by B.C. Brock

 

“We have to be quiet today,” Mama used to say on Sundays. “That’s when God takes his naps.” She told us He’d been sleeping up there ever since the church burned down. Said He climbed

into our attic and never left. I don’t know how He stands it—it gets hot up there, and there ain’t much to speak of. Just a pull-string light and old quilts stacked so high they look like tombstones. Sometimes, I hear Him moving. Real soft. Like walking on clouds. But I know that can’t be true.

I asked Mama once why God slept in our attic instead of in heaven like the stories say. She always got annoyed with me—slapped her forehead like I was a fly needed swattin’. “Ain’t no heaven close by,” she said. “He got scared of what He saw and came here. Needed a rest.” Other times, she’d say, “He slipped through the cracks in heaven and landed right here in our house.”

I worried about Him. One night, I left a glass of water at the bottom of the attic stairs, so He wouldn’t be thirsty no more. Figured He had to be thirstin’.

The next morning, the glass was empty. Smudges on the rim. That’s when I started leaving other things: canned peaches, hymns I copied by hand on old paper, even a feather I found down at the barn. Sometimes, they’d be gone—taken. Other times, they came back mangled. The can of peaches came back rusted, full of worms.

At first, I cried. But then, somehow, it felt like there was purpose in what He left behind. Mama always told us not to go up there. Said He dreams up there. Said it’s dangerous to wake Him. But I went anyway.

The air hit me first—thick like soured syrup. Heavy and wrong.
I didn’t see Him clearly. Just the silhouette of a frail old man against the light bleeding in from

the attic window. He was draped in a moth-eaten quilt, and one foot stretched from beneath it—cracked, caked in blood and flower petals. I don’t know where the petals came from, but they were there, soft and strange.

A cloud passed over the sun, and the glow dimmed. Something in me dimmed too. I asked Him, “Are you gonna wake up?” He mumbled. I didn’t know the words—sounded like a language older than language. The beams groaned. The rafters bowed like the bones of an old man rising from sleep. Maybe that’s what they were. I backed down the stairs, heart pounding like Judgment Day had come just for me.

Later, I sat on the porch with Mama. She smoked her cigarette and stared up at the sky like it owed her something. Said she was still waiting on a sign. We don’t go to church no more. We just keep the house clean, say our prayers short, and keep the attic door locked.

Sometimes I think the world already ended. Only nobody noticed. God came here to die. But instead, He fell asleep. And now we wait— for the day the ceiling cracks.

 

B.C. Brock is a neuroatypical writer from the American South. He is a high school English teacher, and his work has been featured in Susurrus and Horrorsmith.