The Crooked God Machine by Autumn Christian Page A

and she splayed out onto the gravel in front of him, wide-eyed, like a choked doll.
    “You know I know you better than that. Sort of busy? Long as I’ve known you, you do nothing but draw those little pictures of yours and meander around considering the lilies. And why, dare I ask, have you yet to find a job?”
    “Theresa’s sick.”
    “She’s a deadhead,” Ezekiel said, “there isn’t any other kind but sick.”
    I grasped the window casement above my head to steady myself. After a moment’s pause, Ezekiel sighed loud enough to make sure I heard.
    “Right, of course, I forgot. You’ve got one of those savior complexes,” he said, “well, good luck with that.”
    He threw the deadhead woman over his shoulder and left.
    “You should stay here if the Apocalypse Brigade is out,” I said to Leda once Ezekiel was gone, “Sleep on my bed. I’ll sleep in Theresa’s room. She never sleeps.”
    I walked toward the door to go out into the hallway.
    “Sleep with me,” Leda said.
    I paused.
    “What did you say?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard her.
    She got up with slow, heavy motions and crossed the room, and then lay face down in my bed. The bed sunk underneath her. The headboard and the posts and the frame groaned with her unfamiliar weight. Leda’s treacherous limbs stiffened, as if they would fall apart if she didn’t hold on tight enough.
    “Sleep with me,” she whispered.
    I crossed the room and stopped at the foot of the bed. For a long while she stood there. I watched her frail body shake with her breathing.
    “Charles,” she whispered.
    “Are you sure?” I asked.
    “I’m so tired,” she said, “It’s been so long.”
    I crawled into bed beside her. I touched her shoulder and my muscles tensed. My head did not belong to me. My limbs did not belong to me. I seemed to be not inside the bed, but floating above it. I watched myself as if from a cloud, a television screen, as I wrapped my limbs around her body and pulled her close toward me. Her breath melted into my breath. I lay there with my eyes open, my mouth and chin buried in her short hair. But the pain lashing my back wasn’t what kept me awake.
    When her breathing slowed I crept out of bed and out into the hallway. My blood followed me like a second skin. It seeped through the bandages and mottled my back. It dripped down into the shape of a face and dried there, crusty and beaded, empty eyes, hole of a mouth. It trickled down my legs and pressed red imprints of my feet down into the floor.
    I got to the end of the hallway and went into Momma’s room. The window was open, blowing leaves and dust across the floor. It’d been years since Momma could even walk up the stairs. Everything was arranged as it once was. The bed, the dresser, my baby brother’s crib. I knelt beside the crib and pressed my forehead to the cool plastic railing.
    “Charles?”
    Without turning around, I knew Leda watched me from the entryway.
    “I’m over here,” I said, my mouth dry.
    “You’re bleeding.”
    I could still see the dried spot of blood on the wall where years ago my baby brother spit out his thumb.
    “I know,” I said.
    “What was his name?” she asked.
    I said nothing. She touched my shoulder.
    “You’re shaking,” she said.
    I didn’t notice until she mentioned it. I thought it had been the room tilting sideways, the bed and the baby crib and the dresser clenching their teeth, growing thin with anemia. But it wasn’t the room, it was me.
    “You’re making me remember things I don’t want to,” I said.
    She pressed her sharp face down into my shoulder. Her arms encircled me. I couldn’t remember the last time someone held me.
    My nerves bit down. They chewed and chewed until I thought they might spit my skin out. I wanted to cry out and scream, to jump up and down, put my fists through a window elbow up. Anything to break away from that alien sensation.
    “Charles,” Leda said.
    “What?”
    For a while I thought she wasn’t