We are Wormwood by Autumn Christian Page A

my hair, smearing blood against my forehead. It dripped down my
eyelids, and pooled underneath the cusp of my collarbone.
    I shoved her away. The mad saint reeled back, her eyes
laughing.
    “You don’t remember when we used to kiss?” she asked. “You
used to love me.”
    She pulled her fingers apart, blood peeling on her
fingernails.
    “Let me take you away,” she said. “It’s not safe for you
here anymore.”
    I pushed past her and into Cignus’s room. There too,
everything was gone; the bed, the red curtains he wrapped me in, the desk I hid underneath.
    I pried at the boards on the floor. I scratched at the nails,
trying to pull them apart. There had to be a secret entrance somewhere. Or a
button, disguised to look like the wood or the wallpaper. If I could find it,
then Cignus would be revealed. The house would give up its secrets and this
cruel game would be over. Was it my birthday? I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was
my birthday.
    Surprise, Lily! Surprise! We were all hiding from you, but
we’re here now. And we brought cake.
    I scratched at the floorboards until I sunk, frustrated,
onto the floor, my fingers bleeding and sore.
    I knew Saint Peter stood behind me, watching.
    “Where is he?” I whispered.
    “I’d give you the world if I could.”
    “Just give me this.”
    Cignus, it’s not right to do this to a girl. You can’t just
fuck her and paint a picture with her blood and send her out into the woods and
then never call again.
    You can’t leave me here.
    “He promised me,” I said. “He said he needed me.”
    “My brother promises a lot of things.”
    Tears dripped onto my wrists.
    “You don’t understand. He has to come back. I don’t ever cry
like this,” I said.
    “Let me take you home.”
    I couldn’t pretend to resist as she pulled me off the floor.
She took led me outside. I shook so badly I could barely walk. She strapped me
to the back of her van, and drove me home.
    That's how this all ended, wasn’t it? The best kind of story
is a tragedy. Everyone in my life must’ve been cursed to die or disappear. Like Daddy. Like Charlie. Like Cignus. God knows where Phaedra went. If I stuck around
long enough, soon Saint Peter would disappear. Time for me to crawl back home
and suck up some of that mother’s milk, spend some quality time with Momma in
purgatorial madness before we both fell backwards into a Viking ship, howling
toward the abyss. At least my mother and I could be at peace in our insane loneliness,
rocking and howling together on deck, polishing our weapons, plucking all the
hairs off our bodies in cohabited Trichotillomania.
    Yet, when we pulled up to my house, I knew my mother was
gone.

 
Chapter Seventeen
    I
ALWAYS KNEW when my mother was gone. Maybe it’s a kind of sixth sense I
developed after years of being left behind in her whirlwind, of sleeping in the
house alone, night after night, while she saved the world. Maybe it came with
learning to drive a car at the age of eight so I could get to school on time,
or maybe it was learning to run and hide from police and social workers who’d
take me away, or being forced to eat cold peanut butter and ketchup because my
mother hadn’t bought groceries in weeks. I used to stand outside, on the neighborhood
cul-de-sac, as the other families cooked dinner, hoping to be invited in to
eat. I rarely was though I stood on the sidewalk until they cleared the tables
away.
    After Saint Peter dropped me off, I flung the front door
open so hard it slammed against the wall.
    “Where are you?” I asked.
    I went upstairs to her bedroom.
    I pulled apart her made bed, as if she’d be hiding
underneath the unwrinkled coverlets and spread pillows. I yanked open her
closet door, nearly falling as I did so. I threw her clothes to the ground,
ripped her senior high school prom dress apart at the seams, and showered
sequins across the entire closet. I went to her vanity, grabbed handfuls of her
lipsticks and compacts, and threw them