Her brother's headstone is a rectangle of granite sunk into sod. Carved with a border, a heart and cross in the upper right hand corner. His name above the dates of his birth and death. Beloved, it says beneath that. Son. Brother. Friend. And lower still:

My mother is a fish.

She reads this sentence for the first time during her sophomore year in college, American Literature 210. Page 1,563 of The Norton Anthology, Fifth Edition, Volume 2 — a book thicker than the bible with the same feathery thin pages. Inside it William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is condensed to a fraction of an inch in thickness. The chapters, each one the first person point of view of a different character, butt up against each other — no room to breathe between consciousnesses. She doesn't notice this. She hasn't yet encountered white space beyond the page and so knows nothing of its value. Doesn't understand how emptiness can weigh words, or why anyone would need it to.

Still, even buried in a wall of text the sentence speaks to her. It is a chapter in itself, the thought of Vardaman, a child who sees the light leave his mother's eyes. A child who trips between is and was. Here and gone. A child who remembers the dirt-coated eye of a fish he has caught, split, gutted, and scaled. Cut into pieces. Not-fish now, he thinks, not-blood. Be and not be. And then the connection, the understanding perfectly distilled in that single sentence. She doesn't mark it, but it sticks with her.

When she gets home from class her brother is in the kitchen. She pulls out the Norton and shows him.

"The shortest chapter in literary history," she says.

He turns the phrase in his mouth like a jewel and smiles.

Two years pass and her brother goes away to college. He lives in a studio apartment, keeps his mattress on the floor next to bookshelves stacked with Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom; and, of course, As I Lay Dying. She doesn't notice them when she and their mother come to visit the summer before his senior year, but they are there. She'll see them later. After. When she comes back to clean out his apartment.

But before that, the summer visit. The three of them go to an antique store downtown where she finds a box set: three hardcover books, gold-lettered and clothbound. Faulkner's famous Snopes triology. She points them out to their mother, casually. She thinks they'll make a good Christmas gift for her brother, but doesn't want to say so with him standing nearby. Their mother doesn't buy them.

They show up under the tree anyway. To her, from him. She laughs. She thinks she will loan them to him when she is finished.

She is halfway through the first volume when he dies.

The day before his wake she and her parents drop his suit off at the funeral home, buy a plot in a cemetery, and go to the monument company to purchase a headstone. The office is small — they crowd around a desk with a three ring binder full of templates. They choose the heart and cross, provide the necessary information, and then the saleswoman asks if there is anything they would like to add. It is discussed and decided: "My mother is a fish."

But it's been five years since the Norton, and when her mother asks she can't remember what the sentence means. Her books are on her shelves, far away, and his are still in the studio apartment next to the mattress, so she goes to a bookstore that night after dinner and buys the First Vintage International Edition.

She skims the pages and the story comes back to her. The family. The loss. It ripples through their thoughts. Singular and plural. Faceted grief. She gets to page 84 and it's there, the way it's meant to be seen. One sentence floating in a blank sea, a small realization too large in itself, so large as to eclipse an entire consciousness. The only realization ever to silence the steady white noise of the brain.

"It's okay," she tells her mother. "It doesn't mean anything bad."

"What does it mean?" her mother asks.

And because she can't explain it any better than Vardaman has, she says, "It means death."

One morning, after years spent trying not to think about her brother, his ripple, the facets of her family's grief, she eases a box off the shelf of the closet in her office. She pulls out and leafs through spiral bound notebooks, folders, and sheaths of photocopies — the literal bulkk of her college education. Spanish and algebra, Shakespeare and Foucault, The Holocaust and Ancient Mexico — every handout and syllabus, every doodle and assignment guideline, everything except her notes from American Literature 210.

She grabs the Norton from the living room and carries it back to the office. She sets it on the desk, flips to the index, finds the page. No margin notes, no clue as to what she was thinking then. Before.

She goes back to the living room and grabs the other copy, the one bought the night before the wake. She brings it back to the office. She turns to page 84.

She knows she won't find what she's looking for there. She knows she wouldn't have found it in her notes, either. Faulkner cannot tell her why her brother wound a cord around his throat. Even if he could, it would change nothing.

She lays the First Vintage on top of the Norton, pages to pages, the new above the old. Four years between their purchase, their reading, the small diamond of space in between them hardly enough room for what happened. Words, ink on pages, etched in stone. Was and is. Be and not be. And Faulkner tells her — Me. Faulkner tells me the only thing he can.

My brother is a fish.

Kelley Clink has been writing creative nonfiction for the last three years and is currently working on a memoir about her brother's suicide. Her work has appeared in Under the Sun and South Loop Review. She has a piece forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review. She lives in Chicago with her amazingly supportive husband and massively neurotic dog.