“My Sister Sleeps on the Slope of Mount Sinani” is the Third Place winner for Room’s 2024 Creative Non-Fiction Contest.
Of this piece, judge Angela Sterritt writes: “My Sister Sleeps on the Slope of Mount Sinani is a compelling and moving story that encapsulates emotional truths and explores universal themes of love, pain, and loss. The writer skillfully illuminates scenes and brings the reader squarely into intimate moments while highlighting their gift with words.”
You can find the full winners list, here.
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A soccer game, my parents repeat to the few who ask how the kick that sent my sister to the hospital happened.
A soccer game, my sisters croaks in agreement from her hospital bed. Her emaciated frame is swaddled in an enormous baby blue hospital gown that the peach of her wrists and shoulders escape. Our grandmother, my father’s mother, is the only one who’s brave or incredulous enough to ask questions about this Girls Under 18 division soccer game where cleats supposedly met stomach. Something doesn’t add up.
“Wait, what happened at this soccer game? Who kicked her? Why hasn’t the girl who did this been punished?” She asks, cranky, inadvertently circling around a secret, not understanding the subtext of my parents’ hushes.
“This just doesn’t seem right,” she huffs and looks to my father and mother who both avert their eyes. I feel the temperature rise in the room. My sister reclines in her hospital bed.
“Well, they’re just kids playing a game, and it all happened so fast.” My father opens his clasped hands.
Grandma either isn’t aware or isn’t prepared to follow the smoking gun’s trail to her son perspiring in the hospital air conditioning. She doesn’t dare track my sister’s breadcrumbs of drinking, dropping acid and going to math class, running away from home in the middle the night. Grandma, in her apartment in Toronto, doesn’t hear my sister’s cries for help ring out from our small town.
No one probes much further into this far-fetched story of a soccer game kick. They don’t want to touch taboo despite the implausibility of this wobbly story offered in truth’s place. No one wants to acknowledge the discomfort lurking at their own dinner table. No one wants to name the violence of people they know. No one wants to admit the danger of fathers.
Meanwhile, the doctors don’t examine why a teenage girl would wind up in the hospital with internal bleeding because they’re caught up in attempting to identify this mysterious affliction. They revolve through a carousel of crisp-sounding terms—
Appendicitis. Hernia. Colitis. Crohn’s. Inflammatory Bowel Disease—making my sister try each diagnosis on like a series of pastel outfits in a makeover montage scene from a 90s teen comedy.
My sister’s suffering is so enigmatic, the doctors decide to open and cut her up. They want to use their scalpels to take a peek at the ants buzzing in her abdomen. She undergoes several exploratory surgeries where surgeons remove parts of her small intestine and then staple her back up. They gash her stomach down the middle and sides with jagged, bone-white scars.
Decades later, at 35, after my sister has survived this ordeal and many others, her best friend Justin will cast a mould of her scarred abdomen to turn into sculpture. Justin’s large artist hands will chisel a replica of my sister’s torn stomach that will be photographed in order to become the cover of her first full album Glass and Wire that she’ll record and produce independently. Natasha, a former lover of my sister’s, will photoshop the photograph of the sculpture of my sister’s mutilated abdomen and render her visceral, literal pain into silky pink hues to embody the angst and power of her semi-sweet grunge music. My sister will never transcend this pain, but she will use it as fuel until the last sparks of her jet out into the night sky.
But for now, as the millennium staggers to a close over my sister’s girlhood, the diagnoses proliferate and mutate, and she streams through the hands of doctors from hospitals across the Golden Horseshoe of Southern Ontario.
First, she is admitted to a hospital in Lindsay, Ontario where she receives a botched appendix removal that further infuriates the hive of fire ants in her belly. Then she winds up at Guelph hospital’s youth wing, its halls splashed with faded murals of forest animals. Patchy bears and deer greet us like picture book ghosts. Finally, she arrives downtown at Toronto’s Mount Sinai, which shines like a new constellation. I’ve never seen such huge and efficient elevators before. The gleaming big city hospital promises the swiftest and brightest doctors. Its skyscraper screams bleeding edge.
Every day after middle school lets out, I walk home and my father logs off his work computer in his home office and then my parents and I climb into my dad’s blue Ford Taurus. My dad says he doesn’t like Ford, but since it’s a company car he doesn’t get a say in the make. The car is for my dad’s job as a travelling salesman who peddles silicone polymers that go into shampoo and breast implants, but we also use the car to make the long haul through rural, then suburban, traffic and into the city to visit my sister at Mount Sinai. I watch the highway roll through apple orchards, cemeteries, and fields, and then wrap around industrial warehouses with smokestacks and vibrant logos. Finally, the 401 ducks into underpasses that spit us out at the lakeshore and at the base of infinite blocks of concrete. The city is full of so many right angles. Squares stack on squares ad infinitum. As we drive past squeegee kids and hotdog trucks, the CN Tower pierces the asphalt sky.
My sister’s hospitalization spans months that spool into a year. She spends her eighteenth birthday in the hospital, kicking off adulthood—the right to vote and buy pornography—bedridden on IV drips. On that early November day, her boyfriend Josh, short and baby-faced, joins us for the ride into the city. The first snow has yet to fall so the roads are clear, though flecked with frost. Josh holds a bouquet of flowers—dark red roses with baby’s breath—like he’s off to prom, even though he’s dressed in his skater boy uniform of greying baggy jeans and a tattered hoodie. There is no cake.
I hold in my lap an unwrapped gift for the occasion: a small black pleather purse with a silver clasp in the shape of a moon that I bought from Bentley’s at our town’s tiny mall that’s a ten-minute walk from our house. When I fished it out from the bottom of the sales bin, it felt soft and the glint of the crescent caught my eye. I figured the purse might fit my sister’s witchy, grungy style. Before bleached out hospital gowns, she was always coveting Le Château lace.
My parents, Josh and I gather at my sister’s bedside where she sits up with support from the adjustable mattress. IVs loop through the hospital bed frame and pierce her forearms. She drinks a chocolate Boost drink my father has brought her to replace that evening’s turkey sandwich she can’t eat. Josh kisses her cheek and she receives the roses with a modest smile and clutches them loosely with the grace of a dying monarch. We don’t sing “Happy Birthday.”
My sister is so pale and thin, it’s eerie. I feel like I’m looking at her through a long tunnel even though I’m only a few feet away, awkwardly shifting my weight from side to side because there’s nowhere to sit in this shared hospital room.
The moment I approach my sister to hand her the gift, she reaches out with her limp arm and I grasp my grave ineptitude. A purse is such a stupid gift to offer someone who has been hospitalized indefinitely. My sister is sick and the only place she ever goes is various wings for surgery or other hospitals for specialists. The doctors have suggested she might need a colostomy bag—she is far away from needing a handbag to go out on the town with.
“Thanks,” she says and sinks back into her bed. Her dark, curly hair is greasy and knotted in its ponytail and her brown eyes are faded from pain. The black purse contrasts with all the hospital whites—gown, sheets, walls, curtains.
I can tell by my sister’s fallen face, she also sees how this gift of a moon-clasped purse taunts that she has nowhere to go and no need for a purse to hold her keys, smokes, Dentyne Ice gum, and burgundy lipstick. We don’t know if she’ll ever need a purse again. Sometimes it seems like she’s going to die in here from the pain that’s carving up her stomach and whittling her to bone. And here I am, this evil brat presenting my sick older sister with an idiotic purse that reminds her of all the parties and dates she’s missing. I’ve rubbed in her face how far she is from living in the open air with the sun, how long it’s been since she’s experienced days without agony. This purse dredges up how she remains the distance of a kick away from being a teenage girl who isn’t ill. Yet still she thanks me for the present and I eat her untouched JELL-O
By mercy of the teachers at her Catholic high school, my sister passes twelfth grade from her hospital bed. Ontario still has OAC, grade 13, and so there’s some wiggle room. Her teachers take pity and promise she can catch up next year. For all their hardline homophobia and anti-abortion ideology, the Catholic high school teachers extend compassion to my sister in her illness. Perhaps they recognize her suffering as holy in their beloved lexicon of martyrology. My sister swallows, rather than wears, a crown of thorns.
If my sister is an eighteen-year-old saint, then I am an eleven-year-old zombie. As the year of hospital visits drags on, I enlist in the army of the living dead. I shovel tasteless mac and cheese from basement hospital cafeterias into my mouth. I complete math homework in the car and write English essays in hospital hallways. I wake up early in the morning having wet the bed. I flip the mattress and then complete looming history assignments.
I stop feeling anything—colours drain and emotions wash out into a peroxide haze. Fear recedes but so does pleasure. I come to the conclusion that my lack of feeling is villainous. What a monster I must be. My older sister—my ONLY sister—is suffering in the hospital and I’m so unmoved I can’t even cry. Evidently, I mustn’t care. What a heartless bitch.
But I don’t feel happy or smug about my sister being hospitalized. I’m not pleased to have my older sister, who teases me by pinching and spitting on me, out of my hair. I don’t feel inconvenienced by the daily pilgrimages to her hospital bed in the city. I’m not jealous of the parental attention that’s fallen away from me. It’s more that I genuinely feel nothing. Maybe at some early point in this hospital saga I felt scared, but several months in, I am as clear and empty as the wind rattling our windows.
I don’t care, and I don’t worry, but I do stop sleeping. I’ve never been good at falling asleep or sleeping through the night, but once my sister is hospitalized, I decide to cut my losses and stay up reading all through the night every night. I sit upright at the end of my bed under the overhead light’s switch. I press my back against the wall and clutch an open book in my left hand and keep my right hand free to flick off the light in an instant. I can hear and feel how the house’s frame vibrates with each of its dweller’s movements.
My reflexes are alley-cat quick. I know every creak and wheeze of this heavy house. I can snap off a bedroom light faster than a heartbeat. Before heavy footsteps reach the top of the stairs or a clumsy hand opens a door, my bedroom light will be off and my book shoved between bed and wall. While I’m swift, I’m just a listener of noises and reader of books. I’m nowhere near as savvy and badass as my sister, who’s an expert cartographer of the house’s many rasps and groans. She knows how to skip over the squeaks in the hallway floorboards in order to silently dash out of the house in the middle of the night and seize freedom.
Unlike my sister’s excursions, my own escape lies in the pages of thick paperback novels I stay up to read every night of sixth grade while my sister lies in a hospital bed in another town or city. I consume encyclopedias of Celtic mythology and YA adventures about kids running away from the enchanted hounds of a war goddess. I read about Sherlock Holmes solving mysteries in Victorian England and then dive into Judy Blume’s coming of age narratives. I thumb through old installments of the Animorphs series I’ve outgrown. I read whatever I can excavate from my small town’s ancient library that hasn’t updated its youth catalogue since the 1970s. I read stories about girls who get pregnant and find God, girls who do LSD and die, girls who skip school and get caught up in Satanic ritual sacrifices, girls whose boyfriends drive drunk and crash cars.
One night I’m so engrossed in my midnight reading, I miss the creak of my father as he exits his bedroom across the hall from me. My bedroom door swings open. I’m hunched at the end of my bed, book in hand and light on. My father’s scowling face hangs over me. His grey hair sticks up in all directions and he’s wearing this blue thread-bare shirt that may have once been a tennis shirt though now it’s translucent. It’s late and I’m wide awake, my nose stuck in some fantasy novel. I know this encounter could go somewhere dark fast. He is bleary and red-eyed, lumbering like a giant from a fairy tale. I’ve only a few seconds before his motorcycle growl revs.
Swiftly, I devise a plan. My reflexes failed to flick off my light in time, but I’ve still got my silver tongue. I can tell by his squint that he’s emerging from his slumber and his reactions are slow, whereas I’m wired and awake. Before he can say anything, I cower even lower.
“I’m too scared to sleep,” I say in a small voice. “I keep thinking about the hospital. I’m worried she’s sick. I’m worried she’s going to die. That’s why I’m reading. I can’t sleep.”
“Oh,” is all he says.
My giant of a father is shy and sluggish. My fears roll over him, a slow sound wave, and he blinks as if to ward off what I’ve just told him. I know he doesn’t want to face his own worries about death and illness, let alone his child’s.
“I… uh… see,”
The trick works—he clams right up. He hovers awkwardly in my doorway for a moment, sizing me and my novel up, but he doesn’t explode. He doesn’t pry into what I’m reading to make sure it’s age-appropriate and not full of curse words and sex scenes. He doesn’t berate me for staying up late. He just stares with sad ice-blue eyes.
I know my father’s afraid of death and even more afraid of facing the ramifications of his violence—how in a vicious rage, he kicked his daughter in the stomach and landed her in the hospital. My father the bumbling giant teaches me and my sister lessons with his violence. Through him, we learn how a person can be both monster and human. How the threat of strange men driving white vans or lurking in alleys is an absurd fantasy and that fear, more accurately, lives at home.
Somehow me breaking vague bedtime rules doesn’t register as an offence tonight. Maybe he’s burnt out. Maybe I’ve struck the jackpot: as the golden child I can get away with more than my sister ever could. Maybe I’ve reminded him of how the life of my sister, his daughter, hangs in the balance because of his aggression. Maybe I’ve activated his sheepishness, or better yet his shame. Maybe he’s too tired to ignite his anger.
Whatever the miracle or reason, it keeps the blood-thirsty ogre subdued for now.
“Staying up late isn’t good for your growth,” he says and turns off my light before stumbling to the bathroom.
My meagre midnight rebellion of reading and staying up late succeeds. I get away with it! I’ve escaped the giant’s wrath. I can sometimes outwit my father, threading a protective knot through our interactions, something to hold onto. Just as I know every creak and wheeze of our house, I know how to appeal to my father’s fear and guilt. I know to wield the stance of the innocent.
As my father trudges away, I feel like I am now David who stood up against Goliath and toppled the giant. Like David, I prod the giant’s sore spots with the tiniest stone and defeat the towering monster. I know how to use Goliath’s own weight against him. I have studied the sharpness of little stones. What I lack in strength, I make up for with nimble, small hands. While ostensibly powerless, I know how to wield precision as cruelty—a deft maneuver that an irate giant never sees coming.
I should be ecstatic. I’ve just won a middle-of-the-night battle with the angry ogre who haunts me and my sister’s nightmares. I should feel relieved. But again: I don’t feel anything these days. I especially don’t feel a whoosh of victory from making it out of an encounter with my father unscathed. When my sister breaks the rules or sighs the wrong way, she gets hit, kicked, elbowed in the face, screamed at deep into the night. I know how to outwit the giant because I witnessed what happened when my sister fought back. My silver tongue is heavy and tastes of metallic guilt.
