As Blank as Snow

My mother’s food has always been like that, strange. It isn’t that it tastes bad or that she is a terrible cook. It is rather that the food takes a life of its own. Instead of tasting like anything the food creates. It creates feelings that I can never quite place my finger on.

I wonder when I first noticed.

Perhaps after a classmate of mine had ordered us pizza during lunch on the day of her birthday. The first day I had eaten anything other than my mother’s homemade lunches. Or was it the day that I had accepted a cookie from my aunt and my mother scolded us both leaving my aunt with an incredulous expression. “You’re still following traditions?” My aunt has asked.

Or perhaps I have just always known, deep down that something is being hidden from me.

Outside the window, across the dining table my eyes catch a flutter. A soft flutter that ripples through the blue space of the sky, beginning it’s descent towards the ground. It falls towards the browning grass, never hastening to reach its destination continuously falling at a constant pace. The snowflake knows that there is time to experience the air that surrounds it, time to experience the journey it is on.

The flurry begins to grow in population. Some days the snow melts as soon as it touches down but today it begins to accumulate and create a multitude of mounds. Tiny snow mountains that scatter our front yard.

One tiny flake suddenly turns the whole world outside a blank sheet of white. It isn’t the doing of this one flake alone, it is the cascade of many that makes the world so. Changes the world so.

I hear the click-clacking of her signature ankle boots before I see her trudge into the kitchen. Her beige trench coat is sliding off her shoulders, and her purse is hanging loosely in the crook of her elbow. She begins to rummage through the kitchen cabinets in search of her car keys and chapstick.

“I’ll be off on some errands until five tonight. Can you remember to take the chicken out of the freezer so it can thaw in time for me to cook dinner?” She calls out in the midst of her treasure hunt, wisps of dark brown curls falling into the clear gloss smeared on to her lips.

Because I don’t answer right away, dark brown eyes pierce me from the shade of her eyebrows as she halts in her frenzy to beckon forth an answer.

“I’ll try my best,” I mutter as I gather the dishes I just emptied of lunch and head towards the sink as she snaps up with items in hand.

“Great, I’ll be off then,” and she scurries out the kitchen just as I enter from the other side of the marbled island.

The kitchen cabinets close with a thud, the front door closes with a thud and suddenly it is silent in our wooden house too big for the mere company of two. Much too big for the company of one.

I am not entirely sure where the idea comes from. But inside the creaking walls and the knocking of the pipes I begin to search for a distraction that will churn the gears of my mind and silence the groaning of the house.

At the very end of the long corridor that leads straight from our entrance to the back room, is a giant red oak door that matches none of the other brown oak doors we have in the house. It stands tall, pretentiously leaning towards the ceiling, glowering on everything below it. As if it knows how desirable it’s mysteries make it. As if it knows how my mother favors it, with it’s lacquered surface and orders to her own daughter, to leave it alone.

I have never been inside that room, never been allowed inside that room, but now that my mother has left perhaps a tiny peak would suffice. A tiny peak that could finally quench the rushing stream of questions and curiosities that fill me and overflow, day in and day out.

I lay my dried skin against it’s moisturized surface and run it along the smooth curves and grooves. The dark stripes swirl like hallucinations against its vibrant red wood and I find pause as my palm lands with a thud against the chilling silver door knob.

Was my mother ever cruel? Has she ever warned me away from good? Why am I so insistent on defying her one command? But it is just that. My mother is an average divorced woman in her mid 40s. She works a regular job on weekdays and does her best to balance the raising of her only child, all on her own. She has never complained and is rarely strict but amidst all those normities she hides one secret, and that secret lies beyond the door.

I give a gentle push and the door slides open, no creaks, no resistance. It is as easy as cutting a slice of pie.

The first thing my eyes land on is the window that bleeds light through the curtains onto the giant mahogany desk in the centre. The slivers of sun rays shimmer with dust and dance in the dark, vacant room. There isn’t anything special about the room and yet I feel a cold shiver crawl up my spine as I slide a foot inside the threshold.

There is no turning back now that I am swallowed by the forbidden room. There is no turning back as my curiosity grows with the realization that the room is nothing out of the ordinary. Why is my mother keeping her office off limits?

Timidly I make my way across the room to the built in bookshelf covering the wall, from floor to ceiling in closed cabinets. I pay no attention to them as my gaze falls upon a leather bound book on top of her desk. It’s surface warm to the touch from the light that has been embracing it through the window.

I pick it up and flip through the pages, one by one until something slips out and falls to the floor with a swish. One dollar bills, five dollar bills, twenty and even hundred dollar bills scatter around my wool slippers. At least $20,000 lies on the floor right in front of me. It has been loosely kept in this little black book instead of in a bank account or at least in a safe.

It is then I realize that the book in my hands is most likely the key to my mother’s secrets. I throw myself into her office chair and rip open the cover. On the back of the front cover is a long list of names, of previous owners, all from my family. And my mother’s is at the bottom.

The more I read the more my stomach churns, the more I begin to understand the family I have been born into. The traditions that have continued for centuries.

It is a book detailing how to steal a soul. How to suck someone dry of their life and incorporate it into your food so that you gain their life in order to live a long and prosperous one yourself.

I fly out of the armchair and to the doors of the cabinets. Inside are stacks of jars which look as if the air inside them has been dyed with dulled colors.

With the book gripped tightly in my embrace, I close the cabinets, scoop the money off the ground and shut myself into my room.

Mother comes home and makes way for her office behind the red oak door. I brace myself for impact but she never comes to scold me or to steal my soul.

At first I fear for my own life as I sit pondering the severity of my discovery but then I start to come to the realization that our meals did taste strange. They tasted like emotions that I can never quite place my fingers on. But now I know. They taste of desperation, hopelessness, despair and pain. It is the feelings of those whose lives have been stolen directly from underneath them, all because of another’s greed.

We continue in silence, neither of us bringing it up. I can never look at my mother the same but her expressions and demeanor towards me never change. There is no shame, no hate, merely calm. That calm is what scares me most.

Then finally she breaks the silence at dinner one night and says “You can keep the money, I was saving it for your college tuition anyhow.”

I look at her incredulously and before I can stop myself I say, “But you stole the money, just like you stole their souls!”

Her eyes meet mine.

“Darling,” She sets down her utensils and crosses her hands in front of her plate. “Let me teach you a valuable lesson. The world we live in was made for the strong. You either consume or you’ll be consumed.

Now what is your choice?”

Outside the snow begins to fall once again, but the world isn’t turning white as the flakes begin to melt and return to the ground.