I was nineteen years old when my brothers were replaced by a hole.

It was a jagged, disgusting thing in the back field, perfectly circular from a birds’ eye view but elliptical when viewed from the ground. Lost worms sometimes stuck their noses out of its wall before disappearing back into the dirt. You could see the thin, white roots of grass edging the opening, where any horizontal growth had been cut clean with the edge.

The bottom wasn’t so far down. Maybe fifteen feet, maybe twenty. Far enough to make it difficult to get back out, but close enough that the bottom was easy to see and examine. Soil saturated with groundwater, pocked with stones.

I only noticed that my brothers were gone when Rebecca called me.

I can’t find Joshua. He was playing cards with my mom, and now he’s not there or picking up my calls. Mom’s no help. Rebecca’s mother was the kind of woman who needed supervision from her newly adult daughter, an arrangement that saved both the two of them and the state a solid few thousand a year. Joshua, my older brother and Rebecca’s fiancé of one month, spent the afternoons with her while Rebecca worked a shift at the group home. Can I call the cops? Where could she have gone?

Did you check the park? I asked.

Fuck you, Rebecca said. ‘Did I check the park’ Like asking the coroner if he checked the stab wound.

They don’t always do that.

Jeeesus Christ, Rebecca said, and hung up the phone. She called me back barely five minutes later and said that she’d finally teased something out of her belligerent mother: Joshua had left uncharacteristically and said he was headed home to the field if she needed anything.

I found the hole when I went outside to investigate myself. The back field was where my brothers usually spent their afternoons, languishing in the overgrown wheat stalks and trading grandiose plans for the land. They were set to inherit it once Auntie passed, and both figured that was coming soon. Auntie didn’t use it for much of anything—it was land from her late, white husband that he’d inherited and his father had inherited and his grandfather had stolen. 

Joshua wanted to sell it to a developer, saying that hotter summers meant that cold-ass Manitoba grasslands were going to sell like hotcakes. He wanted to open a B&B with the money. Caleb, my younger brother, wanted to farm the field, plant trees and sweetgrass, build a greenhouse and cultivate old prairie. They tossed around phrases like ancestral sovereignty and eminent domain. When I went outside that day, though, they were gone, leaving just thin blades of pale green spring wheat in the wind.

And the hole. A jagged, disgusting thing.

I texted Rebecca hole ate them.

I missed twelve calls from her that hour while I sat at the edge of the hole that ate my brothers. Its maw was hypnotizing, like staring into a dog’s saliva-heavy mouth. Near the bottom of the hole the soil glistened with groundwater, and the top layer was nearly black with nutrients. I didn’t dare reach out to touch the hole but could almost feel it anyway: clumpy and thick between my fingers and cool against my palm. I could imagine the taste, too, like unwashed winter carrots. Sweeter than it’s meant to be.

Finally, Rebecca gave up on my cell and took matters into her own hands. She stomped wherever she went, and grass parted under her hiking boots like water in front of Moses. Those boots stopped right behind me, and then one braced itself right between my shoulders. The empty threat was clear: a flex of her calf, the carrying of momentum, and my body crumpled at the bottom of the hole.

The fuck is this, now, Rebecca said. The hole was reflected in her dark brown eyes, but it didn’t change a thing: the two were the same color, the same empty shape. The dirt isn’t this dark here. Shit, it’s always been light brown and dusty as hell. And the water table is at least a dozen yards deeper nowadays—your aunt just had to redig her well.

I thought it was funny that the inaccuracies in the soil were Rebecca’s problem with my new hole.

Ight. I shrugged, which moved her boot up and down my back.

Has this always been here?

Nah, I said. It’s new. It ate my brothers.

They probably just drove into Winnipeg. Rebecca bounced some of her weight against my spine.

Maybe they became the hole. They were both sort of sad.

At the time, it seemed self-explanatory that their sadness, which was a sadness steeped in our mother’s sadness, and our grandparents’ sadness, and on and on, would become a dirt hole like that.

Our grandmother wrote books on sadness that she never published. Most of the stories in them were oral tradition, an attempt to preserve things that she would email to her brothers and sisters who were taken to boarding schools while she hid in the cupboard. Some of them were her own.

The first story she ever wrote was on an old typewriter my mother found for her on the side of the road and it was about the Great Lakes and how they were made eons and eons ago by an old, old woman whose grief was so deep that it carved away the soil. The story fit into the creation stories my uncles told, where Gichi-manidoo filled the lakes with his tears. They forgot, my grandmother said, that before grief could fill it needed to hollow out—that it was something which emptied out the insides and left shells sitting around.

She never explained what had made the old woman so sad. She didn’t have to. We grew up surrounded by tragedies: the missing women, the taken children, the lost forests. It made sense to me as a child that the lakes would be carved and filled with melancholy. It made sense to me then, standing with Rebecca, that this hole was made with my brothers’ sadness, and would be filled with mine.

I don’t like looking at it, Rebecca said.

I think it’s beautiful, I said.

The next few months, as the newness of spring bled into high summer, were spent strangely. I fell in and out of consciousness, even as I shot the shit and roamed the woods and chomped the bit. The only time I felt all there was at the hole. When I was staring at it, whether from its edge or from the roof of my house, the part of my mind that was never awake anymore lit up. Neurons going crazy.

Rebecca and I had only done shrooms once. We took them on a late-spring day our junior year. It had been overcast for weeks, with every sunset threatening frost at the edges of almost-budding leaves. That kind of weather comes with crime spikes in Manitoba, just like heat waves do in L.A. We were both miserable, so Rebecca texted her mom’s plug and we bought a little pink chocolate bar from Vancouver for a quarter of my paycheck.

The clouds parted halfway through our high, breaking winter’s seal of solemnity. The new sun cast a warm light onto the carpet that Rebecca and I had been lying on, and she squeezed my hand and whispered growing season is finally here. To me, it felt like the Deer Woman herself was dancing down the sunbeam, and if I squinted, I could see the glint of her jingle dress in the dust mites drifting through the air.

I told my younger brother about it afterwards. He laughed and said, oh, dude, she was telling you that’s love.

I never took what he said very seriously, but I liked to humor him. I could never trip him up, either. He always had an answer. Love for what?

He shrugged. For the sun, for the drug, for the girl. For the way you knew the river ice would crack soon. For the way sadness feels when you finally part ways with it.

That was the way the hole made me feel in the years following my brothers’ disappearance. Like it was Canadian winter all year long and the hole was the only sun in the world.

Eventually I started sleeping at the bottom. It would be difficult for me to tell you when, why, or really any other solidifying details about the first night I spent in the hole. I only know it was right after we noticed how it bleeds, a year and a half after that first May day. I remember there were still dying leaves clinging to the trees that now surrounded the hole. They reminded me of a council, like elves in The Lord of the Rings, or maybe of onlookers crowded around a car accident.

Rebecca never liked how attached I was to it. The closest she would come to the hole after that first day was my back porch, where she would sit on the stoop and watch me watch it. Ratty black hair sat long over her shoulders, which curved in on themselves. Her eyes were severe and her mouth was always soft. We spent a lot more time together after the hole appeared, and it reminded me of when we were kids, before we had jobs and she had a fiancé, when it was just the two of us tied at the wrist with a friendship bracelet. She would try to compel me into conversation, bringing up shows from decades earlier, or the movement of birds, or Auntie’s new boyfriends I never bothered to meet.

I never responded the way she wanted me to. Eventually our afternoons would always lapse into silence. Once, though, about an hour into our quiet coexistence, she cleared her throat.

What, I said. I was staring at the patterning of rocks in the side of the hole. They wrapped all the way around the hole like a wedding ring. The noise had made me jump, but I didn’t want to admit that to Rebecca.

Have you noticed these trees? she asked.

I raised an eyebrow at a worm weaving between the stones. Of course I had noticed the trees—I spent hours every day noticing everything about the hole. It was surrounded by thick, tall spruce trees and almost a foot of ground cover in every direction. The forest started to peter into wheat fields about ten yards out from the hole, but Auntie hadn’t tended them since my brothers disappeared and the fields were wet and rotting, a dirty green-brown rather than their old gold.

Yeah, I said.

Rebecca fell silent again.

The white spruce closest to the hole had roots that toed at its edges. Something kept it from branching into the open air, but it still grew against that invisible boundary with everything it had. That conflict created strange manipulations of the root system—bulbous tap roots and mats of thin sprouts, lateral roots that dipped in search of water. The root system was huge, which benefitted the tree itself. It was a behemoth of an organism.

The trunk was at least four feet in diameter. Rebecca and I holding hands probably couldn’t wrap our arms around it all the way. It was impossible to see where it touched the sky, only a seemingly infinite stretch of needles and cones and branches.

We’re too far south for the modern climate range of gaawaandagoog. White spruce haven’t been this side of Lake Winnipeg for half a century, Rebecca said. And have you ever seen a tree like this?

Well, yeah, I said. I didn’t like whatever she was implying, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. There was something accusatory in her voice—something accusing the hole, my brothers, of power she thought it shouldn’t have. Down in Minnesota. Chippewa National Forest.

We’d gone when I was young and my grandmother still had the mobility to snowshoe the trails. Chippewa National was all old growth as the result of a survey error that had marked the forest as Coddington Lake and unloggable. My grandmother said the forest reminded her of herself—part of the land that was uncolonized by accident. Overlooked. Left as something beautiful. The trees there had been nearly as large as our white spruce.

The Lost 40, Rebecca said. Those trees were as old as your great-great-great-great-grandpa. Probably older. Where did this one come from? How long has it been here? Hundreds of years?

I tried to remember. It was tough to remember dates without a job or school to go to—even once I’d graduated, I kept time with my little brother’s high school classes, and without him it all fell apart. Beyond my unmooring, there was something about the hole that resisted memory. I could tell it wanted me to believe it had always been there. I stared at my wriggling earthworm and realized I had never seen it before. It wasn’t the usual European nightcrawlers my aunt kept in her compost piles—it was something else.

Like two, I said. It was the first to come up after the hole. It started as a seedling.

Two years, Rebecca repeated. I noticed suddenly that she was sitting next to me, which was the first time she’d approached me and the hole. The toes of her beat-up skate shoes touched the crumbling soil of the edge, and she had her thin fingers tucked into the thick, autumnal layer of dead leaves carpeting the ground. Her shoulder touched mine every time she inhaled.

Yeah, I figure about three years. I nodded my head down to my worm. You ever seen that kind of nightcrawler before?

Rebecca’s eyes flicked down into the hole, then out of it as soon as they could. It looks endemic. Y’know all our worms now are invasive—they’re not supposed to be here. They’re not supposed to eat all the leaf litter as fast as they do. Our great-great-great-great-grandmas had a yard of ground cover under their feet everywhere they walked. Like a fucking carpet. Imagine what lived in there before the white man brought over their earthworms.

Imagine what’s living in there now, I said.

Rebecca was silent for a long moment. Finally, she said, remember what I said about the soil? And the water table? Even just that first day?

I shrugged, because I didn’t remember but didn’t need her to explain again.

It’s like it’s bleeding, Rebecca said.

And so I started sleeping in the hole with my brothers. The soil was wet with groundwater that Rebecca said had been sunk away years ago, and it was dark with nutrients that the corn should have devoured, and it was thick with roots and insects that had returned faster than they ever should have. Even when it rained, the hole stayed empty, and I stayed dry, and I slept well. Rebecca complained at first, but after a week she began to come to the hole to wake me up in the morning, and after a few more, when the snow fell and the hole stayed warm, she would sit at its mouth to talk to me at night.

We were studying its floor one evening, which was spotted with seashells and limestone and peppercorn-sized white orbs. Rebecca told me they were left behind by Lake Agassiz, a prehistoric lake that spanned almost all of Manitoba. It used to nearly kiss Lake Superior until it drained down through the American South, leaving beaches and sediments and flood mythologies everywhere behind it.

Rebecca rolled a pearl of limestone between her cotton-gloved fingers. I wonder what your grandmother would’ve thought about Lake Agassiz, she said. By then I had told her my grandmother’s Great Lakes origin story dozens of times—sober, stoned, drunk, tripping, sleep deprived. She had heard every version I could conceptualize.

Whadzhu mean? I asked.

Well, the lake drained out, she said. It disappeared.

But now it’s Lake Winnipeg, right? I reasoned.

Yeah, sure. But Winnipeg is miniscule compared to Agassiz. Where the hell did all that grief go? It’s like the old woman’s tears were for nothing.

I dug my fingers into the soil to pull out a spiral shell the size of my palm. It was rough to the touch and weighed almost nothing for its size. Not for nothing, I said.

Rebecca was making a pile of the prehistoric debris. She had always made piles and lines of things since we were children, an instinct that Auntie had tried, in vain, to channel into beading, calligraphy, gardening—anything useful. I added my shell to her pile and had the idle thought that we would have to hurry our excavation if we wanted anything significant before the sun set—always so early in the winter.

It added something to the earth, I said. It felt strange to be the one telling Rebecca about something like this. Fertile soil all the way down through the states. We wouldn’t have the Great Plains without Agassiz, and without the Great Plains we wouldn’t have the buffalo, or sweetgrass, or any of that sort of thing.

Rebecca laughed. You know, your auntie used to tell me how funny it was that you were so good at trig when you flunked out of every other mathematics they put you in. But, shit, you just like circles, don’t you? You don’t want anything to be permanent.

Whadzhu mean?

You don’t want her tears to just sit there forever and then disappear. You want them to go back and repair the wreckage that made her cry in the first place, Rebecca said. Everything is rot and growth to you. Ouroboros. Some sine wave ad infinitum. One to negative one to one.

When Rebecca got sharp, she got clever. Phrases like ad infinitum were the easiest clue that I should watch my tongue.

Yeah? I said. So what? Maybe it all is a circle.

It’s been years, Rebecca bit, and they’re still not back. There’s no damn circle without Joshua and Caleb.

We’re the circle, I said. I paused. Us and the hole. I paused again. Bitch.

Rebecca laughed again, and then she kissed me.

We had never kissed before, which was just as surprising to the two of us as it was to every other speculator in the town; Rebecca and I were the kind of best friends who probably should have had a middle-school-sleepover story, or a kindergarteners-playing-doctor story, or a drunk-in-a-corn-field story, and we both knew it. Still, that day in the hole was the first time our lips touched.

I am going to eat you alive, she said to me at some point, with her fingers in my mouth and her hair tickling at my shoulders, and I knew she was talking about the ouroboros.

She lounged between my legs, hair splayed over my stomach and eyes drifting closed. She was illuminated by the sunset, the hole’s shadows casting deep blues pressed against orange glow. I like you and your circles, she told me.

Yeah, I know. She was telling me that she didn’t understand. I knew that circles, like the hole, weren’t something you could like, like they were an ideology or a perspective on the world. The hole just was, and we were in it.

Spring came and went again, for what must have been the third time since the hole came to Manitoba, and the canopy that the newly ancient trees knit above me had expanded and taken over the block. Our neighbors complained at the shade, then moved out as roots cracked first their sidewalks and then their concrete-poured basements.

A few stayed: my aunt, puttering about in her kitchen as branches bigger than her head cracked her windows; my older brother’s elementary school best friend, who’d gone from being drunk on the street corner to drunk under an enveloping spruce; our next-door neighbor with peering eyes and mottled hands. Rebecca’s mom stayed because there was nowhere she could’ve gone. Their basement flooded with water clearer than I had ever seen, and Rebecca moved into Joshua’s old room and her mother into Caleb’s. No one talked about what was happening. There was a sense that discussing the hole would make it devour faster or disappear altogether, whichever we wanted less.

When my grandmother died, years and years ago, my mother, aunt, and I spent years as though she were still around. My mother talked to her out the sink window as she washed dishes. My aunt tended to her garden, maintaining my grandmother’s neat rows and tidy herb boxes, keeping them from the creep of decay that follows the death of a curator. I read her stories aloud to myself and pretended it was her voice I heard. But, eventually, my mother ran out of things to say to a ghost who wouldn’t respond. My aunt had to take on more shifts at work and the mint broke out of its restraints and wreaked havoc. I reached the bottom of my grandmother’s manuscript pile.

In the same way, the emptiness at the center of our new life eventually demanded our response. A circle demands to be completed the same way a sine wave demands to reach its peak again. Rebecca was never one to shy away from someone’s pleas for recognition. There was an unspoken recognition that when we would have to truly respond to the hole, Rebecca would be our diplomat.

It was a cool, bright day when Rebecca gave me a three inch, meticulously carved wooden bear with dark-stained fur and a snuffling nose.

It was warm when she pressed it into my hand. Even in Canada, summer meant pockets were a suicidal place for chocolate bars, and when I brought the carved bear to my face he smelled like sweat and sugar and cocoa, remnants of summer mistakes given immortality in cotton lint.

Ursa very minor, I joked.

A doodem, Rebecca said. We sat on the bottom step of the back porch. The dead ground cover was now all the way to the wood slat floor. While the top leaves baked in the summer sun, you only had to ruffle them with a hand to reach cool, wet dampness—and enough bugs to populate an entomological Shangri La. Rebecca distrusted them at best, so I had cleared away a path to the hole for her and paved it in stones. Even though I’d laid them myself, I always saw new patterns in the lines between the flat rock. It was a convenient thing to stare at while we talked.

I hummed, waiting for Rebecca to continue. The bear shone dully in the sun.

The clan system, she said finally, from way back when. I’ve been doing some Wikipedia scouring, looking for something to fill the hole. The doodems used to be how the land was populated. We weren’t just sitting around, waiting to feel like we were someone. We were born a person. She toed the edge of a paving stone, staring at my hands, seemingly unable to keep her eyes off the bear she’d spent so long crafting.

The bear?

The makwa, the tender-foot, Rebecca said. Your auntie told me your grandma had the clans in the area written down somewhere, so I hunted through those boxes in the attic and found the ledgers that told me about you all. Your brothers’ doodem.

I never read anything. It bit to know that there was writing my grandmother had done that I hadn’t found. That I had given her up before I’d had to.

Rebecca’s smile was wry. She wasn’t the sort of woman who would know what I was feeling, but she knew what I was like and the smile let me know that. I ran my thumb over the bear’s foot. Nothing you would’ve liked, she said. Just record-keeping. Moons of birth, cousins’ names, clans, birthplaces, that sort of thing. But it made me think of that huge, drained out lake. Of the hole.

Mmhm, I said.

Of the tiny seashells the water left behind when it left. I don’t understand your circle shit, she admitted. That was a post-coital leap. But I understand the shells and your grandmother’s ledgers. Your brothers didn’t leave much behind except this giant fucking hole where they used to be. She lapsed into silence.

But, I said.

But the hole gives us its own packing material. Agassiz dragged soil all down through the Great Plains. She grabbed my hand and clutched it. The legs of the bear bit into our palms, slick in in the sweat of a summer forest. This is white spruce wood. I’m going into Winnipeg for more ledgers, more doodems, to fill the hole with.

She left the next day in her mother’s beat up red sedan, with forty five dollars for gas and her tribal ID, driving a bit further along the circumference of a circle she didn’t understand. I watched her go with my aunt, her mother, and Joshua’s elementary school best friend. Her car’s exhaust sank in the humidity, disappearing into the pine needle carpet she left behind.

I was twenty three years old when Rebecca left me with just a hole, a jagged, beautiful thing in the forest behind my house, a thing that was born from my brother’s grief but would be filled with mine. I sat at the edge of it and I cried.