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screaming, I opened my arms to welcome her into my bed. And instead of
destroying me with fang teeth, she curled up against me, shivering, trying to
warm herself underneath the sheets.
    Pluto jumped into my arms. The window rattled and I held
tight to her. Charlie continued to foam and writhe in the grass, but I couldn’t
hear him over the hiss in my ears. A swelling noise, louder
than the blood in my throat, louder and louder.
    She whispered. Let me in, baby girl. Let me
    In.

 
Chapter Seven
    CHARLIE
PROGRESSED FROM walking across hot coals to self-flagellation. While
muttering incantations, he beat himself with a cat-o-nine-tails crafted in shop
class of bits of leather and shards of glass. The kids at school called him
“suicide boy” while giving him wristbands to hide his cuts. To Charlie, they
were mute, because his brain was frying from sleep without rest. The teachers
referred him to a counselor; he fell asleep on the counselor’s desk when asked
if he had a “safe home environment.” Her recommendation to the teachers was to
move him to a desk in the back and let him sleep. Hidden in the back row, he
scratched at his wrists with a broken piece of glass. As his appetite waned, he
lay in my lap, underneath the bleachers, whispering of mythology.
    “After Persephone ate the pomegranate, she could never go
home again,” Charlie said. “Well, except to visit her mother.”
    “Why would she want to do that?” I asked, only
half-listening.
    Thinking: I want to build a time machine. I want to climb
inside and go back before they set your teddy bear on fire. I’ll bring it to
you unsinged so you can sleep again.
    “The god Zeus was in love with a beautiful woman, named
Leda, so he turned into a swan and raped her.”
    He pressed his chin into my knee and coughed. I kept
expecting him to choke out glass. It was only spring, but we were already well
on our way to becoming insane that year. I still hoarded matchsticks and
firecrackers. Charlie kept hitting himself in an attempt to transcend the pain.
Phaedra started tending to carnivorous plants. As for Momma? Well, she was the same as she’d always been. The last time I’d seen her, she
told me held a sword underneath her tongue. When The Nightcatcher came around
again all she’d have to do was open her mouth and cut off The Nightcatcher’s
head. With it, she’d grow a tree, and from that tree, feed the entire world.
Nobody would ever go hungry again.
    “Once, a god of poison came out of the hush place, and
poisoned an entire town,” Charlie said.
    “That isn’t in your mythology books,” I whispered.
    He coughed again. There it was, a chunk of glass from his
cat-o-nine tails, spit and saliva in my palm.
    Phaedra told me to leave him. That I was
addicted to the pain that broken people caused. She said all
fourteen-year-olds were, but I don’t think she paid much attention. She
smuggled Venus flytraps in her backpack and whispered Bukowski poetry to them.
She whispered to me with her nose in the mouth of Venus’ prickly hairs.
    “And besides,” she said, “ he kills
cats.”
    “No he doesn’t,” I said.
    She didn’t hear me as she started a whispering frenzy under
her breath again, rubbing the Venus’s hairs with the tip of her finger:

 
    she got up and lit a cigarette, she
was trembling all
    over . She paced up and down, wild
and crazy. She had
    a small body. Her arms were thin,
very thin and when
    she screamed and started beating me
I held her
    wrists and then I got it through
the eyes: hatred,
    centuries deep and true. I was
wrong and graceless and
    sick . All the things I had learned
had been wasted.
    there was no creature living as
foul as I
    and all my poems were
    false .(1)

 
    (1) “I’m in Love” by Charles Bukowski

 
    Summer came and school let out. Charlie took me to the river
outside of town. His scars flushed red in the heat. His thin cotton t-shirt and
swim shorts couldn’t hide the whip burns and scars webbing his