What made her laugh?

Herself.

In our family, my sister was both black sheep and jester. She was an improv whiz and brilliant mimic who could defuse the dangerous tension building in our mother by sliding into the kitchen in her sock feet, waggling her fingers full of rings, and singing, “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Fri-eeeeeend”, exaggerating Carol Channing’s already hyperbolic facial expressions, funny drawl, and extended vibrato. This show never failed. Even when my sister was sick, her face drained of color except for the jaundice around her chin and mouth, she could pull it off. Our mother’s volcanic smoke dissolved. My sister performed again, sliding in, waggling her hands, singing the diamond song the same way. She did this on repeat, as many times as necessary, until our mother had laughed herself into helplessness…and for a little while, we were safe.

Who was her best friend?

Me.

I was my sister’s only friend, and therefore, her best. This is not the arrangement she would have chosen, had she the ability to choose. But as a high school dropout and a shunned Jehovah’s Witness – both the result of an illness dubbed “malingering” – she was all alone, and had me to choose from. We were sick with a sickness no one could see. Born and raised in a mobile home, we grew up breathing toxic formaldehyde off-gassed by the cheap particle board. Formaldehyde also lurked in perfumes, fingernail polish, and other cosmetic delights, hyperactivating our immune systems – coughing, wheezing, migraines, dizziness, nausea, nosebleeds. It was the 1980’s in rural Iowa and few in our circle had the imagination required to understand chemical sensitivity, and why we couldn’t hang with their Aqua Net. It was easier for the elders in our Jehovah’s Witness congregation to pronounce our family nuts – “malingerers” – and shun us. We were a problem solved, and consequently, abandoned. My sister’s friends moved on without her. They graduated high school, married, left the state. My sister was forced by her illness to drop out during her sophomore year. Since homeschooling was not then legal in Iowa, the school finally gave in to my father’s demands and sent a tutor, but the tutor turned out to be a spy, entering our household every week after showering away all chemicals, sharing Macbeth with my sister while taking notes about our family to bring to the school system. She seems fine to me and I think her family has her convinced she’s sick. The tutor stopped coming, my father slammed a lawsuit against the school district, and for my sister, there went another soul she’d been deceived into believing was a friend. She turned eighteen, nineteen, twenty. She didn’t graduate, didn’t drive, didn’t date, and spent most of her time in her room, fighting with our mother, crying (desperate, shoulder shaking) beneath the covers, cleaning the house, reading old books that fell apart in her hands. In the end, it wasn’t our shared status as environmentally ill outcasts that made me and my sister best friends. It was The Monkees. Every weekday during the summer when I was twelve and she nineteen, we sat together on the floor in the living room and fell over backwards, holding our ribs, convulsed with laughter, watching The Monkees’ wacky antics on Nickelodeon. Afterwards, we raced outside and played tetherball for hours, discussing the minutiae of each episode. Every week, we rotated which Monkee we had a crush on, so we never had a crush on Mike, Davy, Peter, or Mickey at the same time. Therefore, we were never reduced to jealous rivalry and could contentedly share in each other’s love lives while smacking the tetherball round and round as the sun sank to kiss the Mississippi into ecstatic orange pieces. My mother was flabbergasted that we were suddenly inseparable, and, furthermore, that a band she had grown up with in the 60’s was the cause of our tight union.
She didn’t like it.

Who was her worst enemy?

Our mother.

And God.

Mom and God. God and Mom. Mom and God.

A tongue twister. They might as well have been one.

My sister believed, and had reason to believe, they both hated her.

Did she have a mentor?

Emily Dickinson.

We moved from Iowa to Missouri, exiles seeking a fresh start. There, we both began homeschooling. My father found a Kingdom Hall with a reputation for tending to, instead of shunning, those with environmental illness and autoimmune disorders. While I returned to our faith with zeal, my sister was done with the Bible and the people who promised they were God’s people with the fruits of love in bloom in one hand and a sword flashing in the other. She’d had enough of two-faced Gods. My sister, instead, took up with Emily. She was twenty-four. This was a year before the seizures that robbed her of the ability to walk and talk, and nearly took her life. She worked on high school homeschool courses and her drawings, rich intense graphite drawings based on old photos scavenged from antique stores, her most elaborate an elderly woman in an overcoat and bonnet with a face textured as tree bark clutching her handbag in clawed hands, like the winter tree rising behind her, a young woman taking the photo, her shadow – the flare of her hair, her dress – visible. In my sister’s drawing, the young woman’s shadow is rendered darkly, thrown across the old woman and rising up into the spectral tree. My sister titled the drawing Life Cycle. She lived like this, lost in the deep wrinkles of the Ozarks countryside, her room filling with antique furniture: pie safes, hand-painted mirrors, a glistening and ever-growing collection of Depression glass. My sister hated clocks, and though they were plentiful in the antique stores she haunted, she refused to purchase them. She had not one clock in her room. She said that clocks were bullies. They only laughed at her. My sister often stared into the mirror and grieved what she saw: lines on her face, deep, cavernous wrinkles, sagging skin. “Do you see?” she would ask me, pulling this way and that at her face, until I was sick. It was like being asked to confirm ghosts. I couldn’t see what she saw. Only Emily could see, she said. Only Emily understood the taunting of clocks. Only Emily could speak about how death seeped into everything, including a twenty-four-year-old’s face. In the winter, my sister pulled on her boots, her coat, her hat, and went outside with scissors to find clumps of bittersweet, those berries on fire. She circled the yard. I could hear her out there, clipping the bittersweet, and reciting:

A clock stopped, not the mantel’s…

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Summer Hammond grew up in rural Iowa and Missouri, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, diagnosed with environmental illness. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her writing appears in New Letters, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Review, among others. She won the 2023 New Letters Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction and her essay was selected for Best American Essays 2025. Her debut novel, The Impossible Why, is forthcoming from Apprentice House Press in 2026.