The Crooked God Machine Read Free Page 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