was here and swallowing me.
The fawn bit my foot.
My limbs snapped back into place. The ancient woods disappeared. The fawn bolted. The fruit spilled out of my mouth and I hauled myself to my feet, choking. The demon jumped off the table.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Stay away from me.”
“Did you not like the dinner?”
We are Wormwood Page 5
