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 place. You are thinking of your mother's womb." Violetta crouched in corners and trembled and scratched at her face.
The six of us used to explore the husks of abandoned houses. These were the houses of people who were murdered by monsters or dragged away to the hell shuttles. We never stole or disturbed anything, but walked through the rooms as if in a museum.
The basements and closets were sterilized and pinned up like butterflies in shadow boxes. The attics and hallways scraped and shuddered underneath us. The ovens, sinks, refrigerators, and showers appeared to go feral, throw off their collars, and spit hot iron as we walked past.
After we finished exploring we usually went downtown. We sat down on the street opposite the reverend that passed out abortion pamphlets while wearing a metal oxen yoke. Ezekiel usually took this time to preach about the impermanence of human flesh.
“Happens fast when the shuttles take you,” Ezekiel said, who’d just come back from his prophet apprenticeship at the capital with a shiny black sphere implanted in his head.
“Where do the hell shuttles take you?” I asked Ezekiel, who I thought knew everything. He didn’t go to school anymore like the rest of us, but instead learned with a private mentor.
“Ain’t no heaven shuttles,” Ezekiel said, “does that give you a clue?”
***
Once instead of going out to the abandoned houses we went to the woods outside of town. We were drunk on the summer night, mad with mosquito bites, blood filling our ears. Summer heat drove the monsters out of their holes and we heard their scratch hiss noises all around us, yet nobody seemed concerned. Darling and Violetta sewed daisy chains into each other’s hair. Wiley kicked trees. Smarts and Ezekiel walked in front of the rest of us, hands in their pockets, looking at the ground in front of them.
We came to a building plastered into the trees, the limbs of the dogwood and cedar like noxious veins feeding the stone. The building was made of concrete and crushed rocks, like nothing I’d ever seen inside the town of Edgewater. It squatted down in the dirt like it was being crushed by its own gravity. A tiny planet with an empty mouth.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A temple,” Ezekiel said.
“God’s temple?” I said, “doesn’t look like the ones in town.”
Ezekiel said nothing. The shiny sphere on the back of his head focused and squinted. I saw myself in that eye, limbs distended and head scraping sideways.
“Let’s go look,” Wiley said.
We went together through the double wide entrance. Inside the temple it was cool and quiet. The walls slouched inward and the stones dripped with monster musk. My throat tightened.
I rounded a corner of the temple and went down a hallway so low and crumbling that I thought might crash over my head. On the walls in the hallway were bowed out and scratched over pictograms of monsters. Monsters that I’d recited the names of in school until my tongue swelled. Kali. Aphrodite. Jolene.
At the end of the hallway I found an inner sanctuary with an altar rising out of the floor like a tidal wave. Broken mirrors perforated the ceiling. The broken floor rolled out away from my feet with a sigh.
On the opposite wall hung a picture of the black moon, gleaming with a silver halo, hovering over our black planet.
In the picture metallic figures with cool faces hovered over the periphery of the moon. Those figures were familiar and yet uncanny, like the face of your sister hooked onto the head of a lizard in some distant dream. Machine and animal.
Before I could get a closer look a monster slithered out from behind the altar. Aphrodite, with a bird face and snake limbs. I gagged on the wet smell of her feathers. When she saw me she hissed and nearly stopped my heart. I stumbled backwards and she writhed across the sanctuary floor toward me.
Someone grabbed my shoulder. Ezekiel. We ran back down the hallway, into the empty entrance, out into the woods. Smarts and the rest had already fled the temple. We didn’t stop until we’d crossed the threshold from the tree line to my front yard, to my porch and up the stairs into the safety of my room. I sat for a long time on the bed clutching at my chest, those silver figures and that black moon stamped on the back of my skull.
“Be a little more careful, would you?” Ezekiel said, “I’m already been to seven funerals this week.”
Other than that comment, Ezekiel and I never spoke about what we’d seen in that inner sanctuary. But on nights when I couldn’t sleep I’d get up from the bed and go over to my desk and try to recreate in sketches those silver machines.
***
We found Wiley in an abandoned monster nest a month after he stopped coming to school, his head crushed down into the dirt and his hair matted into moss. We tried to drag him out of the monster nest, but he came out in pieces. His arms fell out of their sockets and his head tumbled off his shoulders and rolled away into the grass. We sat by his corpse without speaking. I held his head in my lap and picked the flowers from his skull while Darling and Violetta sewed more daisy chains, Smarts dug through the monster nest pulling out bones and scraps of clothing, and Ezekiel picked at his nails and sighed loudly. We left his body out there beside the nest. We didn’t speak of Wiley again.
Shortly afterwards Smarts disappeared. One day a traveling salesman came to my door and told me he wanted to talk to my Momma, so I let him inside and he sat down at the kitchen table and I fixed him a pot of coffee, Momma sat on the couch watching God on the television.
“Momma,” I said, “someone’s here to see you.”
“I’m not talking to that son of a bitch,” she said.
So the traveling salesman folded his hands on the table and smiled sideways and turned to me.
He said, "son, you want to see something?"
I shrugged.
The traveling salesman made a big spectacle of picking up his heavy black leather briefcase and putting it up on the table. He waited for a few moments, smiling that sideways smile, before unclasping the big golden beetle snaps of the briefcase and then letting it swing open on the table.
Photographs filled the briefcase. The salesman picked up one of the photographs and slid it across the table toward me.
It was a photograph of Smarts. I knew it was him because he still had the tape and plastic wrap around his bald head. In the picture, he stood in the corner of a grainy dark room with a dirty light bulb on a chain hanging down over his head. His punch-hole eyes had been gouged out, leaving his face a wet ruin. There was ball gag in his mouth and a chain around one ankle.
"Let me see the other pictures," I said, but the traveling salesman whipped the photograph out of my face and back into the briefcase, then quickly snapped the briefcase shut.
"Oh, those are nothing special," the traveling salesman said, and then added in a cheerful voice, "just your friend performing various acts of sodomy."
"What?"
"Five thousand dollars and he'll be returned to you."
"I don't have five thousand dollars," I said.
"Well, I'm sure one of his friends will," the traveling salesman said, and he thanked me for my time, snatched up the briefcase, and left.
Later Ezekiel mentioned the salesman.
"Did anyone else have a weird guy trying to sell Smarts come and visit you?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Yeah," said Darling, her voice barely perceptible. Violetta had disappeared recently, and without her twin Darling had become soft and withered.
"Well I sure as hell wasn't going to pay five thousand dollars for that asshole," Ezekiel said, then turned to Darling "hey, you ever figured out what happened to Violetta?"
"The shuttles took her," Darling said.
***
The last time I saw Darling was when I was walking home from school and I ran into a hell shuttle pick-up a few blocks away from my house. I found her on the sidewalk in a chain line. She was eating an apple while the rest of the prisoners clamored around their neighbors asking for cigarettes and last kisses.
"You too?" I asked Darling, careful not to get too close to the guards wearing their pig-nosed face masks and holding stun guns.
"I'm going home," she said.
"Home?"
She smiled.
“Get away from her!” One of the guards shouted at me, and his pig mask nose quivered.
"You better go," she said, "I'll see you soon."
I ran away from the hell shuttle pick up and didn't stop until I got to the end of the block. I looked back in time to see a hell shuttle pull around and stop in front of the waiting line.
Darling tossed the apple onto the ground and when the shuttle doors opened, she was the first to board. The guards herded the rest of the people after her. Their skin turned gray with anxiety, but Darling remained white.
The next time Ezekiel and I explored abandoned houses I said to him maybe we weren't really exploring, but we were fleeing. We were fleeing as fast as we could but it wasn’t fast enough. Ezekiel laughed and he grabbed a teddy bear from the child's room and he began kicking the teddy bear around the room.
"I'm not going to die like Wiley or Smarts or the twins," he said, "I'm not going to die like you."
He tapped the back of his head and the shiny black sphere smiled down at me.
Chapter Four
Jeanine was the name for all pretty girls, the name for all girls with parents who still thought their children were virgins. She knew the flight patterns of every bird still alive in Edgewater. She memorized textbooks upside down and then took bets that she could recite the words back verbatim, and won every time. She bit her lips to turn them red because she couldn’t afford lipstick, and when she got bored absentmindedly scratched at her wrists until they were striped blue.
Do you know Jeanine?” I asked Ezekiel one day after school.
“Yeah, I know her. She’s a whore.” Ezekiel said.
“Really?”
“Nah,” Ezekiel said, “she’s one of the crazy ones. Won’t take money for it.”
After that every time I looked at Jeanine in class, speckled Technicolor underneath the projectors as we watched yet another serial killer documentary, I thought of her unzipped. I saw the blood rushing to her lips, flushed down her skin, as she told me the swallows would be coming in late this year. I saw myself breathing on that bare suicide skin as she told me a scissor tail warbled every morning from six to six thirty four on her balcony. I imagined I saw her naked spine bent down and a thousand cranes creep out of her skin and fly away.