“No! Pim!” I yelled, and as I climbed up the last two rungs, he lost his balance completely. I remember his eyes going wide, his mouth becoming a round O. By the time I reached the top, my brother was sinking into the grain, yelling in terror and flailing. Then he breathed in the flax and the yelling stopped.

The more he moved in the silky quicksand of that flax container, the deeper he sank. I lunged out to him, I tried, but his arms were so thin, and he couldn’t paddle toward me. He could only sink further. He was snot and saliva, savage, primal eyes, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, thought wildly of jumping in too, but I didn’t. I just hung there, waving my hands in the air near him. Only his head was visible now, those big dark eyes looking up at me, pleading. A few seconds later, even those disappeared. I watched as the last of his hair was swallowed up. I squeezed my eyes tight, my nose and throat gummed in panic. Please God, when I open my eyes, let everything not be this.

I had one foot over the container edge when Ruth reached the bottom of the ladder. I think only a minute contained all the chaos, a minute where she’d heard me and ran from the tree line.

“Get down!” she shrieked, climbing rungs herself, grabbing at the hem of my T-shirt.

“Pim’s in there!” I screamed.

“He’s what?” she clambered past me on the ladder, treading on my fingers, straddling the rim of the container. “Pim!” she shouted. “Jesus! Pim! No, oh God!”

I gaped at her, my face red-hot. I’d never heard Ruth swear before. Earnest, steady Ruth, who kept a Bible beside her bed and brushed her hair a hundred strokes every morning. In one smooth motion, she clamped both palms over the edge and dipped her whole body down into the grain.

“Ruth!” I sobbed. “Don’t!” Even though she had a grip on the rim, I was sure she’d disappear, too, and in so many ways she did. We both did. Whatever we had of ourselves was lost in the few minutes that Ruth swished and swirled her body through the grain, hoping that Pim would grab a leg, a foot, as if he was sitting underwater with his eyes open, holding his breath. Ruth’s face contorted with the effort and eventually she slowed, pulled herself back up out of the grain. She hung with her ribs over the side, heaving.

“Get down,” she gasped. I descended the ladder, my knees rattling. She slid down too, facing forward, all but falling, three-quarters of her covered in a strange flax dust that had turned her clothes and skin moth-silver. Her shoes were spilling seeds, little flecks of it that we’d find for weeks in our bedroom, in folds of our clothes.