We are Wormwood Read Online Free PDF

veil.
    “Nobody can see your face when you’re dead. When I get to
the spirit world, I’ll ask Persephone for a kiss.”
    I pressed my face into Pluto’s fur and sighed.
    “Do you want to walk with me?” he asked.
    “Not when you’re wearing that.”
    He didn’t move. I remembered when we were eight his mother
tied a snake to his wrist and told him it was poisonous. When we were ten, he
ran screaming into my yard because his father taught him to fear the cottontail
that lived in the mulberry bushes.
    “Wait here,” I said.
    I ran inside and grabbed Momma’s car keys. I never knew why
she thought she’d be able to get to Alaska without her car, and I didn’t care.
I went back outside, unlocked the car door, and got into the driver’s seat
    “Get inside,” I said, pulling the seat up so I could reach
the pedals, “and hold Pluto for me.”
    I drove out of the neighborhood with Charlie, past the
grocery store, then down Main Street. We lived in a small, murky town with
crumbling buildings and withering trees. An insect-ridden,
rotting town. The trains poisoned the ground. The factories poisoned the
sky. As a child I remembered blue flowers and lush grass growing here. Now
there was nothing left but whipped-back trees and the ashes of Miss Catherine’s
roses.
    I drove onto the highway and sped away from town. Charlie,
underneath his mother’s funereal veil, sat beside me for a long time without
speaking, stroking Pluto’s thick black fur.
    “You’re not a cat killer,” I said.
    He pressed Pluto into his chest.
    “Do you have any weed?” he asked.
    “No. Miss Catherine fired her gardener.”
    “Want a cigarette then?”
    He handed me one from the pack in his pocket. I stuck it in
the side of my mouth.
    “Keep driving, I’ll light it for you.”
    He pulled out a lighter, flicked it on and brought it to the
tip of my cigarette. I inhaled and started to cough. The cigarette dropped down
onto the floorboards. I tried to stamp it out with my foot and the car swerved.
A black-flamed, hell-on-wheels Cadillac cussed at us as it careened past.
    I pulled over into the grass, retrieved the cigarette from
the floorboards, and threw it out the window. Charlie exhaled. He’d been
holding his breath.
    “Hey, you said you wanted to get to the spirit world,
right?” I said.
    He laughed. A pale, shuddering kind of
sound. I couldn’t remember a time before when I’d heard him laugh. Misery
child. Dead teddy bear connoisseur.
    I kissed him through the veil.
    I grasped his cheeks, his hair. I smeared flour over his
skin. It wasn’t the first time I’d kissed anyone, you know. There’d been the
gardener with the cracked-chasm lips, whispering “drugs” in my ear like a love
story. And the boy from the nearby high school that I’d revenge-kissed for
calling me ugly. But never like this. Not with the heat and the veil between
us. Not with his eyes rolling up in his head as if he was dreaming; not with
the blood draining from my face; and not with my flour-encased hands turning us
into ghosts. My hands felt like bear traps. If I weren’t careful I’d break my
own bones.
    I leaned back into my seat and wiped at my mouth. Charlie,
panting, pulled the veil back over his face. I drove back home.
    I pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition. I
took Pluto out of his arms and she snuggled into the crook of my arm.
Everything seemed quiet, in a painful way, away from the blistering noise of
the highway. There was no engine to cross the space between the two of us.
    Charlie held his hands up in front of his face, the fingers
outstretched.
    “Trying to figure out if your hands are still attached?” I
asked.
    Speaking felt like breaking a sacred thing.
    “I’m trying to wake up.” He said. “It’s how you know if
you’re dreaming.”
    “Your hands tell you all that?”
    “In a dream you never know where your hands could be.”
    He stretched his fingers further, further. I touched his
wrist. His hand was