It Eats the Light

It had been six months since the funeral.

A moving truck was parked in front of a picturesque two-storey house with rounded trim on the eaves, a window in the attic, a large sunporch, and vines growing up the front that framed the living room window. The wrap-around porch had two doors; one in front to go inside, another to access the sunporch to the left. There was a decent sized yard, more of it out back where there was a door covered by a box eave with built in shelves for wet shoes and umbrellas. A rickety swing set had been left as a monument to tenants past. It sat on the front yard facing the road and the old warehouse, equally rickety if not more so, which was just across the road.

It wasn’t a bad house, all told. It was large enough, roomy enough. A few bits and pieces here and there needed fixing up, but it was nice enough to serve its purpose. In another life, Klara would have been excited about finally getting her own room, her own space. She would have loved the forest in the backyard, the river that lay just beyond it, and the old train trestle that had been converted into a catwalk since the railways had shut down about a hundred and fifty years ago. In that other lifetime she would have been the first one running up and down the creaky wooden stairs imagining what wallpaper she would prefer to the gruesome rose nightmare that had been left behind by old Miss Hazel, the former owner. She would have found out what was behind the window shaped like an eye that glared watchfully out from between the eaves, rummaging through dusty old boxes and finding a mirror to a secret world, or hidden passageways to lost treasure. She would have tied a blindfold around her wavy black hair and waited for Kora and Cara to finish hiding, letting their new home fall quiet as a tomb, then let their muffled giggles give them away. She would hunt them down over and over until her mother called out to them to finish up, wash their faces and hands, and help her get supper started before her father got home. She would have sat in the sunroom writing in a diary of all her secret thoughts, hopes and dreams, and everything she would accomplish in their new home.

She was six months removed from that other lifetime and its possibilities, and so the house was just a house. Not bad, not good. Just a house. An old wooden thing filled with someone else’s dreams and memories.

She stood next to the white moving truck with Kora and Cara next to her in descending order, each sister a head shorter than the one next to her, like a set of nesting dolls in similar dresses. Not identical, but similar in that they all looked like they were homemade from curtains or bulk fabric of similar patterns in different colours, which they were. Klara had yet to master the art of the needle, but they fortunately they still had some of their mother’s handiwork so she was safe for a while yet.

Cara was five and had not enjoyed either the process of packing up her toys and clothes, saying goodbye to their old house, nor the two hour drive that followed. She wore a hand-me-down from her sister, a white dress with thin, red, vertical stripes. Kora, nine, was likewise hot, tired, and disgruntled at having neither the responsibilities (read: authority) of her big sister or that she was coddled quite as much as the younger. She wore a hand-me-down from her sister, a white dress with yellow polkadots. Klara, at sixteen, was now the oldest woman in the house, and wore a hand-me-down from her mother which was white with small blue flowers, a bit boxy at the shoulders, and with a lacy sash around the waist that had drawn the ire of her father when he had first seen it. Though faded, worn, and not in style anywhere that she knew of, Klara cherished that dress. She had gone to tears when her mother gave it to her. It was a woman’s dress worn by the woman of the house, and she knew then that wearing that dress meant that she had to fill her mother’s shoes as well. She had just assumed she would have more time before she would have to fill them.

Ready or not, she had been charged with organising and packing two children who, on top of the loss of their mother, were now faced with beginning a new life in a strange place, with only the vaguest of explanations as to why they were moving in the first place. Their father’s explanation of “to do the lord’s work” had evidently not sufficiently answered the question, as Kora had made it clear for the first three quarters of the drive.

And the preceding two weeks of packing.

And the preceding two weeks which had followed their father’s announcement.

Mercifully, she had fallen asleep for the last half hour of the drive, much to the delight of Klara, her father, and even little Cara, who parroted her oldest sister’s accusation of Kora being “immature and childish”. Such a barb from a five year old was more than she could stand, her eyes welling up and lip poking out before she crossed her arms and turned out the window to pout herself to sleep. Now she was awake. Not just awake, but awakened from a hot car nap to an unfamiliar place, all while being nine years old.

“I’m hungry,” she said, rubbing one eye with her free hand while the other clung to a raggedy white rabbit. “When are we going to eat?”

“It’ll be a while,” Klara said. She was still looking at the house with an unfocused gaze, looking at the box layered in faded, chipping white paint, but not really seeing it. They might as well be at a church function back home, stopping in to the roost of a new hen that had come to join the flock.

“Can we have some koekjes? Or some biscuits?” Cara asked while giving Klara what the latter had dubbed “the big face”; eyes wide as the moon, cheeks chubby, her tone just about sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock. She was clutching a stuffed fox with both hands and pressing it against her belly. She had recently taken it out from under her dress where she occasionally stuffed it so she could “play mommy”, much to her sister’s amusement and father’s pronounced discomfort. On the drive was the first time she had done it in a long time, certainly since before the funeral. Klara recalled hearing that younger children can sometimes regress into infantile behaviours when they are facing emotional crises, and it occurred to her that Cara had played mommy a lot when she was younger. She found Cara had been quietly staring at the fox, still cleanish and a few years removed of the haggardness of her older sister’s rabbit, for a bit too long.

“I don’t know,” Klara said. “Maybe, if we can find them. Dad will likely want to have oats or potatoes or something without sugar or flavour.”

“Bleh,” Kora sneered. “I miss mom’s cooking. Dad never wants anything that tastes good. He doesn’t like pizza, doesn’t like hamburgers-“

“I want pizza!” Cara said.

“-doesn’t even want bell peppers in pasta because peppers “upset his stomach,” she finished with air quotes and no small amount of attitude. Klara shook her head and smirked.

“If we make potato salad I’ll have to add raisins to cool down the spice from the mayonnaise.”

Cara tilted her head up and craned her neck to gawk at her big sister, the stuffed fox dangling from one hand.

“Mayonnaise isn’t spicy,” she said matter-of-factly. “Do you even know food?”

Klara snorted. “It’s a joke, Cara.”

“That’s not a joke!” said Cara. “This is a joke. Knock knock.”

Klara and Kora exchanged a glance. One wanted to be in the shower while the other wanted to be in the basement planing lumber.

“I said knock knock!”

Klara rolled her eyes. “Who’s there?”

“Interrupting cow.”

“Oh, not this again,” Kora muttered before Klara clapped her on the chest with the back of one hand.

“Interrupting cow wh-“

“Moo!” Cara shouted, bursting into a fit of hysterical laughter. “See, that’s a joke. Jokes are supposed to be funny.”

“How would you know?” Kora said, putting her knuckles on her hips and turning one out in the peak of attitude.

Cara tilted her head back again, turned to her sister and said dryly, “I’m funny and you’re jealous.”

Kara gritted her teeth and opened her mouth to say something but was cut off by Klara, who put her hands on her younger sister’s anger-heated shoulders and said “I think we should find dad and get started unpacking. The two of you still have to choose your rooms, you know.”

“I get my own room!?” Kora shouted, her eyes wide and jaw hanging open dramatically.

“I gotta sleep alone?” Cara said, her eyes just as wide but much glassier and without the excitement. “I don’t wanna sleep alone! I wanna sleep with Kora.”

“Dream on, tiny tot!” Kora said, snapping her fingers. “I’m getting my own room with my own bed and my own closet, and I’m gonna sneak out the window, and have like fifteen boys come by for a party, and when they try to kiss me I’mma be like “whoa. Whoa. Whoa. No. Stop it. No. Grow up.””

Klara looked at Kora with her head cocked to one side and said “where do you come up with this?”

“Don’t hate,” Kora said. “Just cause I got boyfriends and you can’t get one.” She bobbed her head back and forth, making her hair shake. She was the only one with bangs and had the straightest hair among them, typically letting it hang freely around her long, slender neck – or goose neck, as she called it - and often using it for comedic effect when bobbing her head around like a desk toy.

Klara put her hands on her hips and tsked. “You don’t want to let dad hear you talking like that. He’ll have a conniption.” Kora rolled her eyes.

“The man has no sense of humour.”

“See?” Cara said. “I’m the funny one!”

A man’s voice came from out back of the house.

“Girls! Come round here! Time to start unpacking!”

Later that evening they sat at the kitchen table in silence. The table itself they had brought with them. It was old, handmade, layered with whitewash. It had its cracks and chips taken out of it, many of them outlines visible beneath the paint that had been intended to cover them up, but it was sturdy and did what they needed it to do. Its legs were thin poles angled to give it a bit more stability, at least one of them shorter than the rest, leaving it wobbly and defeating the purpose. The top was disproportionately thicker, being made of two-by-fours. The old man had allegedly made it for the girls’ mother as a gift shortly after the wedding. “A place to eat their daily bread”, he always told them.

There it was, a familiar anchor in unknown waters. It was strange to see the family table, an everyday part of their lives since the day they were born, now in such unfamiliar surroundings. At least, it felt strange to Klara, who found herself looking at her father and younger sisters to see if they would let on that they too found it awkward, uncomfortable, or just a little weird. If Kora was bothered she did not let on, instead staring disinterestedly at the porridge they had fixed for supper, her cheek in one hand as she blasphemously rested one elbow on the table. Cara was likewise fixated on the grey meal, slapping her spoon against the gelatinous glob for the sake of hearing the thock, thock sound it made with each impact. If either of them felt out of place, they did a good enough job of hiding it.

For Klara, the table’s proper place was at their old house surrounded by the cabinets her father had made after his hands had matured along with his eye for detail. They were a soft off-white, somewhere nearer beige and caramel, with red trim that made them look like they belonged in a gingerbread cottage. They contrasted with the candy cane backsplash insisted upon by their mother, who had an eye for the absurd that was as much of a contrast with her husband as the backsplash to the cabinets. In their old kitchen, the table had reminded Klara of white chocolate bark and made her feel like she could eat anything in the kitchen, from the cookie clock to the marshmallow storage jars they used for sugar and coffee. In the new kitchen, with its generic pine cupboards many of which were missing their doors, it just looked like a shoddily made table next to some cabinets that were made on an assembly line with cheap plywood, then stuffed into an old kitchen because the house had outlived the old ones. Back home it had a place. Here, it was just a thing.

She looked at her father who was eating his porridge silently. He had a few days’ worth of salt and pepper stubble on his leathery face, and the lines beneath his tired eyes became more pronounced each time he opened his mouth to take a bite of the gruel. His tongue seemed to roll around in his mouth while he ate, though he never made a sound even when he was clearly working the meal out of his teeth. He had changed out of his moving clothes into something more formal for supper, a white button up and black slacks. His hair was short, dark brown, and parted to one side. As on his face, the greys were starting to show. Not particularly surprising for a widower in his late thirties.

“Well,” he said eventually, “we got a lot in today. We’ll finish unloading the truck tomorrow and you girls can start unpacking. Did you pick your rooms yet?”

Silence.

Klaus lowered his eyes and looked at the table, shifting his jaw to one side thoughtfully. He turned to his eldest daughter and said, “How about you, Klara? Did you pick your room out?”

She sat up a little straighter and said only, “yes, dad” with a light smile offered out of courtesy rather than sincerity. It was not a forced, plastic grin, nor was it really enough of a genuine expression of human emotion to be called a smile in earnest. She put in just enough effort to show him some teeth, some of the respect he demanded, and let it go.

“Mmm,” he said, finishing a mouthful. “Good. Good.” He paused for a moment, needing it to think of what to say next. “Good think we moved at the start of summer, hey? Give you enough time to get settled before you start school.” Kora sighed.

“I don’t know why we had to move anyway,” she said reflexively. “I liked our old house.”

“Me too,” said Cara softly.

Klaus put down his spoon, opened his hands and then closed them partially as though he were about to deliver a formal presentation, one of the habits he had picked up over his recent years of public speaking.

“Well,” he said, “the tricky thing about this life is, you never know what the lord is going to put in front of you. Your mother’s passing - I don’t pretend to understand his will, but he has a plan for us, for all of us, and that plan is going to be realised no matter what. Sometimes, you know,” he stammered and cleared his throat, “Sometimes the lord, he puts things in front of us that are meant to challenge us and make us stronger. People will say, “lord, give me strength” and wonder why they find themselves in hard times. It’s to make you stronger. Now, why he has put these recent challenges in front of us, I don’t know, but here we are.” In spite of his best efforts, whatever they may have been, the soliloquy came off to his eldest daughter as less “Sermon on the Mount” and more “Politician doing damage control”.

“You aren’t answering the question,” Kora said, her face still in her hand. “We’ve been asking you for weeks why we had to move and you keep saying “lord” this and “lord” that.”

Klara’s shoulders tensed and her skin flashed with heat. She stole a glance at her father and saw him leveling a stony glare at Kora at the far end of the table on his right. Not only for the table was she glad his hands had matured.

“Well,” he said, straining, “fair enough. I suppose I haven’t.” He looked at Klara whose eyes were downcast at her untouched saucer of porridge, and she could feel that he was trying to guess how much she had told them without his knowledge or permission. He cleared his throat again.

“The truth is,” he said, “we left because there were some problems in the community.” He had left a slight pause before the word ‘problems’, as though he were not sure that was a strong enough word. “We’re trying to live a good life. A righteous life. We’re not perfect, far from it, but we’re doing the best we can. We found ourselves in a situation where, with the church and all, well –“ he paused again. “Well, after the reverend Cloutier left, we just weren’t sure that was where the lord wanted us to be after all,” he said in almost a mumble before putting his head down and taking another spoonful of porridge. There was a tinge of bitterness to his voice. Resentment. Likewise, there was a tinge of a sneer at the corner of Klara’s mouth while she listened to her father speak.

“Why not?” said Cara. “Why didn’t God want us back home?” Klaus rubbed above his eyebrows and took a moment to respond.

“The lord wants you to go where you’ll be among good people that love The Bible and live by it and follow in God’s word,” he said. “and sometimes you meet people and they say they want to be righteous, but when it comes down to it they stray from the path.” And muttered, “some of them, on purpose.”

“Why?” said Cara. It was clearly a five year old’s “why”; not out of interest but out of the habit of asking “why”. Her father, consistent with his character, jumped on the opportunity.

“Oh, hard to say,” he said, his voice rising emphatically. “Sometimes it’s the temptations of the devil, sometimes it’s a weakness that’s just in their nature. Sometimes people say they want to live by God’s word but give them a chance and you find out quickly that they aren’t true Christians.”

“So the people at the church weren’t true Christians?” said Kora.

Klaus shrugged. “It’s not for me to say, but when the Reverend Cloutier left and they started talking about who they might bring in,” he shook his head. “You start to wonder.”

Klara tapped her spoon against the gruel, stifling a scowl and a groan, having suddenly lost her appetite. Had her father turned his head to his left he would have seen his eldest daughter shooting daggers at him from under her dark, knit eyebrows. The angle at which she was looking at him would have cast a shadow on her eyes so that, to him, she would have looked positively evil.

She lifted the spoon from the gruel -

“By ‘not true Christians’,” she wanted to say, “what you mean is that the congregation entertained the idea of bringing in a female pastor. Not just any female pastor, but one that had officiated a wedding between two women, one that had very unchristian ideas about what women could and couldn’t do with their bodies, one that might have opinions, opinions that she expressed with her own mouth that she would not keep closed to shelter the fragile egos of your friends and brothers-in-Christ, who told their own wives what their opinions were, when and how to express them, those men who were good Christians until they weren’t, until they entertained the idea – not acted upon, not implemented – but merely suggested that such a woman could be one possible candidate, and that was enough for you to put our lives in boxes and drag us to the middle of nowhere. Also, who is this “we” you keep talking about? You and Christ or you and your own insecurities?”

• and tapped it against the gruel once more.

When Cara spoke she did not seem aware of the one-sided tension that existed between her oldest sister and their father, nor that her father was having a one-man existential crisis.

“Do I have to sleep alone tonight?” she said. “Cause this house is big and I don’t know where the bathroom is.”

“No, Cara, you can sleep with me tonight. Or I can sleep in your room. We’ll put up some sheets and make a blanket fort.”

“Like camping?” she said.

“Like camping.”

“Pft. You two enjoy sleeping on the floor, ‘cause I’m sleeping in My Room,” Kora said, pointing at herself theatrically. “My room, my rules, no nerds allowed.” Her father paid no mind. He was holding a glass of milk in his hand and spoke to Klara while looking at his youngest.

“Cara is a big girl now. She’s going to have to learn to get along on her own,” he said. “can’t be a baby forever.”

“It’s our first night in a new house, dad,” Klara said. “You heard it yourself. She doesn’t even know where the bathroom is.”

“Mmh,” Klaus groaned. “Not good to start a new life with bad habits.”

“Do you want to change her sheets and underwear if she has an accident?”

Klara watched bemusedly as the blood drained from his face and his pupils shrank to pinpoints. She had made a point to include the U-word, one of his most feared, just to see how pale she could make him go. It was not a hobby she could regularly indulge, but tried to make time when she could.

“Maybe just tonight,” he said softly, taking another drink of milk.

Klara shot a sly wink to Cara, who looked back at her big sister, beaming.