The Crooked God Machine by Autumn Christian Page B

going to speak. My name hung in the air.
    “I think we’re just two very lonely people,” she said.
    My nerves relinquished their grip. The room snapped back into place and the bed and dresser stopped looking like sick dogs. I tilted my head back and reached up and slipped my fingers into her hair. I kissed her.
    When we got back to the room and curled up against each other I fell asleep almost instantly. Leda jolted me awake by grabbing my shoulder when the screaming in the swamp started.
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “Don’t worry about that,” I said, “that’s just Jolene.”
    I went back to sleep.
    I wanted to dream of her, warm on my lips. I wanted to dream of slipping off her dress and pressing my mouth between her legs.
    Instead I dreamed of Mad Maddy’s gritty, black glass feet dragging across my bedroom floor.

 
    Chapter Three
    After that night we started to meet each other in the woods. They were the only quiet times I could remember. We lay together on a blanket for hours, even on the nights when the monsters were slavering awake with the heat and the Apocalypse Brigade marched the streets rallying for God. I sketched everything I could think of but her, she wouldn’t let me sketch her, and while I did so she taught me the name of every flower and tree. She spoke their names like the names of abusive husbands.
    We kissed like children, with all our clothes on, backs craned and legs spaced apart. Despite those vicious eyes Leda went shy when I tugged on the hem of her dress, or tried to slip my hands underneath to touch her bare skin. She touched her face and hugged her chest and rolled away from me. I withdrew my hands to my sides.
    “I’ve never kissed without having sex first,” I told her.
    She laughed with her face pressed into the grass. I didn’t want to tell her I wasn’t joking.
    We started to see each other once every fortnight. Then each week. Then a few times each week. Soon we were going out every night, sloughing through poison ivy and breaking abandoned monster holes with our shoes to get to each other. When we saw each other across the clearing we walked with hesitant, lamb steps searching for monsters that might be coming out our limbs. When we reached the center of the clearing we felt the back of each other’s heads for the heat of the wire spider.
    “You’re still here,” I whispered, when I felt nothing but her cool scalp.
    “Still here,” she said.
    In the clearing she taught me how to dance. She pressed my hands against her waist and showed me how to lead, stepping over animal skulls and crumbling moss, as she hummed a song she’d heard once. We’d lost music a long time ago, after Sissy broke our last record player. Except for the timpani music that used to blare out of the speakers of the courthouse and the skinned drums of the Apocalypse Brigade, Leda’s was the only song I could ever remember.
    In the middle of our dance I swept her against a tree. I tried to hoist her up into the branches and rest her legs against my shoulders, but over the years I’d gotten too weak. My muscles ached with the weight of her. She slipped down and I leaned into her, my face cooked with sweat. I grasped at the bark her hair, panting.
    “You’re getting better at this,” she said, “the dancing, I mean.”
    She hummed a few more seconds of the song.
    “Where did you learn that?” I asked her.
    “The ocean gave it to me,” Leda said, and she smiled.
    She leaned her head back, tilted her chin upward. The tree above us quivered with sleeping birds. An owl with the face of a bear opened its eyes and they gleamed fierce. They were Leda’s eyes.
    “Let me draw you,” I said to Leda.
    “Later,” she said.
    We lay down on our blanket together and I waited for later. The months unraveled themselves. We danced until it became muscle memory, until I could take a wolf or a lizard by the waist and waltz across the glade. Leda’s cut hair grew long and thick until it covered her