The Crooked God Machine by Autumn Christian Read Free Book Online

Momma's ghost, "you never bother Sissy."
    But Momma just clamped her teeth down on her bottom lip, snapped her hands against the bed rails, and started her angry commercial all over again.
    Outside the buzzing of the locusts threatened to uproot the house from its foundation.
    "Get away!" I told Momma's ghost once more, "go into Sissy's room!"
    I curled up into bed and stuck my head down into my pillow but Momma craned her neck down until it seemed to detach from her head and she whispered in my ear once more:
    "You don't feel a thing."
    I thought the plague would never end and that I would be on the receiving end of Momma's abusive slip implant advertisements until God came to destroy us all. Yet one morning the locusts died. They fell out of the sky and fell off the windows and lay on the grass in carcass heaps. Water replaced the blood in the taps. The machines closed their mouths and lumbered back into the fields.
    Momma and Sissy didn't seem to notice. I ran through the house opening all the curtains now that the plague was over, touching the empty, blood splattered windows, shaking and laughing.
    “What’s gotten into you?” Sissy asked, “stop laughing like that. You’re making me nervous.”
    Sissy followed me and closed all the curtains behind me, but at that moment it didn’t matter. I kept running through the house as if a locomotion star was beating its arms against my legs. I passed Momma in the kitchen as she was crouched underneath the sink searching for Daddy's cigars and whiskey. Momma stood up
    “Boy, what’s gotten into you?” she asked, repeating Sissy’s words like a spitting engine.
    But I just ran past her. I ran out the back door and held my hands out to the sun and the sun was bleating like a lamb and the piles of dead locusts kicked up in a flurry underneath my feet and my heart struck out and fell to the bottom of my ribcage as I ran. I ran to Jeanine, to the only girl who I knew would still be alive.
    I found Jeanine in the front lawn of her house, wearing padded leather gloves and carrying a large wicker basket on her hip. She scooped up dead locusts and placed them in the basket. I ran to her and grabbed her head and kissed her on the mouth.
    "Watch out for the stingers," she said when I let her go and her black hair strung out between my fingers, "I got stung by one of them and it hurts like a bitch."
    She set the basket full of dead locusts down and pulled off one of her leather gloves. She held her fingers out to me and I kissed the sting wound on her ring finger, the pulsing red island of venom rubbing up underneath my upper lip. She smiled at me and pulled the other glove off and I kissed those fingers too.
    "I've missed you," I said.
    "Let's go," she said, and took me to the abandoned rock quarry. The family of swans was still alive. They floated through the water at the bottom of the quarry, through trails of floating dead locusts. Their white necks dipped down to touch the lips of their reflections. The swans were untarnished despite the ravages of the plague.
    “I don't know how it happens. How they're still alive after all those plagues."
    We cleared a space on the rocks and Jeanine and I lay down in the heat. Her skirts billowed over her knees. I trailed my fingers through her black lion's hair and we watched the swans swimming down below.
    "I'm leaving this town first chance I get," she told me, "I'm going to go to the capitol city or to the ocean, somewhere with lots of light and warmth. One day God is going to wipe Edgewater off the face of the planet, and I'm not going to be around when it happens."
    “What about the swans?" I asked, though what I really wanted to say was, “what about me?”
    “They'll live," she said, "they always do. But I'll die if I stay here."
    I clung to her neck and I buried my face in her hair. Our skin was pale and our eyes red from staying inside, staying in the dark for so long. My fingers slid down into Jeanine's collarbone, slipped down