Splitting wood gave me a lot more time outdoors and away from the drama indoors. Things were just...weird in there. I still had to come in at night, but I was perfectly content to split wood all day long and do the outdoor stuff, even dumping the pot. When I did come inside, Mom was mad at me for "being lazy and rebellious" and "not doing my chores". Which is to say, she wanted me to do as much housework as the other girls did, as though I were one of them, even though I'd already put in hours of work and was now tired. It felt acutely unjust that she called me lazy when all the other girls did was basic housework and making cookies. So, sure, frying cookies in a frying pan because you have no oven is a little more time consuming than baking them, but still, they were making cookies, which seemed recreational to me.

Also, I wanted to have faith and to be righteous in Yahweh's eyes, but the constantly changing nature of the daily prophecies and dream interpretations made me uneasy. Every single detail in a dream meant something. You dreamt that you picked up three red apples from the ground? That was bad, because the Evil One, Satan, was commonly depicted as red, and 3 was an evil number, so such a dream would indicate that you were willingly partaking of Satan's fruit, and repentence and a multitude of prayers were in order. They might even have whole-family prayers with the offending dreamer sitting in the center as everyone else laid hands on him or her and prayed for them to resist Satan's temptation and to open their heart to Yahweh once more. I tended to think that the dream should be thought of as a whole rather than picking it down to the tiniest details and drawing conclusions based on those.

And there was other stuff that I found unnerving, too, like the time Mom said she saw an alien looking through the glass of the front door at her. We were all standing right there with her, and none of us saw an alien even though we'd also been looking at the door. But the more we looked at the front door and the window overlooking the sink, the more apprehensive we were of seeing that alien. She said it'd been an evil spirit sent to make her ill, and ill she became, immediately. She was bedridden for a couple of days. Occasionally Raphah and I would question this stuff together when we were outside, but we were terribly afraid Yahweh might hear us doubting. My eyes weren't getting any better. Mom was almost due to deliver Baby Eliyah, but she wasn't any plumper than one might expect of any woman who was eating for two. More and more words were forbidden in our daily speech, including some that were in the Scriptures. We had spent hour after hour writing the sacred names down on plain white address labels in teeny, tiny print, and cutting them out and sticking them over the words, "God", "Lord", and "Jesus" in our bibles, only to find that words such as "wonderful" were also evil, and there was often no adequate substitution to paste over them.

We'd all been sewing baby clothes and mentally preparing for Baby Eliyah. We couldn't wait to meet our new baby brother, and the thought of the great prophet Eliyah made small and coming to live in our family was humbling and awe inspiring. Mom's due date came. She announced one evening that she was going to have the baby that night, and calmly strode into her room with clean rags and gallons of water. We all listened expectantly throughout the night, but we knew that we had to have faith. Maybe since it was the prophet Eliyah, his birth wouldn't be painful at all. In the morning, Mom emerged from her room as we met her eagerly. She proclaimed that the prophecy regarding Baby Eliyah was false, it had been sent to us by Satan to deceive us. She would still give birth to Baby Eliyah, but the timing was totally off. We looked at one another questioningly, but we knew- we must not doubt.

The tension in our family was always as unrelenting as it had always been, except that over time, it went from being just Eliyah to Mom as well. The house was dim and dark, which didn't help her frequently depressed mood at all. Still, it was Eliyah who we had to watch out for. No one wanted to sit next to him at meals. We actually fought and bickered over who would get to sit at Mom's end of the table until she came up with a rotating turn system. If we got stuck sitting next to Eliyah, the meal turned into an ordeal, which is to say, even more of an ordeal than meals already were with him at the table. If you had a dessert or anything nice, you had to eat it first, before he finished his. Otherwise, he'd take it right off of your plate. If you betrayed an aversion to food, he'd force you to eat it. And even if what you were eating was plain and basic, such as lentil soup, he might suddenly dump a lot of hot sauce into your bowl and then force you to eat it. Or maybe he would seem to have forgotten the victims sitting next to him, and they'd be lulled into an uneasy sense of almost-safety, right before he jabbed a toothpick into them. And of course, he consistently got two or three times as much food as anyone else, and special foods we didn't get, despite the high-grading of what meager niceties were on our plates.