We are Wormwood (25 page)

The pills in the paper cup were black, soft liquid capsules.
They would be pills easy to swallow, pills with soothing names. Never mind the
drool. That could be wiped away by Agnes with her rough fingers.

I remembered the story my mother once told me.

“She hunted you in your own forest, like you hunted the
stag. She was fast upon you. She twisted your dream world so that it no longer
belonged to you. It became a labyrinth of nightmares. She took the ground from
underneath you. There was no escape.”

I picked up one of the pills. I brought it to my mouth. The
stars fell out of the sky above. They’d never been stars, really, but flecks of
stucco on a too-close hospital ceiling.

“Just as The Nightcatcher was upon you, you cut your shadow
from your body. It grew into the shape of a girl, your dark-half with night for
hair and eyes. The Nightcatcher seized the shadow, and you were free.”

The nurses surrounded me with crossed arms, stomping feet.

“Why are you babbling to yourself? There’s nobody there.”

“No,” I said quietly.

“Speak up,” they said. “Stand straight. Your weakness has
brought you to this place.”

“No.”

I dropped the pill, and the paper cup. They fell to the
ground without noise.

“No?” they asked, laughing and mocking.

They untied the strings of my hospital gown and tore it away
from me. I threw my hands over my bare chest. They tugged at my hair. They
pinched my nose until I had to open my mouth to breathe. They threw black pills
in my mouth and pushed me backwards. I fell and coughed them up, choking.

“You can’t get better if you don’t want to get better.”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember the demon, her body
soft in my bed. I tried to remember her heated kiss, the dark smile. The
memories were fading, as if they’d been nothing but chalk outlines on the side
of my brain. And yet:

Why did your mother name you Lily?

It was so difficult to think with dirty, calloused fingers
trying to pry my mouth apart, slapping my face. A nurse emerged from the dim
hallway and pushed a towel-covered cart into my room. She flung the towel
aside, revealing a row of syringes.

I remembered the moment in that elementary school auditorium
when stories stopped being real, the moment when my mother, haggard and
cracked, was banished from her throne of storytelling.

They injected syringes into my back, into the shape of a new
spine.

I had seen the poison in a dirty rat girl’s eyes. I ran from
boiling waters and terror queens and family curses, thinking I was forging my
own path, yet I only kept my mother’s story alive.

And yet:

Your mother named you Lily because flowers could grow as
well as be crushed underneath your feet.

They couldn’t take those memories from you. They couldn’t
wrap them up in a package of insanity. I had left this hospital before. I had
walked on ceilings with the billowing black hair of a demon tied around my
ankles. I kissed lips that slipped a spider into my mouth. I burned my fingers
on the bottom of an ocean, reaching out for pale arms.

I shed my velvet, and the horns remained.

“She’s real,” I said.

“You’re deranged.”

I opened my eyes. I stood, naked and cold, jostled from all
sides, and held my hands in front of my face.

“What are you doing?” they asked. “This abnormal behavior
will be reported.”

“When you’re asleep, you never know where your hands will
be,” I said.

In the spaces between my fingers, I saw what Charlie must’ve
seen before he went under the water: a possibility of realities, swirling and
crashing into each other. Between my fingers dripped gold and silver, the
bleeding tongue of a nurse turning into a snake, the walls of the hospital
tearing apart.

It was like bursting through a membrane.

“She’s real because I make her real,” I said. “Because I
made her mine.”

I squeezed my hands, and the throne room came back into
focus. The dead-thing dress curled back up on my shoulders. The nurses
transformed back into goddesses, the dirty mattress into a feasting table.

In my hands I held my hunter’s bow, an arrow pointed at The Nightcatcher’s
throat.

“I’m going to kill you,” I whispered.

I could have torn down the entire hush place. I felt it in
my fingers, like a muscle I’d exercised only in dreams. I reached up and peeled
the tops of the walls apart. Wet and rotting earth spilled through the folds.
The gods cowered. A few disappeared. Yes, I’m a monster. I’ll be your monster.
I grabbed a glass of wine and drank it, then crushed the glass in my fist. The
legs of the feasting table came crashing down.
Give me your
throne, Nightcatcher
,
I’ll unhinge you
. You can
eat me, but I’ll become a rot that spreads across your face.

I stepped off the table and approached her throne. The gods
attending her fled.

The empress bled quietly, a pool of blood rising up in her
lap. I came before her enormous crystal throne, so big that her small feet were
at my eye level. She leaned down, her curls grazing my forehead.

I could take her throne, if I wanted to. And maybe,
lifetimes ago, I had. I might have sat there for a long time, wondering why it
didn’t fit me, wondering why it did not satisfy me to have all the gods she’d
captured serve me as I pleased. I probably killed myself out of boredom.

I saw The Nightcatcher was just a child. She held her
bleeding stump to her chest, blood running down her golden dress. The fringes
of her crown frayed. And she shrunk on her enormous throne, looking at me with
a child’s eyes.

I let go of the hush place. The walls folded up once again.
The table’s legs unbent. I placed the hunter’s bow at her feet.

“Let’s do things differently this time.” I said.

I held my hands out toward her. I led her out of the throne
room and into the woods.

MY
WOODS WERE
quiet. The river that haunted me for years into a small stream
that ran through the middle of the meadow. I no longer smelled the smell of
machine oil, or of dead grass.

The Nightcatcher clung to me. She reached with her small
child’s hands and tried to slice my dead-thing dress away with her sharp nails.

“Stop,” I said. “I remember how to do this.”

I peeled the dress away from my shoulders. It came apart in
a shower of glittering spider legs and beetle’s wings. Crystalline insects with
iridescent claws scurried into the grass.

Now naked, I bled gray from the wound in my stomach.

The Nightcatcher slipped off, into the trees.

I walked down the path, one halting step at a time, my
newborn hooves shaking.

The trees coiled their leaves and retracted their branches.
They brushed the weeds and hanging ivy to form a path for me. Their shadows
played cool against my skin. Eyes watched me from the trees and the grass.
Green eyes, trembling soft.
Blue eyes like popped veins.
Black eyes, scrying pools.

“Come out,” I said.

The grass and the brush trembled.

“I said come out.”

The deer came out of the woods first. The Witch’s black
mastiffs followed. Their eyes changed colors, at once blue, and then gold.
Together they followed me through the woods.

Big, black crows flew down from the treetops and landed on
my naked shoulders. Their claws gripped my skin hard, leaving red marks. I
coughed blood into my hands. The skin of my arms began to unravel. The birds
weren’t trying to hurt me. They were keeping me from falling apart.

I wanted to laugh, because girls didn’t become goddesses
every day. Because I’d never again be seduced by hospitals and pills that
turned the body into a living gelatin cube. The river would never haunt me.

At the end of the path I came to a grove, and in the center
of the grove, sat a stone dais. Blue flowers grew up from the earth around the
dais.

The Nightcatcher walked out of the trees, no longer dressed
in resplendent gold and headdress, but as naked as me. Unlike me, her skin was
unmarred and smooth. In her one hand she clutched a broken piece of mirror.
Flecks of cocaine were still smeared across its surface.

 
“I’ve been here
before,” I said. “We’ve already done this.”

“No,” The Nightcatcher said. “Never quite like this.”

I knelt on the dais. The dogs and the deer encircled me. The
birds flew up into the trees and my skin fell apart. I coughed more blood on
the dais and lay down in the sticky pool. I spit out the rest of my teeth.
There were grooves carved in the dais for my head. My fingertips. I spread my
legs and arms.

The dogs and deer tore me apart. They ripped my skin to get
to my bones. They cracked my rib cage. They broke my knees.

It took seeing my heart torn out, pulsating on the stone
dais in front of me, to realize this was a ritual embedded into my DNA. I sat
on this dais before, my body flushed with warmth, my heartbeat in my head.

I was only a punk girl, a baby child living in the middle of
suburbia, trying to survive ostracization at school and an absent mother. I
didn’t have a chance to remember. A miracle I did at all, really.

Lifetimes ago I must’ve run away from this place. I
remembered. I ran through the forest until the sky grew darker and darker,
until I was blinded in the darkness, until the trees dissolved and I tumbled
downwards.

I’d trapped my shadow and myself in a dark city. I’d trapped
all of us.

But we could be free.

And even though it hurt to speak because my entire body
quivered, broken and spilling out, no heart to pump the blood, I spoke.

“I’m ready.”

The dogs and the deer came to me carrying blue flowers in
their mouths.

They pushed the flowers into my bones. They crushed the
flowers in their teeth, into the shape of a new heart, and placed it into my
chest. They created a new stomach for me and placed it through the hole in my
waist. Wherever I still had nerves to feel pain, they burned.

Then they ran off, as if spooked. The trees rustled as the
birds flew away. I sat up, gripping my stomach to keep myself from completely
falling apart.

At the end of the path, a girl stood with her black hair
squirming. She held a headless bird in one hand, and in the crook of her other
arm, a black cat with wormwood eyes.

Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.

I held my arms out, and she came to me.

“I’m dead,” I said.

Strips of skin hung down from my arms. I touched my face. It
was a ruin of black blood, smoke, and gobbets of gore.

“No,” my demon said. “You’re glowing.”

She let Pluto go and climbed onto the dais next to me. I
grasped the demon’s hand. She pressed her mouth against my bleeding thigh.

“Good. You feel good,” she said.

I proffered my wrists to her.

“Eat,” I said.

And she did.

Chapter
Thirty-Six

THE
DEMON LAY
in the pool of my skinless body, her lips against my lips,
her
fingers against my fingers.

The Nightcatcher sewed us together with a gleaming thread
made of star shine and a needle made of bone. The thread dissolved inside our
veins. The demon breathed into my mouth as The Nightcatcher sewed her cheek to
my gazelle skull. She was cool in the hollow space of me. I didn’t feel the
pain of the needle plunging into my skin, sewing into my muscle, sealing the
poisonous flowers into my body. There’d been enough pain already.

“I’ve searched for you for so long,” I said.

“I’ve always been with you,” she said. “In you.”

“I was so afraid.”

“You should be.”

Our kiss sealed us together. She clasped my broken, bleeding
wrists. I used her lungs to breathe.

This must be what falling in love felt like.

In my skin.

My shadow.

This was almost like the time we did MDMA together,
sweetheart. My body slowly slid down into the stone, my brain lit up like a
halogen bulb passing through a crystal. We must’ve shone bright enough to make
a new kind of star.

The Nightcatcher plunged the needle into my eye and the
thread that passed through my pupil glowed gold. She tugged and pulled. The
demon’s kiss deepened. Her kiss said I want to make you happy, there’s nothing
left to live for but your mouth.

I’ve missed you so much.

The Nightcatcher sewed the demon’s ribcage into my empty
chest cavity. She braided the demon’s hair into my hair, deepening, swirling,
snarled against my horns, transforming into a dark, rich red.

We always fit so well in bed sheets, our bodies tucked into
each other almost like this. I should’ve known we fit deeper. How I ached for
her, and until that moment never even knew the depths of my need.

She sank into my bone and into the flowers growing like a
meadow inside me. The thread sewed our fingers and feet Her mouth dissolved
into my mouth. She sighed, a soft sigh, and it reverberated through my skull.

Then we were whole, and I was alone.

For a long time I lay on the dais, moving my fingers and
toes slowly, stretching my new skin. Constellations bloomed on my stomach.
Cignus. Scorpio. Ursula. They were brilliant and wild, like neon cutouts on a
velvet board. I moved my hand, and watched the shadow of my fingers pass across
the stone. My blood and dead organs

Wisps of flowers blew past me. Bits of fluff fell on my
mouth and I breathed them away. I didn’t think I would be able to stand, but my
new skin was more resilient than the old one. It carried a new weight.

I stepped off the dais, and I walked a new path.

New grass bloomed underneath me. I’d never known colors
could be like this. I’d been given new eyes. I couldn’t really see the world
missing my shadow all those years.