The Crooked God Machine

by Autumn Christian

  At the end of the street Ezekiel spotted a group of girls talking outside the liquor store, dripping over passersby to ask for change and smokes. He tossed the rest of the pamphlets into a trash can and motioned for me to follow him. He walked up to a silver haired girl with punching bag eyes, skin the color of chitin. He took her head in his hands and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  “Ezekiel,” she said, “where have you been?”

  “You’re a sinner,” Ezekiel said. He smiled and held out his arm for her to take, “come with me, baby.”

  I followed Ezekiel and the girl past the liquor store, into an alley, and out into the woods underneath the big faced creeper trees. Ezekiel took the girl’s hand and they ducked behind a tree. I listened to them undress each other with clumsy and frantic motions as I sat down on the other side of the tree and curled my legs tight against my chest. I waited for a long time there as they whispered and laughed. I cooked in the heat of their sex. Then I ruptured in their climax, the moment when that smell like a lightning strike sunk into my bones.

  "Do you want a turn?" Ezekiel asked.

  "No," I said, “aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?”

  “We’ve got time,” Ezekiel said, “And why not? What are you afraid of?”

  A moment’s pause. “Oh, right. It’s because of her. Jeanine. That girl with the butterfly wings made out of meat.”

  He laughed.

  “One day you’re going to wake up in a bathtub full of ice and watch her escape with all your organs underneath her arms. She’ll make pets out of them. Give them new names.”

  The girl laughed with him. Even her laugh was silver.

  "Her dad was a serial killer, you know," Ezekiel said.

  "Isn't her brother a prophet?" the girl asked, "Jonah, or something. Wasn't that his name?"

  "I don't remember," I said.

  “Hey, Charles, you know I'm only kidding you. Jeanine's a good girl. She's good for you. Come on over here to our side of the tree. Come have a smoke with us."

  I sighed.

  “Charles, don’t feel bad. I’m sorry. Come on over here.”

  I went to join them. Ezekiel and the girl were still naked. The girl pulled her silvery hair behind her shoulders while Ezekiel fished in his pants in the branches above for a pack of cigarettes.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the girl, trying to distract myself from the raw space between her legs.

  “Chicory,” she said.

  “She’s twelve years old,” Ezekiel said, “her parents just died.”

  “Light my cigarette for me,” Chicory said.

  He lit a cigarette and slipped it between her lips. She sucked on the end but didn’t inhale, crossed and uncrossed her legs. The monsters in the woods nearby screech hollered and shook the trees.

  “What was that?” she said.

  “Don't worry, baby, those monsters aren't going to come after us. I'm the chosen of God.”

  He tilted her chin back and took a kiss and promised another miracle.

  "Get dressed," he told Chicory, "I'll show you something special. Charles. You come too."

  Ezekiel led us out of the woods past Edgewater. He and Chicory walked arm in arm, almost skipping as they walked, laughing and telling jokes. As usual, I walked a few paces behind them with my hands thrust into the pockets of my jacket.

  When Chicory figured out where we were going she stopped laughing. She tugged sharp on Ezekiel’s elbow and dug her heels into the grass.

  "Let's go back, come on, Ezekiel. Let’s go back," She said.

  “What did I tell you before?” he said, “don’t worry about a thing.”

  We stopped at the edge of town, at the sloping, knuckled hills that looked out beyond the fields of the machines.

  I couldn't see the machines in the dark because of the gray miasma surrounding their faces and limbs. Yet I smelled the clean plated metal of their inner workings. I heard the thud of their shredded organs bearing down on us.

  “What are we doing here?” Chicory asked.

  "Watch this," Ezekiel said, and then he fell down into the grass in an epileptic fit.

  Chicory fell to her knees beside his writhing body.

  “Don’t touch him,” I said to her, “he does this all the time.”

  She shook his shoulders.

  “Chicory,” I said, “stop.”

  “I don’t want him to choke on his tongue,” she said.

  Ezekiel entangled her arms in his fit of epilepsy and they rolled together on the ground. He crushed her body beneath him. She grasped clumps of grass between her fists and pulled and pulled until the ground turned bald.

  “Stop please,” Chicory kept repeating, her voice muffled underneath him, “let’s go back.”

  Ezekiel couldn’t speak. Strained, burbling noises hit the back of his throat. The shiny sphere in the back of his head glowed so bright and so hot I thought it might peel back all the layers of his skull.

  Down in the field the machines spewed a flash of fire into the darkness. The miasma cleared. The soil squirmed and a mass of dirty white material shot up out of the ground. It writhed in the air, tumbled the soil underneath it until the ground itself seemed to be alive. But soon the dirty white was given definition, the soil receded. They were bones of our dead.

  As they pulled themselves up out of the soil those bones spit out their teeth and straightened their spines. They uncurled their clutching fingers. Their stiffened stomachs unfurled, their arms and legs rolled out from their sides and smacked the dirt. Silent, they filed past us and marched out of the machine fields toward Edgewater.

  Ezekiel stopped convulsing and Chicory uncoiled herself from his limbs. He gripped her wrist but she kicked away from him.

  “Get off of me!” Chicory cried, but Ezekiel had already let go of her wrist and wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. He tilted his head back toward the fields and laughed.

  "Isn't that something?" he said, "Look at what God did. Look at what I did."

  The dead filtered out of the machine fields in stark white rows as Ezekiel lay in the grass and laughed and laughed. As they approached us the fog peeled from their faces and revealed in detail all the empty spaces between their bones, the sockets of their elbows and knees pulled apart in an invisible suspension. As they got close Chicory was the first to recognize them.

  "I know that girl. That's Reverend Elli's sister." Chicory said, as a creature wearing a black funeral dress dragged herself past us. "And look over there, that's Jenny Sikes. You know, the crazy English teacher that had sex with all those underage girls. God, she walked like she was dead even while she was still alive."

  Chicory was right - these were people who had died in Edgewater in the last twenty years, maybe even longer. I found myself searching for the face of my father.

  "I think I saw my parents up there," Chicory said, "Didn't you see them?”

  Before Ezekiel or I could tell her to stop, she ran ahead of us and disappeared into the folds of the marching dead. Ezekiel and I trailed behind.

  "Where is she going?" I asked him.

  "I have no idea what that girl's doing," he said, “come on, let’s follow them out. God tells me they're going to the capitol,” Ezekiel said.

  "For what?"

  "Why, to join God's army and go kill heathens and heretics of course," Ezekiel said, and he smiled a big, bloody, dinner steak smile.

  We left the machine fields behind and followed the path the dead made through Edgewater. I called out Chicory’s name several times. No answer.

  “Stop worrying about that girl,” Ezekiel said, “she’s fine.”

  We walked past the derelict houses and chiaroscuro streets of the night, past the closed shops, the monster holes and preaching zones and blood spattered execution platforms. They dead always stayed a step ahead of us.

  We passed Jeanine's house. Jeanine sat outside on the porch in a pink nightie, her black lion’s hair pinned to the back of her neck. She smoked a cigarette wit
h insomnia cracking her eyes. When the dead passed her house in their silent formation she raised the cigarette to her lips without a moment’s hesitation, or surprise. Then she saw me and Ezekiel. Ezekiel waved at her. She stubbed her cigarette out on the porch balustrade and walked out into the street toward us.

  "What's going on?" she asked me.

  "Ezekiel raised the dead," I said.

  “Again?” she asked.

  We continued walking. Jeanine followed us. We found Chicory up the street, tugging on the desiccated arm of a woman, calling out for Mommy.

  "She's my mom," Chicory said, "look at her face. Mommy. Mommy, it's me. It's Chicory."

  "Let her go, Chicory," Ezekiel said, "your Mommy's dead."

  The skeleton tried to drag itself forward with Chicory clinging to its hips. After a few moments the woman raised her fist, hit Chicory against the face, and knocked her on the ground. She kept moving forward and soon disappeared up the street. Chicory lay on the ground where she fell, curling her body into a cloister, covering her face and crying.

  "Get up, silly girl," Ezekiel said to Chicory, "come on. You're making me miss out on all the fun."

  As if in response to Chicory’s cries, lights flickered on all up and down the street. People came out of their houses to search for their dead relatives. They called the names of people we used to know. They ran up and down Edgewater in a heated riot, screaming and setting fires and breaking windows and clinging to once familiar bones. All the while, the dead remained silent.

  Chicory continued to cry. Ezekiel shrugged and walked off, leaving the three of us behind.

  "See anyone you know?” Jeanine asked.

  "No," I said, "not anyone important, I mean."

  Chicory picked herself up off the street. Her face looked like a chunk of bone, a hard white shell.

  “Hey, are you all right?” Jeanine asked her.

  In response Chicory ran off into the night.

  Jeanine and I went after Ezekiel. Ahead of us people continued to scream and cry, calling out the names of the people we used to know. We came across decayed faces dropped onto the asphalt, peeled and clawed and distended from the bone, as well as bits of finger bones and leg bones, the clawed away shreds of funeral clothes.

  We found Ezekiel in the center of town, standing on the top of a guillotine platform with one of the senior prophets of the Edgewater Prophet Headquarters. Ezekiel pulled speech notes out of his pocket and looked toward the senior prophet, who was leaned up against the guillotine scratching the rusted blade with his fingernails. The man nodded to Ezekiel.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Ezekiel said, holding his speech notes up in front of his face, “Welcome to the Edgewater resurrection. We are gathered here today to witness a rare miracle, the pinnacle of our human condition. To join the indestructible army of God is to be made immortal, the greatest honor that any human can ever hope to have bestowed upon them...”

  He paused. He lowered the notes from his face and looked out across the nearly empty courtyard.

  “Where did everyone go?” he asked.

  “Wrap this up for me, will you?” the senior prophet said.

  “But I still have six more pages to read,” Ezekiel said.

  “I don’t want to hear it. I’m going home,” the prophet said.

  After the senior prophet left Ezekiel stuffed the rest of his speech into his jacket pocket.

  "They're still chasing those things," Jeanine said, in way of explanation, "pretty pathetic."

  He jumped down from the guillotine platform.

  "Whatever. I don’t care,” he said, "I’m bored of this.”

  Ezekiel left us alone once more in the stark, empty street.

  Jeanine turned to me. Her hair her come undone and now lay across her face in uneven streaks. She picked up a dead man's face from the pavement. When she looked at me her eyes were white and wide enough to walk through.

  "This is exactly why I'm getting out of this damned town," she said, holding the face out toward me, her thumbs through the empty places where its eyes used to be.

  Chapter Eight

  I woke one night to Sissy hanging a kitchen knife by a thread directly above my head.

  "What are you doing?" I asked, with Sissy's knees pressed into my shoulders and her body stretched over my headboard as she tied the threat knot on the ceiling.

  "How come we never see that girl you’re dating?" she asked, "how come you never take her over here?"

  "you mean Jeanine?" I asked

  "I want to meet her."

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I said.

  “Why?” Sissy asked as she finished tying the knot.

  She lowered her hands to her sides and the knife floated in suspension above our heads.

  “You’re digging into my shoulders,” I said.

  Sissy hovered on top of me for a long moment after that without speaking. Her eyes fixed to the space directly above my head where the knife hung suspended. Her nails scraped into the headboard of my bed. She’d grown thin in the last months, skin like a noose, bones like cream.

  “Okay, fine,” I said, “I’ll bring her over.”

  “Great,” Sissy said, and leaped off the bed, suddenly animated, “I’ll make dinner.”

  I took the knife down from the ceiling after Sissy left the room and the next day at school invited Jeanine over for Sunday dinner. Jeanine arrived at our house on the edge of the swamp the next Sunday evening dressed in spring colors and a face painted with dark blue eye shadow and meat colored lipstick she stole from her mother.

  I met her out on the porch.

  “Watch where you step,” I said, “Theresa likes to set traps everywhere. And bake needles into the rations. Oh, and don’t sit down on the couch or stick your hand into anything. She likes to hide stuffed squirrels everywhere. And avoid Momma’s eyes if she ever smiles at you like she’s got a secret.”

  “You worry too much,” Jeanine said.

  She laughed and kissed me on the cheek. I hesitated to touch her in return. I didn’t recognize her dressed up all in colors. She even smelled differently, like freesia and fake rain instead of meat and grit and hair dye.

  “It’ll be fine,” she said, “look at you, you’re more nervous than I am.”

  We went inside. Sissy waited for us at the kitchen doorway across the great divide of the living room. She too, was dressed foreign, in one of Momma’s lace corsets from her teenage days, and a ruffle skirt that swallowed up her legs. She hid her face behind a mask of plasticine powder.

  Even though nobody was on the couch, the television continued to play loud enough to bust the ceiling. I took Jeanine by the shoulder and guided her across that seemingly vast, infinite space toward the kitchen. Sissy lit a cigarette and leaned against the door frame.

  “Your girlfriend looks like a whore,” Sissy said. When she smiled the dried makeup cracked on her face.

  “Please don’t hate me for this,” I whispered to Jeanine.

  We followed Sissy into the kitchen where she’d arranged at the kitchen table the government rations onto the special occasion silverware. In the dark green light I could almost imagine our monthly bread and meat paste was a real Sunday dinner. One from our childhood, before the factory shut down and Daddy left.

  Momma sat in the corner of the kitchen next to a dead stuffed deer, her chair propped up against the wall.

  "Sit down Jeanine," Sissy said, stabbing her cigarette against the edge of her plate, "sit next to Momma."

  "I want to watch the Teddy and Delilah show," Momma said.

  "Shut up Momma," Sissy said, "we're having dinner. Don’t embarrass me."

  Jeanine and I sat down and Sissy played host, cutting the meat paste and fried bread into delicate, bite-sized portions. Then she served them to Jeanine and me one square at a time on the tip of her silver fork. Her bones shook with the strain. Jeanine and I waited in silence for Sissy to finish, and when she did, we picked up our silverware in tandem an
d ate in silence. Momma didn’t eat at all.

  "Well then, do you like my deer?” Sissy said, indicating the stuffed deer with hollow green eyes propped up in the corner, "my father made it. His best one he took with him. But he left this one with us."

  Jeanine and I exchanged glances. I felt cut off from her, like we were separated by a pane of glacier glass. I wanted to push my hands through the crystallized air and touch her, but I thought we might both break.

  After a moment, Jeanine turned back to Sissy. The fork in Jeanine’s hand quivered.

  "I like it," Jeanine said.

  “No you don’t,” Sissy said, “but that’s okay. Nobody does.”

  "You know,” Jeanine said, “you remind me of this friend I used to have. She used to collect butterflies. Preserve them and pin them up, put them in these little shadow boxes all over her room. Only the black butterflies though. She's dead now."

  "I'm thinking of becoming a taxidermist myself," Sissy said, “I've always wanted to strangle and stuff a bear. Jump on its back and throw my arms around its neck and squeeze until it stops kicking. "

  “Don’t suppose there are many bears around here,” Jeanine said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Sissy said, “it’s just a silly idea. Why don’t you tell me more about yourself? What are you going to be?”

  "An archaeologist,” Jeanine said.

  "Oh, nobody's doing that anymore," Sissy said.

  “I am,” Jeanine said.

  Sissy laughed. Raw flakes of makeup cracked and peeled off of her face and fell into her food. Her skin underneath was terracotta colored, quivering. At the sight of it, Jeanine set down her fork and felt her own face.

  “What’s wrong?” Sissy asked, “aren’t you hungry?”

  “Ravenous,” Jeanine said. She swallowed and started examining her hands.

  Sissy touched my arm. Sniffed.

  "Charles. You smell like him. Are you wearing Daddy's jacket?"

  "What does it matter?” I said.

  "That's funny," Sissy said, "you wearing his jacket. You're nothing like Daddy. Would anyone like some whiskey?”

  Without waiting for a response, Sissy got up and retrieved Daddy’s whiskey handle from the cabinet. She poured herself a shot and threw it back in one gulp.