In the corner of the room rested my dead baby brother's crib and inside the crib his old blood bloomed into a snake. I called Momma’s name but she wouldn't wake. I shook her shoulders but she wouldn't wake. I sat on top of her like in a bad dream and leaned down into her face and screamed.
“Bubba, what are you screaming for?”
Sissy stood in Momma’s doorway in her white nightgown, her hair upbraided in a snake coil, rubbing her eyes.
“Jolene’s trying to kill me,” I said, “and Momma's dead.”
Everything in the room returned to its normal place. The looming furniture shrank. Momma’s ribcage turned from sand back into bone. The snake of blood had been nothing but a tired spot on an unused mattress. Sissy went to the bed stand and picked up a nearly empty pill bottle. Shook it.
“Momma’s not dead. She just took too many sleeping pills.”
Jolene screamed to shake the entire house. She spit my name out like a curse word and the hallway light busted. The house tumbled into darkness.
I cried out for Daddy.
“Charles,” Sissy said, “he’s not here.”
Sissy pressed her mouth to my forehead and whispered a “shh” that hummed on my skin.
Jolene rattled my bedroom window.
“I'm going to fuck your sister with the branches of this tree,” she called to me. Her voice tumbled through the room like broken glass.
Sissy reached out her hand for me to take and then lifted me off the bed. We went down into the hallway past my open bedroom door. Jolene’s silhouette plastered itself onto my window. Her nails scratched against the window, and they were color of a sick dog, translucent and green.
Sissy hid the both of us in the hallway closet and we sat on top of the boxes full of Daddy's leather jackets. I tried to speak, to tell Sissy to make Daddy come back and save us all, but I could barely breathe. Sissy touched the back of my neck with the tips of her fingers and stroked my hair. Her hands were the only real thing that kept me from falling straight through the floor as I rattled with Jolene’s screams.
When morning came Jolene was gone and Sissy and I were still alive, so we left the closet and went downstairs to find Momma raised from her sleeping dead stupor and making coffee. Sissy and I sat down at the kitchen table with red eyes and animal seizure nerves. Sissy scratched her nails into the table. I chewed my thumbs into the shapes of meat hooks.
“Oh, you’re awake,” Momma said.
She didn’t meet our eyes. She only poured substitute sugar into her coffee and looked out the window where Sissy’s garden lay abandoned in the gloom outside.
“I thought the wisteria would’ve come in by now,” she said.
She sighed, and her body heaved with soporific weight. Momma took her coffee upstairs and left us alone.
“Do you want some breakfast, Charles?” Sissy asked. When she looked across the table at me her face was a lead weight, and for a moment I saw Momma creeping into her eyes.
“What is that thing?” I asked.
Sissy said nothing.
“If she gets me will she come after you next?”
Sissy leaned forward and her back made a noise like a button snapping off of a coat.
“You know,” was all she said.
That night after Sissy and Momma went to sleep I put on one of Daddy's leather jackets, took a kitchen knife out of one of the kitchen drawers, and went down into the swamp. Daddy was gone and I knew I was the only one to protect Momma and Sissy from the bad things. I walked with the kitchen knife held straight out in front of me. The roots of corpse trees dug down into the mud and pried open a path. The fog sucked at my feet and a chill settled down on my skin.
Jolene called my name and her voice shivered through the metal of my kitchen knife. I looked behind me and the house bottomed out and disappeared. I kept walking. The air became thicker. I became shrouded in a miasma of dust and the atmosphere shrank. The swamp closed above my head.
Jolene rose up above me out of the green water, her limbs shining like insect wings. She bent her spine so that it arched against her skin like fish fangs. She reached out toward me and clasped my knife between her palms. The knife scratched her but she did not bleed.
She smiled and her wet, dirty hair fell in a halo against my forehead. Her crown of tree branch teeth pressed into my cheeks. The crooked tip of the kitchen knife gleamed sharp in the center of her eyes, those dripping, fist-sized eyes that could cut into bone. I shivered and shrunk in her grip. When she spoke her voice abraded my head.
“Give me the knife,” she said, and she pressed her forehead to my mouth and whispered, “shhh,” just like Sissy did.
She shoved my nose into the folds of her rotting dress. She breathed swamp into my hair and her body twitched.
“Give me the knife,” she said again.
I let go of the knife. It slipped through her palms and dropped down into the water below. She grabbed my hair and shoved my head down.
“Look,” she said, “look down into the water.”
She forced me down to my knees into the swamp and silt. My mouth and nose touched the surface of the water. Her nails dug into my scalp.
“Look or you drown,” Jolene hissed.
I looked down and saw straight to the bottom.
There were bones in the water. The skull and finger and hip bones of children. The bones of all the children lost to bullet wounds and SIDS and cracked heads. The bones of all the children put into black trash bags and left on porch steps so that the monster with her hands now tugging at my hair could drag them down here in the swamp to build her sleeping nest.
The bones were cracked open and gnawed and left to corrode in the mud. Bones that were cool blue and misery heated red, bones that never learned adult fear. Bones of girls with mouths frozen into rictus and bones of boys with empty skulls and skinny legs chewed apart. Bones of my dead baby brother. Bones that held out their hands to touch me. Bones that went down into the darkness forever.
Jolene released my hair and I stumbled backwards and fell. She laughed.
“Run home now,” she said, “you’ll be with me soon enough.”
I ran, leaving my dead baby brother and the kitchen knife and my bones in those dark waters behind.
Chapter Three
God appeared on the television in a black horned mask and warned that Judgment Day was approaching. He’d been doing this for as long as I could remember. After my baby brother died and Daddy left Momma threw all of Daddy’s stuffed animals into closets and cupboards. Then she sat down in front of the television and turned the television volume up a little more each day until God's voice broke through the walls and busted down the ceiling and rattled my bed so I couldn't sleep.
Momma put on her angry face every time God came onto the television. Her angry face made her look about a century older, her mouth small and hard and her eyes big and buggy. Her body knotted against the couch like a dead tree. She grew twisted claws in the perfect shape for gripping curtains and the edges of chairs.
Yet no matter how long God on the television in his black mask screamed and cursed, no matter how much Momma's body knotted and strained and her angry face threatened to eat out her head, no matter how many times the television speakers boomed so loud that I thought the furniture would blow across the room and Momma would have to hold tight onto the seat curtains to keep from flying out the window, she never turned off that television.
I walked downstairs to find her in front of the television with God screaming in her ear.
“I can't sleep," I told Momma.
"Fix yourself a glass of warm milk," Momma said without looking away from the television. I had to walk through a wind tunnel to get to the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of milk and while I was waiting for it to heat up in the microwave I looked back into the living room from the kitchen. First Daddy, then Momma, had been sucked under by that living room, bent under the pressure of its gravity. No light came in the room from outside, and all the light b
ulbs in the house had either died or busted long ago.
I took the glass of milk out of the microwave and walked back into the living room.
"Hey Momma?" I asked.
"You're blocking the television," she said.
I didn't move out of the way at first. I turned toward Momma and looked down at her claws burrowing into the couch upholstery. I wanted to ask her if she was still alive. I wanted to ask her if she still loved me.
Yet when I opened my mouth to ask her angry mask slipped on, that rubbery, tight parody of a face with its shrinking lips and hollow ball forehead, and I couldn't speak.
I went upstairs and crawled into bed with my glass of warm milk. I drank the milk and pulled the covers over my head, but I couldn't sleep with God's voice tearing down the house.
"Repent or you will die," God in his black mask said, "follow me or you will die."
I kept waiting for the voice to cease but God never slept.
In the morning when I crawled out of bed with stiff limbs Momma was still in front of the television and God was still speaking about the death of all humanity, the flood that would sweep us away, our imminent death knoll and dirge sung by his terrible monsters. I hung onto the edge of the couch and God's voice shuddered through my teeth.
"Why aren't you at school?" Momma asked.
"It's Saturday," I said, "I don't have any school."
"Go outside and play with your friends, then," she said. She pried my fingers off the couch and pushed me toward the door. I went outside onto the porch and the door swung shut behind me.
I didn’t want to tell her that except for the prophet Ezekiel all my friends were dead.
I still thought about them even though they were gone. There was Wiley, who had angry purple fingers and a red butterfly birthmark that covered half his face and neck and a death wish. He used to sleepwalk into his kitchen in the middle of the night and smash dinner plates. He picked them up one at a time and hurled them onto the floor. When his parents locked the cabinets so he couldn't smash the dinner plates anymore, he sleepwalked into the living room and smashed his mother's collection of porcelain angels. After that his parents locked him in the basement at night. In his sleep he ricocheted off the walls of the basement like a machine gun bullet, his arms and legs whining like helicopter blades. Whenever he came to school his face and limbs were black with bruises.
Then there was Smarts, who had a body flat as a plaster fresco and punch holes for eyes. He wrapped duct tape and plastic wrap around his bald head so the girls couldn't read his mind, so he said, and he raised chickens to torture and slaughter because his daddy told him every good boy had a little sociopathy in him. Smarts talked with a lisp and walked with a limp, though Ezekiel told me had it on good authority Smarts was faking both. For what reason, though, Ezekiel couldn't say.
The twins Darling and Violetta wore tiny tulle wedding dresses and always buried their teeth in their ghost red hair. Darling pressed the tips of her fingers to my temples and told me what to think. She always said things like, "You are thinking of a warm and empty place. You are thinking of your mother's womb." Violetta crouched in corners and trembled and scratched at her face.
The six of us used to explore the husks of abandoned houses. These were the houses of people who were murdered by monsters or dragged away to the hell shuttles. We never stole or disturbed anything, but walked through the rooms as if in a museum.
The basements and closets were sterilized and pinned up like butterflies in shadow boxes. The attics and hallways scraped and shuddered underneath us. The ovens, sinks, refrigerators, and showers appeared to go feral, throw off their collars, and spit hot iron as we walked past.
After we finished exploring we usually went downtown. We sat down on the street opposite the reverend that passed out abortion pamphlets while wearing a metal oxen yoke. Ezekiel usually took this time to preach about the impermanence of human flesh.
“Happens fast when the shuttles take you,” Ezekiel said, who’d just come back from his prophet apprenticeship at the capital with a shiny black sphere implanted in his head.
“Where do the hell shuttles take you?” I asked Ezekiel, who I thought knew everything. He didn’t go to school anymore like the rest of us, but instead learned with a private mentor.
“Ain’t no heaven shuttles,” Ezekiel said, “does that give you a clue?”
***
Once instead of going out to the abandoned houses we went to the woods outside of town. We were drunk on the summer night, mad with mosquito bites, blood filling our ears. Summer heat drove the monsters out of their holes and we heard their scratch hiss noises all around us, yet nobody seemed concerned. Darling and Violetta sewed daisy chains into each other’s hair. Wiley kicked trees. Smarts and Ezekiel walked in front of the rest of us, hands in their pockets, looking at the ground in front of them.
We came to a building plastered into the trees, the limbs of the dogwood and cedar like noxious veins feeding the stone. The building was made of concrete and crushed rocks, like nothing I’d ever seen inside the town of Edgewater. It squatted down in the dirt like it was being crushed by its own gravity. A tiny planet with an empty mouth.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A temple,” Ezekiel said.
“God’s temple?” I said, “doesn’t look like the ones in town.”
Ezekiel said nothing. The shiny sphere on the back of his head focused and squinted. I saw myself in that eye, limbs distended and head scraping sideways.
“Let’s go look,” Wiley said.
We went together through the double wide entrance. Inside the temple it was cool and quiet. The walls slouched inward and the stones dripped with monster musk. My throat tightened.
I rounded a corner of the temple and went down a hallway so low and crumbling that I thought might crash over my head. On the walls in the hallway were bowed out and scratched over pictograms of monsters. Monsters that I’d recited the names of in school until my tongue swelled. Kali. Aphrodite. Jolene.
At the end of the hallway I found an inner sanctuary with an altar rising out of the floor like a tidal wave. Broken mirrors perforated the ceiling. The broken floor rolled out away from my feet with a sigh.
On the opposite wall hung a picture of the black moon, gleaming with a silver halo, hovering over our black planet.
In the picture metallic figures with cool faces hovered over the periphery of the moon. Those figures were familiar and yet uncanny, like the face of your sister hooked onto the head of a lizard in some distant dream. Machine and animal.
Before I could get a closer look a monster slithered out from behind the altar. Aphrodite, with a bird face and snake limbs. I gagged on the wet smell of her feathers. When she saw me she hissed and nearly stopped my heart. I stumbled backwards and she writhed across the sanctuary floor toward me.
Someone grabbed my shoulder. Ezekiel. We ran back down the hallway, into the empty entrance, out into the woods. Smarts and the rest had already fled the temple. We didn’t stop until we’d crossed the threshold from the tree line to my front yard, to my porch and up the stairs into the safety of my room. I sat for a long time on the bed clutching at my chest, those silver figures and that black moon stamped on the back of my skull.
“Be a little more careful, would you?” Ezekiel said, “I’m already been to seven funerals this week.”
Other than that comment, Ezekiel and I never spoke about what we’d seen in that inner sanctuary. But on nights when I couldn’t sleep I’d get up from the bed and go over to my desk and try to recreate in sketches those silver machines.
***
We found Wiley in an abandoned monster nest a month after he stopped coming to school, his head crushed down into the dirt and his hair matted into moss. We tried to drag him out of the monster nest, but he came out in pieces. His arms fell out of their sockets and his head tumbled off his shoulders and rolled away into the grass. We sat by his corpse without speaking. I held his head in my lap
and picked the flowers from his skull while Darling and Violetta sewed more daisy chains, Smarts dug through the monster nest pulling out bones and scraps of clothing, and Ezekiel picked at his nails and sighed loudly. We left his body out there beside the nest. We didn’t speak of Wiley again.
Shortly afterwards Smarts disappeared. One day a traveling salesman came to my door and told me he wanted to talk to my Momma, so I let him inside and he sat down at the kitchen table and I fixed him a pot of coffee, Momma sat on the couch watching God on the television.
“Momma,” I said, “someone’s here to see you.”
“I’m not talking to that son of a bitch,” she said.
So the traveling salesman folded his hands on the table and smiled sideways and turned to me.
He said, "son, you want to see something?"
I shrugged.
The traveling salesman made a big spectacle of picking up his heavy black leather briefcase and putting it up on the table. He waited for a few moments, smiling that sideways smile, before unclasping the big golden beetle snaps of the briefcase and then letting it swing open on the table.
Photographs filled the briefcase. The salesman picked up one of the photographs and slid it across the table toward me.
It was a photograph of Smarts. I knew it was him because he still had the tape and plastic wrap around his bald head. In the picture, he stood in the corner of a grainy dark room with a dirty light bulb on a chain hanging down over his head. His punch-hole eyes had been gouged out, leaving his face a wet ruin. There was ball gag in his mouth and a chain around one ankle.
"Let me see the other pictures," I said, but the traveling salesman whipped the photograph out of my face and back into the briefcase, then quickly snapped the briefcase shut.
"Oh, those are nothing special," the traveling salesman said, and then added in a cheerful voice, "just your friend performing various acts of sodomy."
The Crooked God Machine Page 2