Going and Going and Going
Shelby Stewart
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2025 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Fiction
Illustration by Abi Watson
On Halloween, her sister was diagnosed with cancer.
It was an unseasonably hot day, even for California, green trees singed with red flames, the sun blazing across a perfectly blue sky. Plump pumpkins lined doorsteps, purple witches held hands around steaming cauldrons of dry ice, and little white ghosts, tied to invisible strings, floated through the air.
The plastic skeletons bothered Olivia the most—fourteen feet tall, with eyes that glowed yellow in the night, they loomed over houses like synthetic angels of doom.
Dusk had finally fallen, but the air was still warm, and she and Julia sat ready at a table in front of their entryway littered with candy for trick-or-treaters. It was the two of them, their parents a few houses down at the McCallisters' who always threw a big party every Halloween with plenty of booze. Usually, they made Halloween a family affair, but when one of your daughters was diagnosed with aggressive renal cancer, any chance to get completely drunk with the neighbors, as happy families with laughing young kids and plenty of life ahead of them screamed "trick-or-treat!", seemed like a good one.
"I was reading," Julia said, staring at a street full of children in costume, "that once I start chemo, it'll only take two to four weeks for my hair to start falling out." She unwrapped a Reese's and took a bite. A little girl dressed as a princess approached the table, and Olivia threw several pieces of candy into her bag. "Don't give so much! We'll run out!" Julia said through a mouth of chocolate. She smacked Olivia on the shoulder.
"You're the one stealing it all! And Doctor Laxman said you weren't supposed to have sugar."
"One Reese's won't kill me." Julia shoved the rest of it into her mouth and smiled at Olivia, chocolate covering her teeth.
"Dare you to smile like that at the next family that comes by."
Julia unwrapped another piece of candy, shoved it into her mouth, and smiled even wider, chunks of candied peanut butter clumped in her teeth. "Dr. Laxman had little ghosts decorating his office," Julia said, swallowing down the chocolate, and turning to Olivia. "Bit on the nose, don't you think?" She stared at Olivia, like she always had, when they were young, daring Olivia to take the bait.
"You're not gonna die, Jules."
Julia shrugged, like it was just any other event, in any other life that wasn't theirs. Olivia looked at her older sister, at the fiery red hair, nearly to her waist, that so many people—strangers, family, friends, boys—had complimented her on over the years. How in a month, she'd see this same color everywhere in the autumn leaves littered on the ground. How they'd rot into the earth or scatter away on the wind, leaving nothing but bare branches on naked trees and dull gray skies where flashes of flaming red had once been.
There were three thick manila folders on the kitchen counter stuffed full of papers with directions and pamphlets for Julia's renal cancer. All the do's and don'ts. Don't eat sugar. Do exercise. Don't worry. Do get enough sleep. All the brochures were brightly colored, decorated with cheesy clip art and smiling families with gleaming white teeth and perfectly happy faces. No one was covered in chocolate. Those families didn't seem to have parents getting drunk at another family's house where no one had cancer. Olivia wondered if there was a mix-up and somehow, they had gotten the brochures for dieting instead of cancer. Brochures for someone who wanted to disappear rather than someone who was being forced to.
Julia reached under the table of candy and grabbed a bottle of vodka, and Olivia looked at her in shock. "Where'd you get that?"
"The secret liquor cabinet." Julia took a swig and made a face, sticking her tongue out. "Thought that was going to taste better."
Julia held out the bottle for Olivia, but she shook her head. "Liv, really?" Julia waved the bottle in her face. "I might be dying, and you're not going to have a little fun with me?"
Olivia took a sip and choked, and Julia cackled. She quickly stopped laughing and hid the vodka under the table as some of the neighbors approached, the Swansons. They were dressed in farm animal onesies.
"Very cute," Julia said, in a sing-song voice.
"We heard," Mrs. Swanson said, dressed as a cow and holding their two-year-old daughter in her chicken onesie on her hip. "Julia, dear, we're so sorry."
Julia laughed, a bitter hollow thing. "Well, you know. Who knew blood in your urine wasn't normal and wasn't just a prolonged period? Should've figured."
Mr. Swanson stared at Julia, under the hood of his pink pig outfit. "I well—"
"Candy? Liv can give you some. I'll be back." Julia raced off, almost knocking over the table, as she climbed out of her chair. Olivia sat there and shoved most of the candy in the Swansons' bags. "There," she said. "Should be enough."
More kids came by, and Olivia gave them the rest of the candy. Children pranced and screamed in the street, a parade of pretend. Olivia packed up the table, shut the door, and turned off the lights.
She found Julia in the silence of her room, huddled under the covers, curled into a little ball, the plastic stars on her ceiling from when she was a child casting a dim glow in the dark.
"When I left the hospital," Julia whispered, as Olivia stood hovering over Julia's bed, "it was like they all knew or something. All the patients sitting there, they were all looking at me. Everyone stopped talking at once, and they were all staring, and remember Jane?"
Olivia nodded. She and Julia had practically grown up at St. Mary's Regional during the summers when they were out of school and came to work with their mom. They'd run wild in the air-conditioned hospital and disturbed patients—the racket of life and laughter ricocheting against tiled halls otherwise filled with rattling breaths, coughs, and hushed whispers that Olivia had always associated with death.
"Jane hugged me. Started crying." Julia crawled out from under the covers. She reached into her jeans and unwrapped a piece of candy, this time a jawbreaker, popped it into her mouth and immediately bit down.
"You okay?" Olivia asked.
Julia nodded, crumpled the candy wrapper, and tossed it over her shoulder. She rubbed at her jaw. "Ow. That fucking hurt." Without looking at Olivia she said quietly, "I know what you meant though. Stop worrying."
It was dark in the closet, where she was huddled against the trombones, picking at a peanut butter sandwich. The stale smell of crusted spit hung in the air, but it was a familiar smell, and Olivia breathed it in. Julia had always hated the dark.
Somehow the news had spread at school, and the whispers followed them like their own shadows through the hall. So brave. It's because she's dying. Maybe her hair'll fall out. Do you think Julia and Liam…?
The door creaked open, hitting Olivia in the thigh, a ray of artificial light throwing the dark room into bright blinding white.
Olivia blinked up and looked into Liam's thin face. Julia's boyfriend. "Liv?" His voice was soft and tentative. Olivia wiped at her nose. "What are you—"
"Just looking for a trombone."
Liam looked at her, surprised, then laughed. "Sick of the piano?" He stuck out his hand, but she wasn't about to let him help her up. She stood, tugging at her sweater, as she tried not to look at him, at his thin fingers, calloused from years on the guitar.
"Did Jules tell you?" She asked, because it was all so heavy, this weight.
"That she has cancer?" He crossed his arms and looked away. "Had to hear that from Stephanie of all people."
"Oh," Olivia said, not knowing what else to say.
"Well, I just came to find this—" Liam grabbed a guitar leaning against the wall that Olivia hadn't noticed and walked out, as the door slammed shut, leaving Olivia in the dark again.
"Do you want to talk about it?" She asked the closed door, like she hadn't been afraid. Like she could look into Liam's face and not feel a prickle of shame at who she was and who she wasn't.
Julia's hair started to fall out a week before Thanksgiving. First it was several long red strands here and there, like festive tinsel a little too early for the holidays. Then it was large clumps that clogged the shower drain, causing water to pool around Olivia's ankles as she stared at the clumps of red hair sitting there, scared to pick up the glopping soggy mess and throw it in the trash.
Olivia tried to ignore it, just like her parents were, every night at the dinner table, talking about grades, what colleges Julia should apply to, Olivia's next concert, like Julia wasn't sitting there swollen from the chemo.
At night, when Olivia walked past her parents' bedroom, she could hear their hushed arguments about finances, the cost of the chemo and the infusions. Her dad blaming her mom for missing the blood in Julia's urine which had been there for months.
"You'll drive yourself insane doing that," Julia whispered into Olivia's ear one night. Julia stood there, tall and proud, holding their dad's hair clipper in her hand.
Olivia shook her head. "I'm not doing that. Mom'll kill me."
"Who the fuck cares. I'm not going to show up to school like I got into some dumb cat fight."
"Weren't we going wig shopping over Thanksgiving?"
"Liv," Julia put her hand on her hip and fixed Olivia with that look that she gave her when she knew she had her.
"Fine." Olivia snatched the hair clipper from Julia, and together, they walked into the bathroom.
Their bathroom was old. Their mom had tried to remodel it at one point, but all she had managed to do was paint it a red-pink and then to make it look classy, she took a sponge, dipped it in gold paint, and dabbed it against the wall. Their dad hated it. Little soaps shaped like shells that they never used and that smelled like potpourri sat in little plastic dishes on the brown tiled counters. Every time friends had spent the night when they were growing up, they apologized. "Sorry, our house is so old," they'd say. "You have to flush the toilet for three seconds. Yeah, make sure you hold the handle down." Money had always been an issue.
Olivia tried not to think about all the other times they'd been in this bathroom, growing up fighting over hair straighteners and curlers, the time that Julia had a zit so big that it took Olivia and their mom ten minutes to pop it together, pus splattered all over the mirror with Julia refusing to go to school that day, screaming that people would make fun of her. Or the time that Olivia had shaved one of her eyebrows off by accident in sixth grade when Julia dared her to; as a freshman, her left brow was still thinner than her right.
"Remember when you started high school and dyed your hair green?" Olivia asked, as she frowned at her eyebrows in the mirror.
Julia laughed and stared at her own reflection in the mirror. "It looked like shit. I should have realized red and green absolutely do not mix."
"Didn't help that you only bought one box."
Julia leaned against the counter and inspected her face in the mirror. Olivia looked at the two of them there—Julia, her face puffy, and it was maybe the first time that Olivia understood how people could call them sisters. Normally it was Julia—tall and thin, and everything everyone wanted—and Olivia—short, pudgy, and excess in all the ways that no one ever wanted. Now Julia wore a face that was similar.
Julia looked over at Olivia and sighed, then turned from the mirror, closed the lid on the toilet, and sat down, her face to the wall. Her back was rigid.
Olivia flicked the hair clipper on, feeling vibrations jolt her hand. Julia was somehow so thin and simultaneously bloated and unrecognizable. Is that what cancer did? Changed the people you loved so much before you lost them so that it was like you were losing someone else? That for a moment, you could pretend it was a stranger?
"What are you waiting for?" Julia asked.
The thick red hair that Olivia had looked at for her entire life felt like it belonged to someone else as she held it in her hands, the strands no longer silky and smooth, but coarse, as if preparing her for a future she wasn't ready for.
She took a deep breath and began, running the clippers against Julia's scalp. Clumps of red hair fell to the floor. She and Julia stared as clumps of red hair started to blanket their feet.
"Ow," Julia muttered, and Olivia looked down. A pinprick of blood started to well against Julia's scalp. Olivia stared at it.
"I'm—"
"Stop saying sorry." Olivia held the clippers in her hand, as she watched the blood. Julia turned around, suddenly. "Do you remember Mexico?" She asked, her eyes intense, as she looked at Olivia.
Olivia nodded. "Mom and dad saved and then fought the entire time."
"Those margaritas were better than that vodka."
Olivia stared at Julia and laughed, the feeling washing over her. "Can't believe you convinced mom and dad that they were virgin."
"Not my fault they never learned Spanish."
"It was more that you flirted with every waiter and made them promise not to tell them. Most of them knew English."
Julia cackled, her head a mess, a combination of bald spots and red fuzz of varying lengths. "That was the first time I had sex." She looked up at Olivia with those eyes again. "It wasn't with Liam. It was with that one waiter who worked at our hotel—the young one, who—"
"What was it like?" Olivia didn't know why, but her voice was a whisper.
"It hurt at first," Julia said, her voice, low and conspiratorial, "then it was awkward. It was over really fast. He made the most unattractive sound when he finished too—some sort of howl. So don't make that same mistake whenever you find someone, Livvy."
Olivia looked at her sister, at her blood that didn't seem to be clotting. Along the top of her head there was a faint dusting of orange freckles where Julia parted her hair, right perfectly down the middle.
"Was sex better with Liam then?"
Julia turned to Olivia then, her green eyes somehow greener against her red-rimmed eyelids. "It was," she said. "But Liam broke up with me when he found out I had cancer."
The clippers slipped out of Olivia's hands and clattered to the ground. "I'm going to fucking kill him," Olivia muttered.
Julia chuckled. "That'd be ironic. Him dying before me."
Olivia reached for the clippers, her fingers touching Julia's fallen hair, where it lay on the ground.
Julia got her kidney removed in December. The chemo wasn't working. For having an entire organ removed, the wound was small. Two relatively small puncture marks covered by bandages and gauze, as if it was any other normal day, any other injury. When Olivia was six, she had skinned her entire kneecap in the playground, and that had required more bandages than this.
Olivia woke up to piano the morning after the surgery. She crept out of bed, and in the dim kitchen light, watched as her dad's fingers danced across the dusty keys. It had been years since he had played, but she remembered watching him, mesmerized when she was young. Olivia looked at the Advent calendar hung above the piano and felt like she could breathe again.
"Wonder if my hair'll grow back," Julia was saying as Olivia changed her dressings and tried not to vomit or pass out. The wounds were yellowing, a bright color that was somehow unnatural on the body. Now that Julia had stopped the chemo, Olivia was surprised at how thin she really was. Her eyes traced Julia's spine, the skin stretched over each bone, and it was hard not to imagine the skeletons at Halloween. Julia was paler than Olivia had ever seen her. She dabbed at Julia's skin, the bone so close to the flesh, unlike Olivia's own body. The human body was fragile, wasn't it? Bones could break, skin could split. You could waste away day after day, while life kept on going and going.
"Maybe," Olivia said.
A week before Christmas, they got the scans back and found that Julia's renal cancer had spread to her lungs and bones.
This time, they were the ones at St. Mary's Regional, death huddling close, gossiping like they were old friends. Maybe it was another nurse's kids who were running in the halls full of laughter.
They sat in Dr. Laxman's office. It was cold, and there were motivational posters from the 1990s on the walls. Images of leaping dolphins, mountains, blue skies, with quotes from famous people like Teddy Roosevelt and JFK. Olivia watched Julia look at each poster and roll her eyes in disgust.
"But how?" Olivia asked.
Julia sat slumped in a chair, staring blankly ahead.
"I don't understand," their mother said, "We just had a scan—"
"Sometimes, we miss things—"
"Are these motivational posters on the walls supposed to make me suddenly get better?"
"I'm sorry?" Doctor Laxman, a small, thin man who looked like he biked every day and had never had a dessert in his life, looked at Julia.
"They keep you motivated then. They do fuck all for me. How long do I have? It's in my bones, so I assume it's not long?"
"I'm not sure. There are new treatments—"
Julia huffed, got up from the chair and walked out of the room.
"How long?" their mom asked.
"Likely no more than a year."
Their mom gripped Olivia's hand, and Olivia was shocked at how cold it was. She could feel her mother's bones, as they pressed their hands together. Why could she feel the bones of all the women in her family but her own?
Every few weeks they were back there. This time, they sat at the cafeteria table staring at each other, Olivia's salad discarded, Julia's brownie devoured.
Julia folded the medication instructions carefully between her swollen fingers, her bald head hidden under a red beanie. Once she was satisfied with her handiwork, she flicked it across the table at Olivia, where the folded triangle hung off the edge but didn't fall.
"Touchdown for me," Julia said, reaching for the piece of paper.
Olivia sighed, put her elbows on the table, and made a goalpost with her fingers. Julia flicked the paper triangle where it sailed through the goalposts and smacked Olivia in the face.
"And she scores the extra point!" Julia yelled, breaking into a coughing attack.
"I hate that you always win."
"Gotta give me something, Livvy," Julia said.
"You won at most things. Not just table football."
"Is that really what you think?"
"No one ever talked to you about what you ate or—"
"For Christ's sake, Liv." Julia reached out and pushed away from the table with surprising force. She stood, her chair tipping back, and clattering against the tile of the cafeteria. "It feels like you fucking won," she said, ripping her beanie off, the fluorescent lighting shining against her pale scalp. Olivia hugged herself. It was so heavy, this weight.
Julia was at the hospital again. Olivia knew every route to the bathrooms that were least used and therefore cleanest. She knew what patient rooms to avoid, and which nurses would smile at her, as they peered at charts before they wheeled their cart of tech into other patient rooms and gave them updates. She learned how to predict when the news would be bad. The head tilt, the kind smile, the delay before speaking.
Olivia watched as Julia slept—the hum of the hospital surrounding them. The chirp, chirp, chirp of the machine monitoring Julia's heart rate was too loud. Julia's arm was folded, and there was a kink in her IV slowing the morphine drip, causing another machine to beep every minute with a warning. Somehow though, it soothed Olivia to hear the internal workings of life being made external, how these machines kept Julia's life tethered to earth. Olivia put her hand on her chest, felt the blood that coursed through her veins running its path from her heart to her wrist, to her thighs.
What was that like for Julia? Did her blood know the cancer, did it draw back in fear? Or did it welcome the cancer like an old enemy prepared to strike but disguised as a friend? Olivia with the greasy fries and Julia never touching any of it until it was too late. By all accounts, it was the wrong way around. The universe had the wrong girl. It would have been easier if it were her, especially because Julia would never wish for something like this.
Olivia closed her eyes—blocked out the fluorescent lighting and tried to pretend like this wasn't a type of punishment for thoughts she had in the dark of night, as Julia and Liam's laughter drifted to her room from the hall.
Julia died on the next Halloween. It was fitting to mourn her on a holiday meant for the dead, and for some reason, Olivia tried to look at the skeletons towering in the neighbor's yards a little more fondly this year. Maybe one of them could be Julia, yellow eyes glowing in the night.
Olivia couldn't agree with her parents on a funeral date, but they eventually settled on Julia's birthday: November 17th. Better to be a celebration of life, Olivia thought, than a celebration of whatever the past year had been. Hospital visits, fights, Julia's swollen, bloated body, her bald head. She had refused to hide her cancer, refused to wear a wig, refused to be the perfect beautiful girl she had been in life. Refused to be everything that everyone had always wanted her to be.
The day of Julia's funeral dawned cold and bleak. Fog clung to the trees, wrapped around their branches, lingering and dense. And yet, glittering flaming red leaves still littered the ground, signs of old life still clinging to the earth.
Even though her red hair was long gone, she was always a child of autumn, it was only right that she was returning to it just as the leaves were at this time of the year, no matter how wasted away her body was, eaten away and rotting from the inside from the cancer.
Her mother had wanted a priest to deliver the eulogy, even though Julia had given up her Catholic faith long ago. It started to rain as Julia's body was lowered into the ground. Umbrellas went up one by one, a black sea of faceless, lifeless beings, and Olivia couldn't take it anymore. The last thing she saw as she ran from the funeral was the priest's vestments, stained with mud.
She never liked graveyards, but as the rain poured, it was oddly calming. Moss crept over old gravestones, the smell of rotting bouquets of flowers wafted through the air, mixed with the smell of freshly turned earth. Maybe Julia was coming to a different neighborhood of sorts.
"What are you doing out here?" a voice asked. Olivia spun, and behind her, there was Liam. Tall, messy brown hair, wearing a black suit, like he was supposed to be dutifully attending a dead girl's funeral too.
But if she looked at it another way, it was like he was wearing the same suit he wore to that wedding they all went to four summers ago, when Julia and Liam had first started dating and Olivia walked in on them kissing in the coat closet. Before Julia had cancer. Like the Western world, maybe this too would be a fixed point in time. Before Julia's Cancer. BJC. Everything after was a new world. And one that didn’t matter.
"She's dead. It doesn't matter."
"Guess it doesn't," Liam said.
"Why'd you do it?" Olivia asked.
Liam, who had started to walk off, looked back at Olivia. "Do what?"
"Break up with her."
"That what she told you? Jesus fucking Christ." Olivia was soaked to the bone at this point, and Liam was too. "I didn't break up with her. She broke up with me."
"I don't believe you."
"Liv, look, Julia's dead, alright. It doesn't fucking matter what happened."
"It matters to me."
Liam sighed. "Cancer makes you funny. I didn't push her. Maybe I should've, but I didn't. I think she knew she was going to die. Even then."
"How would you know?"
"My dad."
"I didn't know."
Liam shrugged. "Don't talk about it much."
Olivia watched as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Despite the early morning, the rain clouds made the sky a dark, deep gray, and the glow of the phone lit Liam's face, giving him a supernatural glow, lighting his cheekbones and giving his cheeks an eerily hollow look.
"I—what are you doing?"
"Can you just maybe trust me?"
Then he shoved his phone into Olivia's face, where a text, illuminated in gray and white stood in clear lettering, think we should break up. i have cancer. don't bother responding. deleting your number.
Olivia stood there and looked at Liam, who was putting his phone back in his pocket.
"She didn't talk to me again after that," he said. "Definitely had a way of keeping her word, did she?"
"What type of cancer did your dad have?"
"Brain."
"Oh."
"Died when I was nine."
"Oh."
"Yeah." Liam shoved his hands into his pockets.
"Is this how it's going to be now?" Olivia asked.
"What? People dying?"
"And..." Olivia shivered.
Liam looked at her, as if he were studying her. "Who knows?" Liam looked away. "Probably. Live long enough, and yeah. Probably. Nothing to do. People die, Liv. Live long enough, and I think this is just what life becomes."
"She told me," Olivia said. "That she had blood in her urine. I knew for months."
The rain had stopped. Liam didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said, "For years, when I was little, I had dreams that my dad was going to die. When he started having issues, and he got scanned, they said he likely had cancer for years."
"I just...I didn't want to—"
"I know."
"Do you feel like a monster?"
Liam looked wildly at Olivia. "Why would you say that?"
But Olivia didn't answer. She walked towards Liam, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed him.
He pulled away. "Liv," he said, his voice soft.
She turned and ran away. The sun crested above the fog. It was weak, but there was still light.
That was a year ago. The night was clear, the sky a velvet black, sprinkled with shimmering stars. Olivia breathed out, just to watch the breath of her lungs become a real tangible thing she could see right in front her—one moment a warm vapor in the cold night, the next moment—gone. She exhaled again, and for a moment, she imagined it was something else entirely, a fog she could disappear in. The world was covered in a soft blanket of white—the kind of snow that stuck, that stayed with you for a while and cradled you in its quiet. Her mind turned, comfortably silent at last. She looked skyward, the glow from a streetlamp highlighting the falling snow. It had been a year, and each day she hoped she'd wake up someone different, someone brand-new. People grew lives around grief, didn't they? She put one foot in front of the other, her boots crunching in the fresh snow on the ground. Julia had been dead and buried in the ground for a full year.
As she walked in the snow, she passed houses. Some with their lights off, maybe people away for Christmas, visiting families elsewhere. She could hear echoes of children's laughter from others. In another house, an old woman, perhaps in her eighties, bent down to lift something from her oven. Her back was stooped, the years of her life etched in the lines of her face. Olivia stared, and through the glass of the windowpane, she and the woman looked at each other.
Olivia ran and ran, feeling the blood rushing through her ears, the cold air piercing through her lungs. She didn't know where she was going, only that her legs were carrying her somewhere, and if she ran fast enough, she could run into another life, another world that wasn't this one.
She slowed as she reached the graveyard. She hadn't been here in a year. Snow covered the ground, draped over the headstones, and dotted the wings of stone angels. Bare tree branches shivered as a wind whispered through the trees. The earth was cold and quiet, with the dead underfoot. Everything she had ever known and everything she had ever loved was here.
She stood in front of Julia's grave, empty hands, nothing to give. "I would have given anything," she whispered. She stood in her ill-fitting puffy jacket, letting the bitter wind whip her cheeks, turn them red.
She looked at the gravestone next to Julia's. Someone named Anne Marie, born in 1923. Olivia did the math, and it wasn't fair, to have Julia next to someone who had lived to ninety-two.
Maybe in another life. To grow old.
Olivia walked home, opened the door to a dark and empty house. The space in the kitchen where the piano once stood was empty. It still seemed too big, even though she had tried to learn so many ways to be quiet and small. Under the covers and alone, she tried not to sob, tried to hold her body tight, feeling her flesh, never her bones, and wondering when small parts of her would feel alive again. Life just kept going and going and going and going and maybe she could hold onto that as something.
