We are Wormwood

by Christian, Autumn

  “You said you had a fourth,” one said after a long pause.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. You’re talking to me.”

  I darted out of the kitchen and grabbed the weed stashed in my bedroom. When I came back, Genie had turned away from the stove. The dogs ran toward the boys and sniffed their hands and legs.

  “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

  I was sure they’d never walked into a punk house, at six in the morning, to be greeted by a red headed witch, dressed in a crushed velvet cloak, holding a silver tea tray, with a pack of black dogs quelling at their feet. And all the while, her outstretched arms bleeding sigils, her smile not quite a smile, the kettle going off with a scream.

  The dogs started barking.

  The boys didn’t demand that I weigh the baggie on a scale, or try to haggle the price. They threw the money on the kitchen table and ran.

  We laughed about the way their eyes scanned the room, like they were expecting police to burst out of the walls, and how they shied away from the dogs as if they were foaming at the mouth. The Witch poured us more tea in silver cups. She served us biscuits, fresh from the oven. Saint Peter fed crumbs to the dogs underneath the table.

  As I ate, my headache faded. The sunlight coming through the windows warmed my face.

  “Can you imagine,” Saint Peter said, tugging on her blue hair with blood underneath her fingernails, “anyone scared of us?”

  The dogs nudged Saint Peter’s knees.

  “You’re spoiling them,” Genie said.

  She rummaged through the freezer. It was normally empty, but as if through witch magic, it now overflowed with frozen food.

  “Who wants hash browns?” she asked.

  “I’m starving. It feels like it’s been years,” I said.

  We didn’t eat very often. We couldn’t afford to eat and support drug habits at the same time. I justified it to myself, even on the nights when I cried in bed after a comedown, serotonin in my brain depleted after a night of partying on cocaine and MDMA. As long as I wasn’t shooting up heroin and meth, I’d be okay, I thought. I’m not a real drug addict. And it was for a good cause. Maybe the river, with its boiling, rushing current of dead children, and Charlie’s pale, veiled face, could be suppressed with the right type of crystalline alkaloid.

  Maybe vicodin and xanax bought on the street could make my dreams, like smears of paint, indecipherable from one another. Charlie, jumping into the water, would become a black wave. Cignus, flies buzzing across his face, my mother wrapping me in butcher paper. It would all smear into shades of green and blue.

  Not quite sweet dreams. But close enough.

  “Do you know what I miss?” Saint Peter said. “Greek food.”

  “Weren’t you a Greek fisherman?”

  “A saint for much longer” she said. “I don’t even remember how to gut a fish.”

  The Witch cooked the frozen hash browns, humming to herself. Someone had placed a small, potted houseplant in the center of the kitchen table, with yellow daffodils, and for once a plant wasn’t coiling to strike me like a snake.

  “I wish we had TV,” I said. “I always watched Carl Sagan when I was hung-over.”

  “We don’t have TV, but we have Wi-Fi,” The Witch said.

  Only an hour ago I’d woken up in a bathtub full of ice, hadn’t I?

  “I’d kill for a Gyro,” Saint Peter said, “or some dolmades.”

  “If you walk into a Greek restaurant looking like this, they might believe you.”

  I reached across the table and took her wrists in my hands.

  Her wounds were green and scaly. I saw acid burns from plants and puncture wounds from snakebites, venom tattooed underneath her skin.

  I couldn’t distinguish my arms from hers.

  “Strange.” I said.

  “What’s strange?” she asked.

  I let go.

  “I just. I don’t think I’ve been sleeping enough.”

  The demon crept from her nesting place on the ceiling, clutching Pluto to her chest. She sat at the table. Genie prepared her a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea, but the demon didn’t touch it. Her teeth were full of shining bug shells. She played with a Daddy Long Legs that ran across her palms, darting in and out of her fingers. I held my hand out, and the Daddy Long Legs crawled onto my fingers, across the back of my hand.

  “I used to be so scared of these,” I said.

  The Daddy Long Legs, its legs like bent wires, walked back to the demon’s arm, then climbed into her hair.

  I took a sip of tea. At first it tasted sweet, but masked a bitterness underneath.

  “What’s in this, anyway?” I asked.

  “Sagewort,” The Witch said, not turning away from the stove.

  “Oh.”

  My insides spasmed.

  “Do you know another word for sagewort?” The demon asked.

  I didn’t answer because the ripples in my cup of tea turned red and my stomach felt ready to fall out.

  “Wormwood,” the demon said.

  I looked down in my lap. A bloodstain bloomed across my shirt. I pulled it up, my hands shaking, and found one of The Witch’s sigils, etched into my stomach, where my wound used to be.

  “That’s weird.” I said, the first thing I could think to say.

  I felt fine only a moment ago.

  “She’s having a miscarriage,” Saint Peter said.

  “Let’s lay her down,” Genie said.

  “No,” I said. “Keep her away from me. She poisoned my tea.”

  Pluto jumped into my lap. The dogs surrounded me, slobbering and heaving. Their noses touched my bare legs. I thought they’d tear my skin apart. I pushed their heads away.

  “I can’t be having a miscarriage,” I said.

  Genie threw aside her velvet cloak, and underneath she wore a suit of rusted chainmail. Only then did I notice her red hair, knotted and dirty, as if it hadn’t been washed for years, and her fingernails, caked in black dirt. Her eyes quivered with astral fire that cast a shadow across the entire room. I couldn’t feel the sunshine anymore.

  The skin of her fingers peeled back and ghouls sprouted out of her bones.

  “Why did you poison me?” I murmured.

  The demon caught me before I hit my head on the floor. Pluto skittered away. The demon and Saint Peter dragged me to the couch in the living room.

  “Get me out of here,” I said, squeezing my stomach between my fists, my face breaking out in a sweat. “I’m not pregnant.”

  “Well, not anymore,” Genie said.

  “Why are you hurting me?”

  I closed my eyes and reached out for the demon. Her hands were far away, so far away. The living room stretched into a coliseum. I thought I’d never touch her again, but her spindly, cool fingers reached across the impossible distance and grasped my wrists.

  “We were so happy. I found you in a tree,” I said.

  My stomach spasmed again.

  “Breathe,” Saint Peter said.

  “Fuck. I took the last of my aspirin.”

  Saint Peter placed a wet towel against my forehead and a dry towel underneath my legs.

  “I found you in the tree. Wasn’t that only yesterday?” I asked.

  “You don’t remember what happened yesterday, do you?” the demon asked.

  “No. But tell me we were happy once.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We were.”

  I pulled the wet towel over my eyes and mouth. I twisted onto my stomach, but it didn’t ease the pain. I pressed my hand between my legs, but I couldn’t stop the flow. The blood spilling from me could’ve lifted the couch up and carried me away.

  “The blood vessels in the velvet provide nutrients to the deer’s horns,” the demon said.

  “I swear you’ve said this before.”

  “I’ve rehearsed it.”

  “I’m dying,” I said. “And we were having such a nice breakfast.”

  The couch rocked underneath me. Like a boat. Lik
e a Viking ship.

  They surrounded me - Saint Peter, The Witch, Pluto, the dogs, the demon. They seemed to grow multiple limbs, sprout proboscis from their heads. They touched me with hands and snouts and teeth, touches that zapped my brain and burned my skin. The dogs howled. Pluto’s wail was almost human.

  “Why are you trying to kill me?” I asked, yet I didn’t recognize my voice.

  “We’re trying to show you something,” The Witch said.

  “Good god, what could possibly be so important?” I asked.

  “We were wrong,” Saint Peter said.

  “About what?”

  “We can’t protect you from her.”

  “Who’s after me?”

  It was a name I couldn’t quite remember.

  Something bit me. A fawn. A white-speckled, knobby-legged fawn. I pushed its head away.

  “I imagine you’re experiencing an unusual rush of images right now,” The Witch said. “Along with disorientation. Paranoia.”

  “No shit.”

  “Are you afraid?” she asked.

  “Let go of my arm.”

  “It’s like pushing through a membrane.”

  The fawn would tear at my flesh until it peeled from my bones. Everyone would see my muscles and fat were strings of carcinogenic waste. My dying organs would spill out onto the carpet like bags of prepackaged, rotting meat.

  “Let go!” I said. “You poisoned me!”

  My bones were rotting. I shouldn’t have let myself forget. I tried to cut the disease out of my stomach, but I couldn’t. And it'd been swimming in my blood ever since, nesting in my medulla, growing, pulsing with gray colored pain, transforming into a disease I could never recover from. Miscarriage? Least of my problems. From inside, my body’s cells grew spiny quills to attack me. From outside, a hungry river, a black chasm, and poisonous woods chased me.

  And something else. Someone else. I couldn’t pretend anymore that she wasn’t coming after me. At six years old I hid from her by crawling into a rotting tree. She tormented my mother with poison. She’d caught my scent in the woods the night Cignus sent me in with the light emanating from The Huntress.

  “Through your fear you can control anything,” The Witch said. “You could change the rotation of the earth.”

  “Then why can’t I remember her name?”

  But she couldn’t speak anymore. The ghouls cut holes from the inside of Genie’s skin and spilled out of her shredded hands and waist. She ran her fingers down my throat, her mouth agape, and ectoplasm oozing from her lips.

  My stomach burst. I screamed.

  I wanted to come to the city and break the curse that had followed me since my conception. I wanted to forget about my mother, forget about my father, and forget about the river that followed me like a hungry mouth, like a raving ghost who mistook me for its murderer. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  I pushed past everyone. I ran toward the front door, barely making it halfway across the room before I vomited the tea. I kept going. I wrenched the door open and tripped over metal tubing on the porch. I shoved over a ghoul bending iron into the shape of fangs.

  Run. Run past the machine in the lawn getting bigger and bigger. Run, even though you’re bleeding out and falling apart, and at any moment could run right out of your skin.

  Yet, where the neighborhood used to be, I found only a black pit that sucked away all sunlight. I ran across an endless lawn, across endless space.

  Of course the darkness followed me, and of course, it had a woman’s name and a woman’s body. Should’ve listened to your mother. Should’ve never taken that pomegranate seed. I could’ve been eating hash browns right now, but I fucked that one up.

  The grass burst into black pills beneath me. Yes, I remembered these pills, the ones that Momma used to put in her purse. She dry swallowed them by the handful, until the day when she thought she didn’t need them anymore, and caused both of our lives to collapse.

  How she used to laugh, “Yes, I’m insane.”

  She never told me, “One day, you’ll be insane too, baby.”

  I fell into the pills. I kept falling.

  Saint Peter found me unconscious, in a ditch, half a mile from the house, blood in my mouth and blood between my legs. I woke up to the wail of an ambulance. Blurry, uniformed figures plunged their hands down through grass, through black pills, and reached for me. I grabbed at weeds and pulled them up from the roots.

  “I don’t need to go to the hospital,” I said to them. “Fucking assholes.”

  They placed me on a stretcher. They held me down when I tried to get away.

  “Don’t move. We need to make sure you won’t hurt your spine.”

  I wanted to tell them to stop repeating themselves because their voices echoed in my skull, rubbing on the inside of my brain like sandpaper. When they checked my pulse, I couldn’t feel their fingers, like all sensitivity had burned away.

  “Have you taken any illegal substances?”

  “You want the list?” I asked.

  “We need to know what you’ve put in your body.”

  “They put something in my tea,” I said. “I’m having a miscarriage. I have a disease. It’s rotting everything.”

  After fourteen hours in the ICU, the doctors placed me in the psychiatric ward.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  NURSES STRIPPED ME of my bloodied clothes. They tore away my shoes and my socks and my dead cell phone. They took my blood pressure like gutting a fish. They scraped at the wound on my stomach like tearing into a pulpy fruit.

  “It’s infected,” they said.

  “Have you been treated for STDs?” they said.

  “She’s dehydrated.”

  “Do you have any insurance?”

  When I couldn’t answer their questions the veins in their necks seemed to balloon to suffocate me. Their pursed lips were butcher tools. Their faces were like cold cuts, their hands like broken toys.

  “Just another druggy.”

  “What did you say to me?” I said, my speech slurred, my legs trying to keep from collapsing.

  “Give her a sedative.”

  “If you prove to be a threat, we’ll put you in solitary confinement.”

  “Need to tell the doctor. Aggressive. Noncompliant.”

  “Put her in the furnace with the rest of the useless girls.”

  “I’m still a person,” I said.

  I didn’t remember the needle plunging into my arm, only warmth traveling up to my shoulder, then the sudden inability to move my limbs. My head lolled back. I couldn’t swallow the spit in my mouth.

  They dressed me in hospital gowns and took away my bloodied clothes, pinching them between their forefingers like rancid garbage. I never saw them again.

  My legs stopped working. The nurses dragged me down the hallway. They seemed to resent me for this, even though they were the ones who caused my rag doll condition in the first place.

  “Do you remember your name?” They asked me.

  “Beelzebub,” I tried to say to spite them, but I couldn’t speak.

  I always knew I’d end up here, in paper slippers and a tongue that refused to work. Just like Atreus would have always cooked the son of Thyestes. Just like Oedipus would have always fucked his mother and gouged his eyes out. Just like Gilgamesh would have always had his immortality, giving flower, stolen by a serpent lurking in the well.

  Just like my mother.

  Every hallway led to this hallway.

  I wondered if my mother’s ghost passed through me, crackling neurons, touching me with her schizophrenic cells. If she could see me now, shuffling down this so-familiar hallway, would she make me hot chocolate, shake her braided hair, and laugh like she used to? Would she tell me, “We slew the great wolf. Warriors don’t cry, baby”?

  The nurses laid me down on a bed underneath a prison window.

  “Keep the lights on,” I said.

  They turned the lights off.

  I expected the psych
ward to explode with noises of women weeping, men screaming. There would be ex-Christ figures, robots, and ghosts. Girls with the voices of babies, boys who babbled in ancient Egyptian. Like in the movies. Yes, I belonged here. I screamed more than anyone I knew. Bring on the noise.

  But nobody screamed or cried. There were no ghosts or robots that spoke in incoherent languages. Nobody rushed down the hallway, naked and giggling, a team of doctors with syringes chasing after him.

  The only sound in the ward came from the shuffling of the nurses’ shoes as they patrolled the corridors. The silence was worse than anything else I imagined.

  Every fifteen minutes a nurse shone a bright flashlight into the room to make sure I hadn’t killed myself. Even with the heavy sedatives, I couldn’t sleep. If they couldn’t see my eyes from the hallway, the nurse would stomp across the room, huffing, and stand there until I rolled over and showed the whites of my eyes.

  “Why in god’s name?” I asked.

  “You’re on suicide watch.”

  “Where were you twenty years ago? That’s when we needed the miscarriage.”

  She huffed again and stomped out of the room. She’d been spit on so many times by punk girls like me.

  The nurses talked in the hallway. They thought we couldn’t hear them.

  “I don’t get paid enough money for this.”

  “My son’s going to become a diabetic if he keeps eating so much chocolate.”

  “If only I were prettier. If only I hadn’t gotten pregnant.”

  “I would’ve been a model. Seen the world.”

  “She’s vomiting blood again. Big faker.”

  “Take all the anorexics in the world. Put them in concentration camps. That’ll cure them.”

  They woke me at 7 A.M for a cafeteria breakfast that I couldn’t eat. Doctors sat among the patients, writing notes on thick pads.

  Across the table from me sat a girl named Dark Catherine. She couldn’t eat either. She rearranged her sandwich in the shape of her dead boyfriend. There were cuts up and down her wrists, across her throat, her cheeks. Cuts like she’d marked the days off with her skin.