“I’ve been thinking about you and me,” I called out.
I shoved the closet door shut and went toward my bedroom. There, I did the same thing, pulling up the sheets and tossing the pillows onto the floor as if I’d find her hiding underneath.
“I don’t think anything is going to help us. I remember the little yellow pills that Daddy forced you to take, before he left, but those didn’t help. And the doctor? That didn’t help either.
“I thought maybe I could escape it. That I wouldn’t get sick like you. Of course, I was an idiot. I’ve been sick ever since Daddy left. I mean, don’t you remember the spider?”
I grabbed a vase in the hallway. It was one of my mother’s favorites with its flower-eyed ceramic print, a wedding gift from my schizophrenic grandma. I threw it against the wall.
“They’re going to have to lock us away and shove needles full of sedatives under our eyes and, sometimes, people are just cursed. Did you hear me? Can you hear me? Sometimes they’re just cursed and nothing in the world can save them.”
I went back into her bedroom with lighter fluid I stashed under my bed, and threw it across the carpet. I doused her bed sheets and her clothes. I splashed it across the walls and her vanity, leaving ugly wet marks everywhere.
The pungent smell burned my throat. I pulled a lighter from my pocket.
“Can you hear me, Momma?” I said softly. “Can’t you see you made me in your fucking image?”
Downstairs, a window broke.
“Momma!” I cried out, and I dropped the lighter.
I ran into the kitchen. Glass glittered on the tiles. Someone had broken the window and the curtains blew into the twilight beyond. I edged toward the window.
The only source of light in the neighborhood emanated from the open front door of Phaedra’s house. It was a red door, a loud door, fitting for the mother and daughter across the way that wanted so badly to be sick. It was the only red door on the row. The only open door. The hinges creaked slowly back and forth.
Something had opened that door, had grabbed it, wrenched it open, and thrown it back until it slammed against the foundation. Something in a great hurry.
Here’s another story for you:
The mad girl with the missing mother climbed through the broken window toward the red door. The wound in her stomach ripped open again with stress. When she crossed her friend’s lawn, she smelled the woods spilling out of the open door, the smell of loam, dirt, and lightning-struck trees.
Maybe in a past life the girl had once been a great hunter. She’d once woven for herself a crown of ash and deer bone and conquered all who would defy her with her great hunting bow.
No longer.
Now she was a ruined girl, a girl crushed by a night sky bloated with factory smoke. She was a dirty girl who rarely bathed, and smoked too much for her own good. If she found a great hunting bow these days, she’d probably try to sell it at a pawnshop.
The mad girl wasn’t prepared for what lay beyond the red door. She knew she was in the middle of a terrible, otherworldly conspiracy she could never hope to understand. The hunter could’ve conjured up the beasts of the forest to go into the house and destroy whatever waited for her there. The mad girl probably couldn’t even bend down to tie her shoelaces without falling over, would lie in the grass screaming at her own shadow writhing beside her.
The mad girl was a stupid girl. Even without those powers, she went through the red door anyway.
She found grass, weeds, and flowers growing on the floor. Ivy hung from the walls as if it had been growing there for years. It’d started wrapping itself in lazy, suffocating circles around the couch and the coffee table, plunging itself into the piano. The mad girl picked through the overgrown weeds, nearly tripping over a dining room chair. She called out for her mother. She called for Phaedra.
The mad girl found a family photograph on the wall, one of Phaedra and her mother in white dresses and fake smiles, trying not to squint underneath hot studio lights. As she looked at it, green and white mold bloomed through the print, tearing into their smiles and their dresses. The photograph slid off the wall.
The mad girl reached the moldy and crumbling. She sank into moss and was forced to crawl up the stairs, clinging to the banister. Several times one of her feet sank down into the rotting wood and, each time, she struggled to pull it out again.
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.
Chapter Eighteen
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 ring
ing.
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.
Part Four: Curious Skin
Chapter Nineteen
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.”
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