Landslide

by V.A Wiswell

2022

My earliest memory is of violence.

It follows me like a shadow.

A lost dog.

A nightmare.

My sister Katelyn is singing “Landslide” from top to bottom, over and over, as we walk alongside the empty two-lane road after a full day of swimming at the lake. We’re almost home when a gust, hot and sudden, spins the dirt beneath our feet into a miniature cyclone. 

My sister drops my hand. Through a gritty veil, I watch as she wades toward the yellow center line, chasing her wind-stolen hat. Just as she catches up to it, a black and silver mirage appears on the crest of the hill.

After seconds that pass as days, and my sister’s clothes and flesh break free from the spokes of the motorcycle’s back wheel, and the jigsaw of her body rolls to a stop at my bare feet, I begin to scream. 

I scream wildly for our mother.

For my brother.

For anyone who will listen.

I scream until my voice is gone.

Then, alone and silent, with my lost sister’s hand resting casually on my foot, I hear something snap. 

A twig.

A branch.

A bone.

A heart.

Katelyn was twelve.

I was eight.

I. The Casket: July 2012

At the bottom of nothing,

is a space too big to fill.

“It’s not your fault, Gina,” Mama said.

We were standing on the edge of the abyss, watching in helpless horror as the casket crank, one revolution at a time, lowered Katelyn into her new forever home.

“Why can’t she stay with us?” Garrett kept asking.

Mama didn’t answer. She’d told him once. She wasn’t going to say those words again. Instead, she squeezed his fleshy, five-year-old shoulder, comforting and hushing him at the same time.

I didn’t say anything back either when Mama spoke to me. I couldn’t. My lips and mind and heart were frozen. Paralyzed by an electric shock of pain and guilt.

“It was an accident,” Mama went on, repeating the same words the police officer and the doctor and the quiet lady with the glasses offering the coloring books and crayons said over and over while we waited and waited in the special room at the hospital; for what, I didn’t know.

“With the sun low and the dust clouding the air and Katelyn crouching against the black tar of the road,” they all said, “The motorcycle driver couldn’t see her. It was an accident. Not anyone’s fault. Just awful, bad luck.”

And with the sky and the moon and the day and the night and every living thing that teases us with its beauty only to someday die, right in front of our eyes, my mouth said without speaking, “it wasn’t anyone’s fault.” But wasn’t it?

I should have shouted, screamed, jumped, or even danced—something I hated, until Katelyn heard me, until she looked up. I should have done any simple, dumb thing but stand quieter than I’d been in my whole life and watch her die.

But none of that was worth saying. Not really. At least not to Mama or Garrett or even Katelyn. Saying it wouldn’t do one thing to appease the hunger of the unfixable thing that was devouring each of us, part by part.

All I could do, besides kick the dirt and throw angry rocks across the perfect flat top of the green cemetery grass, was keep myself still and stand in front of Katelyn’s grave with Mama and Garrett, and with the rain dripping on us from the cloudless sky and accept what we now were: The Survivors. Our wet eyes, breath compressed, and arms linked in the unbreakable chain of loss.

II. The Collapse: Summer 2012

Not like a building or an old barn.

From the inside, ground to dust.

A week after Katelyn died, Mama stopped trying. She stopped cooking us pancakes for breakfast and cleaning our dishes. She stopped braiding my hair and combing Garrett’s off his face. She stopped playing crazy eights and dolls and speed cars with us. She stopped everything. Especially being Mama.

I’d wake in the morning to find her wrapped in her housecoat, shuffling from her room to Katelyn’s. She’d stay that way, silent but for the slap of her slippers against the hardwood of the hallway floor, with nothing to offer my brother and me but a weak smile and a short brush on the shoulder, all day.

I thought then, maybe more hoped, that she was saving up the energy she normally wasted on words and using it to heal the wound of Katelyn. I believed then, maybe needed more than hoped, that she wanted to return to us as much as we wanted her back.

But when July passed into August and Mama, voice still missing and eyes shiny as glass, was the same—here but gone, leaving me to look after Garrett and leaving no one to look after me, I understood I was wrong.

III. Pie And Muffins: September 2012

The dead can live forever

if we refuse to let them rest.

By September, Garrett and me had grown used to the silence. We didn’t like it. We missed hearing Mama hum soft songs in the morning while making coffee and listening to her soothe us to sleep with her bedtime stories, and we missed the reassurance her voice brought, letting us know she was with us, that we were all still real. But with every try, like jumping high on the couch and running Garrett’s trucks down the stairs, failing to utter as little as a peep from her mouth, we accepted what was and found ways, like talking to each other a whole lot more and leaving the TV on all the time, to fill the space left by Mama’s voice.

On the first windy fall day, wet and whipped by the blowing leaves, Garrett and me came home from school wanting something warm and dry. What we found was something strange. Something wonderful.

Mama was talking again.

Loud and clear to no one but herself and the cats.

She was wearing her World’s Greatest Chef apron, the one we gave her last Christmas. Her hair was pulled from her face tight into a bun. Her hands were mixing, whipping, and tossing like we’d never seen her do before. She’d turned our green Formica counter into a whirlwind of chaos, covering it from corner to corner and end to end with bottles and bags of ingredients, piles of cooking tools, and stacks of cookbooks.

For minutes, with her back to us, we stood in the doorway, mesmerized by her movements and the sweet sound of her voice.

She was so caught up in her preparation and solo conversation that I doubt she would have noticed us if not for my brother.

“What’re you making, Mama?” Garrett asked, spilling hope and little drops of fear.

Her head twitched. His voice nipped at her ear. Even then, though, she didn’t stop. Without asking how we were, how we had been, how our day had gone, or telling us what she was preparing to make, she began talking at us. Her words flew as fast and as unpredictably as her hands.

“I got all these fixings at the market.

Indigo blue, that’s her favorite color.”

“Katelyn?” I asked.

“So why not pie and muffins?”

“For us, Mama?”

“Mr. Johnston was having one of his best sales.

You kids like pie, always have.”

“We do, Mama. Are you making us one?” Garrett said, his whole face lifting.

“I never saw Mrs. Emery look so surprised. Jam, too. That’s what I’ll do next.”

“Strawberry?”

“Taking my money, Mrs. Emery, I mean, with her eyes wide. Like saying anything about her was wrong.”

“Who, Mama? Katelyn?” I asked again, this time knowing I wouldn’t get an answer.

For hours we stayed like that, standing behind Mama, catching the thoughts that spilled and dribbled onto each other from the bowls and cups of her mind. We did our best to stay with her, to keep time with her pace, but soon the effort wore on us, and we sank breathless and sweaty onto our bottoms.

We sat slumped with our backs against the sink cupboard for the rest of the afternoon, not wanting to listen anymore but wanting less to leave and risk losing Mama again, until the kitchen fell dark and the dog began to rub at our legs and lap at the puddles of food spilled onto the gold leaves of the linoleum.

“Are you almost done, Mama? I’m getting hungry.”

Garrett’s tiny voice, made wispier by exhaustion, was the last thing I remember hearing before my eyes got too heavy to hold open.

I woke to the sun’s greeting, a new day, somehow tucked neatly in my bed, stomach growling, still hungry, never having eaten the night before.

IV. Speed Train: October 2012

Blowing back our hair.

Watering our eyes.

Mama talked and talked. About everything. About nothing. All at once. Jumbled and juxtaposed. Almost without pauses and never with breaks.

It was like her thoughts were fireworks exploding in her mind, burning so bright and hot she had no choice but to spit them out. For a while, I thought the talking was better than the earlier weeks of quiet that had consumed her. I thought at least now something was coming out, that eventually, she’d say all there was inside of her head, and then, when it was out for good, she’d be able to rest and get better.

Before Katelyn died, never getting enough sleep on account of sick kids or their nightmares, the noisy neighbors or the wind and thunderstorms it brought, and her early start at work was Mama’s biggest complaint.

“Someday,” she used to say, while serving us oatmeal at dawn with TV cartoons humming away in the background and a shaky hand and sunken eyes, “I’ll sleep ‘til noon and wake to breakfast in bed, like those fancy women in the movies.”

So, when I woke night after night to her chitter-chattering, on and on about Katelyn: her hair, her shoes, her summer garden, her favorite books, like it was Sunday at bingo, willingly tossing aside the rest she’d coveted to whisper secrets into the silence and dark haunting her mind, I knew, even from the small stature of my eight-year-old perspective, it was a sign of big trouble.

Days passed.

Then weeks.

An endless stream of unacquainted words.

We could both see it, even Garrett, even at five. With the waking and the talking working together like evil movie twins, Mama was slowly disappearing beneath the quicksand of insomnia and fading into the black, midnight-sky explosions of her thoughts.

Haggard eyes.

Weak bones.

Flesh as thin as a blade of grass.

She was quickly becoming a memory of her old self. One that, unless something changed soon, I wasn’t certain Garret and me could remember for much longer.

V. Mrs. Quigley: November 2012

Desperation was circling.

Like vultures.

Saviors with sharp beaks and black wings.

Word must have gotten around town that Mama was fading fast—being eaten alive by her own words, never leaving the house, sending us to school in dirty clothes, and barely putting water out for the dog. Someone, a teacher, a neighbor, or Mr. Johnston at the market must have said something.

Decided to do something.

Or maybe it was us. Maybe our unraveling, what we thought of as silent and steady, was loud and fast. Maybe the whole town could hear our stitches popping, eavesdropping or not.

Mrs. Quigley lived in a big house about five minutes down our road. Every year in the early summer, we’d walk over to pet the goats and chickens she kept in her backyard. Katelyn, always braver than me, would feed the goats right from her hand. I’d watch, squeamish even from a distance, without following. I couldn’t help it; as much as Katelyn encouraged me, the way the goat’s lips felt against my skin, wet and mushy, gave me the creeps. We could have fed the chickens, too, if we’d wanted, but we three agreed they were too scary—always pecking and clucking. None of us wanted to put our hands under those beaks.

That was how it was with Mrs. Quigley—we went to her.

She never came to us.

We knew her summer goats.

Nothing else.

Garrett and me were outside, fighting the cold in our thin coats, kicking the ball back and forth up the drive when Mrs. Quigley and her blue Ford truck pulled in.

Right away, we noticed she was carrying something wrapped in foil. And right away, before she got close, we smelled the sweet, cinnamon scent of banana bread.

Not that we were complaining—Mama was trying her hardest—but she hadn’t baked anything since Katelyn died. Garrett and me had learned to make sandwiches and stay full on spoons of peanut butter before bed. But the smell of that loaf reminded us of how good things from the oven tasted. Like hawks on a mouse, we wouldn’t let it out of sight until we each had a thick chunk weighing down our bellies.

We trailed Mrs. Quigley inside and found Mama in her usual spot at the table. If Mama’s reed-thin frame, peeled eyes, and oily hair disturbed Mrs. Quigley, she didn’t let on. She kept talking, in a soft, slow way, like everything was normal.

Like we were normal.

Not wanting to risk missing out on the bread by being told to go back outside, we snuck into the living room and stayed quiet, pretending to read books and color.

While Mrs. Quigley made tea, put the kettle on, and found the cups, Garrett and me waited. And we waited.

I could tell Garrett, with his face pinched like a prune, was less than a breath away from stomping straight up to Mrs. Quigley and asking for a slice of bread. I put my hand on his shoulder to keep him put. If anyone was going to ask, it should be me.

Mama and Mrs. Quigley were sipping their tea.

Mama was absent.

Empty eyes on the window.

Lips quivering.

Mrs. Quigley was talking.

About her garden.

About a book about birds.

I steeled my patience and forced myself to stay polite and wait until Mrs. Quigley finished.

Mrs. Quigley paused; I thought I had my chance. Then she shifted in her chair, moving closer to Mama. Her voice fell even softer.

“One day, Marjorie,” she said, taking Mama’s blue-tipped fingers in hand, “You’ll wake up, and the first thing on your mind won’t be Katelyn. It’ll be something boring, like the groceries or what vegetables you want to plant in your garden. Then you’ll catch yourself, realize what you’ve done, and feel awful—like you’ve committed the worst sin by forgetting your daughter, even if only for a minute. But forgetting isn’t a sin. It’s God’s way of letting us move on.”

Mrs. Quigley had meant it as a kindness—a thought to give hope to Mama. But Mama, held together by the tight weave of her grief, didn’t want to be told by anyone to move on.

Sudden, a wave in a storm, Mama rose from her chair and threw her tea, cup and all, across the room. The porcelain shattered into sharp pieces. I sheltered my eyes from the flying shards and crouched, hiding from whatever was next.

Tea ran down the wall like dirty tears.

Mama’s whole body shook.

Mrs. Quigley’s hand slapped her mouth.

“Get out,” Mama screamed from the bottom of Katelyn’s grave.

A puppy’s whimper slipped from Mrs. Quigley.

She shot from her chair, grabbed her purse, and scurried out our front door.

Maybe we shouldn’t have, maybe it was wrong considering how Mrs. Quigley left, but as soon as we heard the rumble of her truck and the tires cranking over the gravel of our driveway, Garrett and me got forks and dug into that banana bread.

VI. The Bear: Winter 2012–2013

We were a missing-pieced puzzle.

Never again complete.

Mama finished November sitting at the table; eyes closed, wrapped in her old housecoat, silent again and softly swaying. It was as if the scream she gave Mrs. Quigley was the very last thing she had in her.

Left was a spent shell.

Gone.

I knew it then.

She’d been poking at the bear of oblivion for so long, torturing herself with too little sleep, too much talk, and chasms of silence; she no longer knew how to stop suffering. All she could do, with her body barely able to carry breath, was to find a way to make it worse. To seek a solution that would let her quit for good, like the engine of the Chevy that sat in our backyard, staring at us, refusing to turn over.

Maybe the thought of putting up the tree without Katelyn, wrapping the gifts with none for Katelyn, or serving Christmas dinner without a plate for Katelyn, was Mama’s final push.

Maybe.

Whatever her reasons, as secret and private as her grief, when November changed over to December, she started drinking.

She drank as much as she’d once talked.

Without pauses and almost without breaks.

The alcohol turned everything in her, once tight and tense, loose and sloppy. Her shirts stunk of sick and sweat. Her hair draped her shoulders in greasy sheets. Bored of the lack of motion, her mouth juxtaposed her misery by parting just enough to make it look like she was always about to whistle. And her thoughts no longer burned fast against a short fuse. They slow-rolled down a boozy slide, landing hard, making a broken-boned pile of words.

Maybe she thought we were too young to notice. Or understand. Maybe she thought we’d stopped noticing her entirely, like the scuffs and tears on the living room couch. Or maybe she believed having willed herself invisible so many times, it had finally worked.

We saw her.

Sneaking like a cat into her pantry of execution. Sipping silently. Her poison as clear and odorless as glass.

We knew Mama wasn’t bad. Or hateful. She didn’t mean to leave us. She was consumed, chasing with a need so strong it tore her muscles and fractured her bones, the memory of Katelyn. So consumed that she couldn’t see or feel or smell Garrett and me anymore.

What Mama wanted, what we all wanted, was a portal.

A way back to Katelyn.

But back didn’t exist.

It was buried.

Dead.

Still, I tried, for Mama’s sake, to wear the right dress, place the right ribbon in my hair, and be big enough to fill the space of my missing sister. But even on my best days, with As in spelling, being picked first on the playground for kickball, and keeping Garrett out of trouble, the closest I could come to our old, easy life was a fake and see-through imitation.

A plastic Halloween mask of a boogie man.

Without Mama, without Katelyn, every day was the same. Every day was a trudge through a muddy field.

Seven o’clock alarm.

Brush teeth.

Wake Garrett. One shove. Maybe two. Sometimes a spritz of cold water from the tap.

Breakfast, oats if we had them. Toast with butter if not.

Load our bags.

Drag Garrett away from the TV. Wet his hair and wipe his face.

Mama, here but gone, staring at us, wet-eyed and quiet from the table.

“Bye, Mama,” we’d both say.

On the good days, she’d nod.

After the last bell, I’d drag my feet across the schoolyard, yanking on Garrett’s arm, moving the two of us like cold molasses toward our dirt road, our home, Mama, and what we might find of her.

Our house was the last place I wanted to go; I held my breath until my lungs caught fire, afraid I’d find Mama crumpled and gone like in my bad dreams.

It was the last place I wanted to take Garrett.

When we reached our doorstep, I’d tell Garret to stare at the birdbath in our yard and think happy thoughts. With him imagining who knows what, cartoons or superheroes or an invasion of fire ants, I’d scoot the milk box in front of the kitchen window, turn it over, and stand on it. Before peering inside, I’d steady my thinking and plan my next step—what I’d do with Garrett, with my hands, if, on the other side of the window, was Mama, on the floor, curled into the final ball she seemed to desire.

But every day, with a shudder of relief, I’d be saved. There she’d be at the kitchen table, a mug of poison by her twitching hand, eyelids fluttering like moth wings, upright and breathing.

I’d stay put for whole minutes and watch her face, rippled by the window’s wavy glass, tingling with delight. In my sunlit child mind, I was sure she stayed because she understood, without us ever speaking the words, we needed her, dilapidated and uninhabitable as she was, as much as Katelyn. And even more, I was sure her holding on meant Garrett and me still swam, alive and well, in the motherly marrow of her bones.

The possibility that Mama wasn’t holding on for us, not for anyone, not really at all, was too heavy for my eight-year-old fingers to grasp. The notion that she stayed, if you can call filling space with her emptiness staying because she hadn’t yet figured out a way to leave or realized leaving was an option, was too sad, too terrifying, and too inevitable to consider.

VII. The Pretty Pale Lady: January 2013

Mama screamed with her hammered-shut mouth.

Not another one. Not again.

On a Tuesday one week before Christmas, a neighbor, teacher, or somebody who felt right to stick in their nose noticed my brother wandering late and half-starved into school again, wearing the same small clothes he’d had on for weeks.

Out of room to ignore the precarity of my brother’s plight, Principal Miller brought him into his office and sat him down. He looked at him hard but meant it to come off soft and asked him what the trouble was in our home. My brother, full on the inside with pillowy cotton and milky grits, didn’t have the constitution to lie. Right then, in front of Mr. Miller and his teacher, he spilled the whole pitcher of Mama.

Exactly two weeks from that day, a lady from the state, pretty and pale in a fitted blue suit, sat across from Mama in our shabby floral chair by our living room window.

Garett and me crouched on our haunches, each to a stair, pressing our faces between the spindly rails of the banister, believing if we didn’t make a sound, we’d stay invisible, and watched as the pretty pale lady handed Mama a brochure.

“There’s a meeting tonight, Marjorie,” she said. “It would be best if you went.”

“A meeting,” my mother said, words as blurry as faces through a rain-soaked window.

“Otherwise, we’ll need to consider placement for Garrett and Gina.”

“Placement?” More slurry confusion.

“A family. Temporarily, for custody.”

A strange sound.

Mama’s hand covered her mouth.

Katelyn’s ghost danced in a sunlit spotlight of dust.

Then, from our hiding place on the stairs, I heard something snap.

A twig.

A branch.

A bone.

A heart.

That night, Mama dressed in her last clean dress, tied her slippery hair into a tight knot, and smiled through a smear of red lipstick. She stepped over every crack in the three-block walk, without holding her breath or turning back, to the community center. She found an empty, hard-as-stone chair and sat as still as her tremoring tree branch limbs would allow through the whole meeting. She listened, without wetting her lips or reaching for her purse, to the man in the center of the circle speak like a prophet about forgiveness and a higher power and the divine beauty of a future clear and clean.

She went back the next night.

And the next.

Slowly, after days, maybe weeks, her hair grew shiny.

Her smile lost its edgy quiver.

She answered, “I’m fine,” without the lie splitting her dry lips.

After a month or maybe two of having her back, I watched from my bedroom window as a long plume of air left my lungs and colored the cold night air white as snow.

VIII. Full Circle: July 2013

Better didn’t last.

Chased by sorrow,

and its unquenchable thirst.

As hard as we all tried to dig in and fight it off, after a cold spring, a wet May, and a June of restless nights spent downstairs sprawled in front of our one working fan, July was here again.

July, the month Katelyn should have turned thirteen.

July, the month the motorcycle ran over Katelyn’s bones, laying us all to rest.

Every night, like a cat who’d had its fur rubbed the wrong way, I’d retreat to my room, grab my red Sharpie, and put an X through the day, marking its end on the calendar hanging on my wall.

With every X, my hand shook, knowing that what the pen was crossing off wasn’t indicating what we’d lived through as much as highlighting what was still to come.

By the month’s third red X, Mama had stopped attending group meetings.

By its fifth red X, she’d stopped repeating the words of the sobriety prophet before every meal.

And by the month’s twelfth red X, she’d lost all her hair ties and seemed fine to let her hair drag her shoulders in dirty sheets.

Every day, right in front of us, Mama slow-crawled closer to the end. But there was nothing Garrett and me could do other than watch and whisper and press the palms of our eight and five-year-old hands together.

I guess I figured the twentieth, the day we all should have gathered at the roller park to watch Katelyn skate, eat cake, and become a teenager, was the day that would take Mama. I’d figured it in that impossible way people can know things without uttering the words out loud or even hearing them said inside of their heads. It was just there, irrefutable, like gravity and time.

Maybe that’s why, because I was so sure it would be the twentieth when I came home on the fifteenth to a strange smell and a dark house, it took seconds,

full,

whole,

complete

seconds

to understand what was so wrong.

The gas snaked through every room.

Spreading wide.

Shedding its skin.

I shoved open the two kitchen windows and flung the back door wide. Mama was on the floor like I’d imagined her so many times.

Crumpled and torn.

Tissue paper on Christmas morning.

I stepped toward her, to reach for her hand, to hold it tight and will the life leaving back inside, but her blue lips and frozen eyes pushed me away.

I stumbled.

My arm found the sink.

I grabbed the dish towel, covered my mouth, and went for the stairs.

Mama was gone.

Garett.

Garett.

Garett.

When the police came, I drove in dry-eyed silence to the station.

I couldn’t cry anymore.

Not for Mama.

Not with Garrett’s small body wrapped in a blanket and his tiny face covered by a mask.

I wasn’t yet nine and already ravaged.

She’d done this.

I sat at the officer’s desk and sipped the tea they brought me. I let the easiest of lies, the ones told by the things I wanted to be true, answer all their questions.

No, Mama had never tried this before.

No, she wasn’t depressed.

No, she wasn’t drinking.

No, she never tried to hurt us.

No, we don’t have any family close.

When they were done, I carefully pulled out the card I’d taken from Mama’s purse and, with a hand as sure as a cement piling, dialed the number of the pretty pale lady in the fitted blue suit.

I spoke in shards of glass.

My tongue cut on every word.

Blood filled my mouth.

The rhythmic breathing and quiet sympathy of the lady in the fitted blue suit, the lady named Alice, filled the phone.

I told her everything she needed to understand to find care for Garrett.

Garrett is shy.

He can read, but he doesn’t like to.

He won’t eat carrots unless you mash them.

He likes to play outside with his trucks.

His favorite is the Ford—the Flat Top.

He’s afraid of strangers.

He needs a yard with some dirt.

And a dog would be real nice.

“And you, Gina, what do you need?” Alice asked.

Me?

Me?

The question was silent and full of sound.

The cement piling of my hand snapped.

The phone dropped.

An estuary, green-blue water, and colorful fish,

swimming,

swimming,

swimming,

flooded my eyes.

I need, I thought, every word trembling on my tongue,

To walk on the side of the dirt road.

To hear Katelyn singing “Landslide” from top to bottom.

When the motorcycle, black and slick, crests the hill, a nightmare disguised as a mirage, I need to catch the yellow hat flying off of my sister’s head.

I need to hold it in both hands and pull it into my chest.

I need to keep it from getting sucked in the devil’s dervish of spokes and rubber.

I need to stop that flimsy, worthless, dime-store hat from dragging us under the nightmare of the bike and stop the full weight of its metal from turning all our bones into sorrow.

Can I have that?

Please?

“Me,” I said to Alice, speaking whisper-soft into the phone, “I’ll be fine.”

A Combattance of Spectres

by Jack Dunnett

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V.A. Wiswell is a writer who lives outside of Seattle, Washington. Victoria’s work has appeared in Writing In A Woman’s Voice and The Lake. She has poetry, a short story, and creative nonfiction forthcoming in Ginosko Literary Journal, 34th Parallel Magazine, and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. You can find Victoria on Instagram at @vawiswell.

Jack Dunnett is a mixed media painter who grew up in the Highlands of Scotland. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Painting from Gray’s School of Art in 2017. He currently lives and works in Glasgow.