CLOAK/3.7ii

That rainy fall, one Sunday morning, the late child younger sibling, then six, wandered off and fell and drowned in the foundation pit of a vacation home being built nearby. In the proceedings which transpired, the deep-pocketed local developer who owned the site was found extremely liable. Their lawyer told the Rain family they'd hit the lottery of loss. The long windows of the lawyer's too-familiar office framed a hard nearly vertical snow, so that the whole room appeared to be levitating.
And that winter came down on Lake Kenoma like a boot heel—life's frog fingers fluttered at its imprint edge and stilled.
Northern winter, the meat-eating season whose weekly washed-out vegetable infusions do not dispel a certain heaviness of seat—
Northern winter, in the absence of light the ascendance of the domestic, and the question of what to do with the long nights ahead—
All day the unseen sun rolled cloud-bound in its socket until dropping into the horizon's parted eyelids with a glare that set the tree trunk shadows swooping through the forest of deserted dwellings, shadow branches raking through the picture window of their house, trailing up the livid faces of the walls, every day, for twenty minutes, the blue spooks, and then darkness.