We are Wormwood by Autumn Christian Read Free Book Online Page A

clutched a book between her knees called
“Beautiful Killers: Carnivorous Plants of the World.” She cradled a Venus Flytrap in her arms.
    Phaedra was somewhat of a legend in town. She ran from the
cops by crossing a muddy creek, in Valentino heels, branches in her hair, and
weed in her purse. She looked the epitome of a gothic Americana princess; her
eyes like Oklahoma Dust Bowls, her cheeks Great Depression sharp. And she ran
faster than any boy, even in Valentino heels and a torn dress.
    I always knew her as the girl who grew up faster than the
rest of us. She sat with boys in the back of her mother’s Volkswagen in her
muddy heels, naked from the waist up, smoking a cigarette that turned her teeth
the color of spit. She made the boys dress up in her skirts and lipstick before
she went down on them. She whispered grim and romantically cliché things in
between their legs. Things like, “Each heartbeat brings us closer to death,” or
“This is the last chance we’ll ever have to be truly alive.”
    From a young age, Phaedra’s mother, like mine, had done a
disappearing act. Whereas my mother was insane and refused to believe it,
Phaedra’s mother couldn't get enough of being crazy. For the majority of her
adult life, she lounged in doctor’s waiting rooms and therapists’ couches. For
years she lay upside down in bed, high on codeine and clonazepam, watching
foreign films.
    “Dear, bring me a headache pill,” Phaedra said, mocking her
mother. “Bring me that ‘Singing in the Rain’ DVD. Bring me a hit of acid.”
    Phaedra’s mom used to be a fashion designer in Paris. Or
maybe she once had a dream that she was a fashion designer in Paris, I couldn’t
quite remember. Phaedra insisted she remembered being backstage during Fashion
Week as a child, while her mother fitted sixteen-year-old anemic girls with
dresses made from razor blades.
    “The sicker the better, that’s what she used to say,” said
Phaedra. “Real beauty is a reptile. My momma used to nurse me while they
snorted cocaine. The designers and the hairstylists and the models, they all
did blow together. Momma turned into a monster on cocaine. Her hair stood up on
end. Put the models in dresses two sizes too small and bloodied their backs.”
    Phaedra snorted.
    “And now she thinks she’s so righteous. She’s grown up.
Matured, right? Whatever. She just can’t afford blow anymore. She caught me
once in my room with some Russian exchange student. She wanted me to go to
therapy, just because I made him wear a dress before we fucked. You know, the
shiny silver one? He looked good in it. Anyways, can you believe her? Go to
therapy? Like Hell!”
    “They always want you to go to therapy,” I said.
    Shortly after the Russian exchange student ordeal, Phaedra
met her true love: a Venus flytrap with moist little mouths, planted in a red
glazed pot and purchased for a dollar at a farmer’s market. She shut the boys
out of her room. She stopped smoking in the backseat of cars and reciting
gothic faux philosophy to devote more time to tending to the carnivorous plants
she kept in her room. They were monstrous plants with unhinged jaws that waited
for insects to land on their velvet lips. They lined her desk and windowsill.
She slept with them in her bed.
    “Why the plants” I asked her.
    “I don’t know,” she said, “they’re pretty.”
    Of course, I thought, the gothic Americana princess would
think of the moist, carnal, wet innards of a carnivorous plant as pretty.
    Soon the common Venus Flytrap wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted the big leafy demons of plants that ate
deer and jaguar ; the roped, sweet smelling bellflowers
that housed stomachfulls of half-digested children.   She dreamed of owning the legendary
Madagascar Man-Eating Tree, a roped veiny myth of a tree with serpents for
limbs that tore off people’s heads and digested them whole. One of these days I
would find her being eaten alive.
    But seeing that would be better