Krisa
When Aunt Marie asked me how the day had gone at the Brenner house during dinner, I simply told her it went well. Sometimes a white lie was needed in order to calm the woman down, especially if the scenario had involved a half-naked woman and a partially undressed angry man ordering me to get out of his home.
“We’re doing prayer tonight,” said Uncle Paul sometime after. His dark eyes bore into the profile of my face. “Will you be coming, Krisa?”
What choice did I have? I nodded a yes, but that didn’t have him looking away from me, much to my dismay. Even after four years living under his roof, the large man intimidated me beyond words. I figured it was because he was only home every other month, giving me time in between to recover from his religious expectations.
“I thought we’d talk about your past again,” he added, sitting back comfortably in the kitchen chair.
I stiffened at the statement, feeling the dread form inside me. But I nodded again.
“We have some newcomers,” Marie explained. “And what better way to inspire them than to hear your story?”
What better way indeed. Nothing more awesome than being the centre of attention among a large crowd of followers, while they flesh through your humiliating past with such ease, you’d think it was a children’s story book. And nothing more delightful than having to nurse your reopened wounds thereafter, feeling the eyes of the newcomers pity you and then praise God for His miracles.
But this was the price that had to be paid. For now. I owed Marie. She did save me from homelessness and foster care. I’d had no one at the time, and knew nobody save for the thugs in the ghettos I grew up in. I wasn’t particularly easy, either. I rebelled when she took me in, getting smashed on weekends, hardly coming home unless I was genuinely in need of a roof over my head. There had been a lot of hostility from Paul at that point, and when it had escalated to a boiling point, Marie had pleaded for me to change. It took her breaking apart in front of me to do just that. It was on a particular night I couldn’t even recall most of, I’d walked through the door at four in the morning to find her asleep on the kitchen chair. I didn’t make it three steps before collapsing on the tile floor next to her, covered in my own vomit. I’d slammed my head so hard, it had split open, oozing a puddle of blood. When Marie had awoken, she’d screamed bloody murder, thinking I’d lain dead there for hours.
The situation was a rude awakening. I had left my old life behind right then and there. The rebelliousness, the irrational need for attention, the constant drunken nights I’d spent at random places… All of that had stopped. And since then, I’d been her walking miracle, the one she showed off to all her church friends.
I looked up at them chatting together with comfortable smiles on their faces. They looked so suited for each other, like two peas in a pod. They’d been together for over thirty years, since Marie was twenty-one. I idly wondered if she’d been a beautiful young woman, and I figured she must have been because she was quite soft on the eyes now: her black-white hair arranged in a bun with a soft face barely riddled with wrinkles on a slim body dressed modestly.
Uncle Paul, on the other hand, must not have been easy on the eyes. Everything about him reminded me of a roughness that was unkind in every way. His thick hair was completely white and always had been since meeting him four years ago for the first time. That stern, thin lipped, wide-eyed, dark browed complexion had me shrinking my shoulders in loathing.
He was a big man too, well over six and a half feet and solidly built. Though he must have been well into his sixties, he certainly didn’t look it. This was odd coming from a man who went away to work on the maintenance of ships six months a year in the open sea. You’d have thought he’d have a weathered exterior about him, but no, he didn’t. The way he presented himself to those around him, the way the air was filled with his authority, you just knew he was a man that got his way.
Except when it came to me. He could never convince Marie of letting me go, and I was the unwanted object in his life. The one he wanted to break and throw away.
His hatred for me stemmed on a level I could not understand.
Three weeks, and four days til he’s back on the boats, I thought.
After dinner, I hurried back into my safe haven of a room and spent the night in bed, thinking of this morning’s events.
Despite what a cocky bastard Brenner was, he looked damn good unclothed.
I had a dream of his tattoos, and something about those designs resonated deep inside me. I didn’t even see them, yet I conjured up an image of them anyway.
It was odd.
Very odd.