We are Wormwood Read Online Free PDF Page A

twins with fat beige nails. One by one they came back from the woods,
meowing and panting. That is, all of them except for my black cat Pluto.
    Pluto came to me because of Miss Catherine. Miss Catherine
called me a dirty little loveless thing; she didn’t like the mud crusted
underneath my fingernails, my urchin hair, my jacket
that smelled like weed. Once I skipped school to smoke with her gardener in her
backyard. He didn’t speak any English except for the words “hello” and “drugs”.
Miss Catherine came outside with a rose between her teeth, little puncture marks on her lip, uttering some incantation meant to revive her
dead husband.
    “You used to be such a nice girl, before your father left,”
she said when she caught me.
    I sneered and crushed the joint between my fingers.
    “You can’t even apologize? Get out of here before I call the
police on you! And this is the last time I’m hiring someone from PrimCare.”
    That night I went back to her garden with an armful of
summer fireworks and set her rose bushes on fire. While the flowers burned, the
black cat rushed out from behind the garden shed, smoke in her whiskers. I
caught her in my arms. She scratched ribbons into my bare skin, but I held
fast. She mewed, hissed, and spit but I covered her in my jacket and took her
home. I locked her in the laundry room and slid some moist tuna and water under
the door.
    I kept her that way for a few days, waiting for her to quiet
down. But every time I turned the doorknob she hissed. Then Momma, on one of
her better days, let her out and told me to let her smell the back of my hand.
    “Speak softly to her,” Momma said. “Shh.”
    Momma crouched with her hand held out in front of her. The
cat crept toward her with tentative steps, her pink nose like a cool, floating
pearl. She touched Momma’s fingers with her whiskers.
    “Her name is Pluto,” Momma said.
    As though on cue, Charlie, sleepwalking again, appeared on
my lawn. He walked with halting, jerky, hypnotic steps as if his feet were
about to pop off. His clumsy troll-like shadow followed behind him. Just like
his hands, the shadow seemed too big for his body.
    He lurched to my window and pressed his face to the glass.
    “Little B,” he called out, “Little B.”
    Pluto hissed at him as I wrapped her in the sheets.
    “Little B,” he called out once more.
    Charlie rapped on the glass. Once. Twice.
    “Leave my cat alone!” I said.
    I held tight to her in the night. I knew that, whatever
waited outside in the dark, even if it was a fat, depressed, adolescent boy
like Charlie, was waiting for the chance to grab Pluto; waiting to tear her
eyes out and leave her blind and stumbling.
    In the morning Momma came to me with skin flushed and bleach
burning her gums. She smelled of blood and tin.
    “You’re leaving again,” I said.
    “I’m going to Alaska,” she said. “I’m going to start a
colony there, to build Skuldelev warships and take over the United States.”
    She threw on her selkie skin and smiled. I knew that smile.
It meant she’d left her body, OBE, gone to wrestle the moon.
    “Fine,” I said. “Have fun.”
    When she left I screamed. I kicked a hole in her bedroom
door. I smashed the living room lamp against the floor, broke the coffee pot
and dumped the kitchen drawers out onto the tiles. I smashed wine bottles
against the wall, and overturned the kitchen table, which shattered the flower
vase that had been on top. I strewed flower stems and dirt across the floor, the
windowsills, and the chairs, and then ripped open bags of flour and sugar and
over the carpet.
    Charlie found me outside huddled on the curb with Pluto in
my arms, my arms covered elbow-deep in flour. He came to me with his mother’s
funereal veil pressed across his face and a book of ancient mythology in his
hands.
    “They’re going to lock you up one of these days,” Charlie
said.
    “Well, you look ridiculous,” I said.
    He outstretched his hands against the