The Crooked God Machine Read Free Page B

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 bulbs 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