Read We are Wormwood Online

Authors: Autumn Christian

We are Wormwood (8 page)

“The entire world is thrown off.”

“Their lives become a hell, and they plunge the earth into
hell.”

“Oh, please. Be original for once.”

I went inside and the door slammed shut behind me.

I expected to find a party, but I found only an empty living
room. In the corner of the room, the speaker, partially hidden by a couch,
blared music.

“Phaedra?” I called, but I couldn’t hear myself speak.

I walked across the room and ripped out the speaker cords.
The house went silent. I couldn’t even hear the boys talking outside.

“Phaedra?” I called again.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

In the kitchen a teenage girl with dirty blonde dreadlocks
hunched over glow-in-the-dark teacups, a glowing green bottle clasped between
her knees.

“I’m looking for my friend,” I said.

“She already left.”

“She only came in here a moment ago.”

“She’ll be back soon.”

“Did she go down the hall?” I asked.

The girl held a teacup out toward me.

“I poured you some tea,” she said. “You should thank me. You
know you aren’t supposed to be in here yet.”

“You said that already.”

“Wait with me, she’ll be back.”

She continued holding the teacup toward me, her arm
unwavering. I sighed.

I crouched beside her and took the cup.

“What’s in this?”

“You like absinthe, don’t you?”

I didn’t know, but I drank all of it anyways. It tasted like
acidic licorice, and I fought to keep from coughing.

The girl’s body warped like the boy’s shadows. Her
dreadlocks rippled like water. Her pupils swelled, and I felt mine swelling as
well.
 

She ran her hands across my neck, my collarbone. She kissed
my temple.

“Will you tell me a story?” she asked. “The boys are so
boring.”

“I don’t have any stories.”

I ran my fingers up and down her arms. Somehow, I couldn’t
stop myself.

“Not everyone has a story, but I can tell by looking at you
that you do.”

“What did you put in my drink?” I asked, kissing the palms
of her hands.

“I just wanted some company. And a story.”

I was about to protest again. There were no stories inside
of me. I wanted to say, “I’m a hollowed out girl, and I have to be in order to survive.
I don’t even know a poem. My mother was a storyteller and it ruined her.” But,
then the story came.

I pulled her by the dreads and whispered.

“Once there was an ugly witch. She was so ugly that they
cast her out of the village and made her live in the woods. She stole a child
from a nursery and raised her as her own. She taught the child how to make her
foul-smelling potions and how to kill animals, so together, they went mad. The
child began to think she was a goddess, and that she could talk to trees. Why,
she even killed a deer and wore its blood and bone because she thought it would
give her magic powers. The townspeople were really quite concerned for this
girl, living in filth. Once a boy came to the woods, asking the girl for her
hand in marriage. He felt sorry for her, and wanted to cure her. In response
she bit him and he ran away, never to bother her again.”

“When the girl came of age the authorities came after her
for killing the livestock and being a general nuisance. ‘Mad, just like her mother,
the witch,’ they said. ‘We’ll lock her away so she won’t bother us again.’ The
ugly witch convinced the girl that a great and terrible monster was chasing her
and, if it caught her, she would be devoured instantly. So the girl picked up
her deer skull and her hunting bow and ran screaming through the woods. The
authorities were in hot pursuit, their dogs yapping at her ankles. In order to
protect herself, she cut off her arm with the hunting knife in her pocket. The
dogs, yowling and yipping, grabbed it and carried it off.

“The girl crawled into a hole and hid. To this day she lives
there, trembling and scared. She convinced herself she was a rabbit, and
nibbles on berries and grass. Because there are sometimes just better things
than facing the truth.”

The girl laughed, the sound refracting like light.

“You talk like an old person,” she said, and kissed me on
the cheek.

The music started blaring from the living room again. The
girl grasped my hands, desperate, speaking fast, trying to tell me something
important, but I couldn’t hear any of her words.

“I’m sorry,” I mouthed

Back in the living room the music chiseled holes into my
cheeks. I tried unplugging the speaker, but I couldn’t find the cord. I went
down the hallway. Broken pieces of mirror were glued to the walls. The ceiling
was covered in mold and women’s underwear. I called again for Phaedra.

At the end of the hallway I came to a room. I went inside
and shut the door. I fumbled for a light switch, and when I touched it, a soft
red light flooded the room.

Paintings lined the walls, glowing red and gold, as if
illuminated from within. They were deeply textured, crackled like skin. I held
my hand out toward one of the paintings and my hand glowed red, the patterns
swirling and dancing across my skin.

When the artist entered the room, I knew I hadn’t been
searching for Phaedra, but for him.

“It’s blood,” he said, as if expecting to find me here.

He shut the door.

“Of course,” I said, feeling dizzy. “What else would it be?”

“My friend works at a butcher’s shop, he lets me take
gallons of it.”

He tripped over a chair, nearly knocking over one of his
paintings. Blood smeared the back of his shirt as well as the front. He’d been
rolling in it. He pulled out a bottle of gin hidden underneath a red coat on
his desk and drank.

“I heat it, mix it with metal. Whatever I can find.
Sometimes copper, sometimes gold.
Wholesale shops. That’s
how I make them glow when the lights are turned on.”

He turned to me with eyes shining and drunk.

“But you’re not the kind of girl that cares about things
like that,” he said.

“They wouldn’t let me be a scientist. So I dropped out of
school.”

“I heard what you did to that Charlie kid.”

He pulled a switchblade out of his pocket. My body tensed.
Maybe this would end in a cliché, him coming at me with the knife and
splattering my blood across the canvas.
Butcher shop; likely
story.

Instead he pulled a bag of powder - drugs - out of his
pocket.

“Have you ever done molly before?” he asked, setting the
bottle of gin down.

“Of course,” I said, though, of course, I hadn’t.

I wasn’t about to admit that I was a drug neophyte to this
hulking husk; admit that the most I’d ever done was bad weed and housewives’
pills.

He dipped his knife into the bag and snorted off the tip. He
tilted his head back and squeezed his nose. He didn’t offer me any, only put
the bag and knife away and started drinking again. When he lowered the bottle
he was staring at me, eyes like stingers.

“Are you lost?” he asked me.

“I was looking for my friend.”

“Right. It’s obvious you don’t give a damn about anything
important.”

“I never said that.”

“Oh, then you have an opinion? You like the paintings?”

“No "

He wheeled toward me with paint in his eyes, paint in his
spit.

“Then get out! Get out of my house! I didn’t invite you
here! I know girls like you. I’ve fucked a thousand girls like you. Little
boring, punk girls with ratty hair who think they have everything figured out.”

His body sucked up the gravity of the room.

“So you killed a boy. Do you think I care? This isn’t middle
school, sister. You’re going to have more to deal with than little lady
teachers and prepubescent children. You think you’re tough? You’re nothing more
than a spoiled child.”

He lurched toward me, splattering me with paint, blood, and
gin.

“I can’t even imagine being that ignorant,” he said.

I spit in his face.

I expected him to lunge forward and hit me. His fingers
quivered and his eyes twitched. I flinched, waiting for a blow.

He touched his chin and smeared blue paint across his face.
His smile was toxic.

“I’m going to destroy you,” he said softly.

He pointed toward the door.

“Now get out,” he said.

He slammed the door shut behind me. Dark shadows of
creatures seemed to flit through the mirrors glued to the wall. Recorded
thunder replaced the sound of dance music. I ran out of the house with my eyes
closed, past the now empty porch, onto the lawn, weaving through the blood
portraits.

They were like women that had lain down to die after being ripped
away from their hair, teeth, and faces. I imagined them trying to move without
skin, their exposed muscles grasping at the weeds.

I couldn’t see the house. I couldn’t see the sidewalk. I
could be lost in the lawn forever. I only saw the grass smoking like coals and
the women trying to pull themselves out of electric lights. What the hell had
been in that absinthe?

The blue-haired girl with bleeding wrists writhed in the
grass, lights in her hair, lights on her wrists.

“I know you,” I said, “but I don’t know from where.”

From behind Phaedra snapped her fingers as if beckoning a
dog.

“Where the hell have you been?” she said. “Come on.”

“Where’s your plant?” I asked.

“Just a two dollar Venus and a four inch dick. Let’s go.”

There were crosses etched into the blue-haired girl’s throat.

“Lily!”

Phaedra dragged me to her car.

As we drove away, the blue-haired girl stood up, holding the
lights in front of her body, lights swelling in the rearview mirror, until her
body disappeared.

That night I dreamed of Charlie jumping into the river. I
knew how this dream ended, yet I couldn’t stop myself from running to the edge
of the bridge and looking down.

But this time, when I turned away from the water I did not
find the demon in her wet white dress.
 
I found the artist doused in blood, rotting meat hanging from his hair,
his face covered in flies.

I ran to him and he caught me in his arms. He pulled me into
his hissing, rotting embrace.

I tried to cry, but what came out of my mouth was an insect
noise.

“Shh,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay. I am a sick
man. Everything’s going to be okay.”

I clung to him.

 
Chapter Thirteen

I
SOUGHT HIM
out because of a dream.
Because of a stupid
fucking dream.
I found out his name was Cignus like the northern
constellation. Cignus like the swan. I showed up at his art show in a wine bar
downtown and found he’d imprisoned my likeness in one of his blood paintings.
He’d exaggerated all of my features. My eyes were like those of a mad crow, my
hair dark and struck through with electricity.

He appeared at my side, no longer in his blood-spattered
dream suit, spitting out flies. He wore a neat gray jacket and, except for his
bloodshot eyes and the darkened circles on his face, he looked the part of the
gentleman.
Like a Cignus, not The Artist.

“Sort of a resemblance, isn’t there?” he said, indicating
the painting.

He headed toward the wine bar.

I shouldn’t have come, but my head didn’t know it yet. I was
sicker than anyone knew. It would have been better for my mental health to stay
home with Momma as she gathered wood for a Viking ship. For months she went to
the scrapyard in the morning and came back carrying twisted boards, her
fingernails bloodied and filled with splinters.

Better to see that every morning, than see myself trapped in
grit and blood, framed and mounted above a bar, with a $500 price tag and a
title of “The Hunted.”

Maybe the demon visited the artist like she visited Charlie,
dressed up in my skirts and sweaters to disguise
herself
.
I hadn’t seen her since the night she took me to the entrance of the ancient
woods, yet I knew she still followed me everywhere. She whispered glossolalia
underneath party noise. I saw her in Pluto’s eyes. And here, she’d shown up in
a painting to taunt me. Silly bitch. I’m sure that, in hell, that could be
called a kind of romance. I imagined her draped over red velvet cloth, pale
thighs opened, spider for a cunt, as the artist pressed her face into butcher
shop blood.

Cignus came back from the bar and held out a glass of wine.

I hesitated. I expected him to haul me out of the bar,
screaming, not offer me a drink.

“Take it,” he said. “Don’t romance it.”

I took the glass. Took a careful sip.

“Good?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I figured you would like it, it’s a Riesling. It’s what the
girls with unsophisticated palates drink.”

He motioned toward the back door.

“Come,” he said. “I need a smoke.”

On the back porch we lit cigarettes together. He inhaled
like he couldn’t catch his breath.

He’d just insulted me, and then commanded me to follow him
outside like he owned me. And all I could think was, he looked better in blood
and dead flies, than primped for galleries and wine. Those crazy eyes couldn’t
be buttoned up in a clean gray suit. I sat on the railing and leaned my head
back, gazing at constellations. Maybe Cignus the swan lived up there, but Momma
never taught me to find any stars but Wormwood.

He spoke my name like a curse.

“Lily, that painting. Do you think it flatters you?”

“I don’t think your paintings could flatter anyone.”

He continued speaking as if he hadn’t heard me.

“I’m going to tell you a story. My sister and I have hunted
the woods behind our house our whole lives. On one of the few nights I went out
hunting by myself, I came across a deer with its throat slit and tied upside
down in a tree. I cut the deer down from the tree, but it wasn’t a deer at
all.”

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