The Crooked God Machine Read Free

a cunt,” Jolene whispered with her mouth pressed against the windowpane, “and your sister’s a whore.”
    I called out for Daddy, but Daddy disappeared long ago.
    “If only this window was your throat,” Jolene told me, and she scratched and scratched.
    I jumped out of bed and ran down the hallway into Momma's room. I found Momma asleep wearing her sleep mask with the painted bug eyes that looked like they were popping right out of her head. Everything in that gray room rose up to attack me; the nightstand, the bed rails, the dead buttons of flowers on the wallpaper, Momma's ghost hair. Her svelte, sticky ribcage rose up like a wasteland against my knees and rolled past my body.
    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