An Essay By Brandon Shane

My sister loved sunflowers. She loved them in the patterns on my mother’s dresses long before she ever saw them waving under the sun. Even then, the first ones she saw were stripped by winter. She knew Him before any believer had knocked on our door, before the cross had been given meaning through lectures. He was in the sunflowers. She would point and smile:

“Mommy, don’t you see Him?”

“Mommy, He’s right there!”

None of us knew what she meant.

We lived in the mountains, and my father was deployed most of the time. There was a wooden patio that faced the driveway where I’d wait for him like a loyal dog, a boy Hachiko. A dirt road, small enough to fit an SUV, led to our cabin, even if it meant the branches would scrape the mirrors. We were surrounded by pines that roared upwards like obelisks, homes to hawks, crows, robins, and owls. My mornings were spent sitting on a big rock right by the kitchen window, where I could see Mother cooking eggs and sausages. I could smell pine needles and sap without having to light a candle.

It all changed when my father was diagnosed with cancer. I was eleven, my sister was five, and she had recently become mute. The house turned into a stone abbey after that late afternoon phone call. While they didn’t tell us kids much, I could see his progress through my mother’s smiles or sadness. My sister was the only one who didn’t spend her days moping around. Everyone thought it was because she was too young to properly understand, but I knew differently. She had known something first. She asked me not to speak of our conversations, a finger on her lips, a smile that broke into a longing stare.

Despite it being explicitly forbidden, we’d head into the trees and go on adventures. When not at the hospital, my mother spent most days in her bedroom. My sister had no time for anything besides flowers. With her eyes to the ground, she pointed and pointed: wild roses, corn lilies, fireweed, and monkey flowers that grew up and down the steep hills. She’d stare at me, then the flowers, again and again. I’d often just smile and rub her head. My sister would chuckle like a teacher who had given up on one of her students, and we’d continue making our way. I looked out for black bears while she hummed and skipped.

I knew she thought of him. There were nights where I’d find her staring at his guitars, touching the old body like the wailing wall, scraping her nail across the carved grooves, trying to put herself in the permanence of one of his beloved things. I’d pick her up and see her eyes were red; mine were too. We’d stare into the night through cracks in the wood.

“Don’t you want to see what I see?” I sometimes asked, and we’d escape atop pale dew grass to hush the noise, listening to the shrill songs of cicadas, leaning against the split-rail perimeter; we knew better than to venture through the dark fog that seeped through the trees. My mother’s room would light up in a preternatural knowing, and her silhouette always appeared behind the white window shades. She was every bit marble as the veiled lady. Our eyes stared out train windows, tracks turning to a wheatfield slope, yellow dawn, casting golden hues upwards, meeting the sky like a dandelion cut in half. My sister was always quick to quiet me in silent syllogisms, motioning towards the synchronistic chapels that evade the uncentered mind.

After catching my mother sobbing on the phone one day, we walked across trails passed by hikers lugging backpacks bigger than us both. We scaled a dry riverbed until the clouds were no longer angels lying in the sky but just distant puffs of white. There was a small patch of grass at the end of it. Looking at the distance we'd traveled, we held hands and saw a grove of sunflowers bending to the wind. It wasn’t too far off from where we had just traversed. We ran to it, and I stumbled, hit my mouth on a sharp stick, and bled all over the dirt. I rolled over, groaning, and stared up at the bright blue heavens, noticing that my sister had worn her pajamas on our daily adventure, which made me laugh while spitting out blood. She came to me in tears. There were rocks a few inches from my head, and I became sympathetic with the worms. She leaned over and had to catch herself from falling, in the awkward way of children. For a moment, I saw my father behind her, and as she extended her soft hand that could not lift a heavy pillow, I felt his calloused fingers squeeze my palm and pull me up. She wrapped her arms around my dirty blue jeans, tugged on my torn shirt, and pointed at the sunflowers. They were as beautiful as ever. She was as beautiful as ever, and I knew our father was going to die.

Limping across the last stretch of pebbles and hatching shrubs, I could see flashes of the old world through her ritualistic breaths. My sister kept pointing and pointing, looking back at me, happy enough to turn the wounds into crushed grapes, and my eyes became stained glass reflecting her shine. I was a ruin for her revelation; I was a son discovering sacrifice.

“It’s Him. It’s Him,” she said, surrounded by sunflowers. The honeyed petals brushed against her legs, the seeds floating like fog on an early London morning, and I saw Him, too.

✿ ✿ ✿

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