In this debut novella, two sisters take off on a road trip through the New Mexico desert following the death of their mother, Bonnie, whose ashes, they feel, have been sitting in a jar for too long. The journey provides Gloria and Kit with both an escape and a purpose. Unfolding this story, Burner explores ideas of ownership and belonging, and how both shape relationships—what it means to be a daughter without a mother, a sister away from a sibling, a person with independence.

As the story begins, the sisters are traveling in their silver 1993 Honda Accord with a container of their mother’s ashes in the back. Next to the container sit a variety of jars that appear to be empty. Gloria and Kit capture, catalog, and sell these jars of invisibilities, labeled with descriptions of their contents: “SOMEONE ELSE’S DREAMS, NIGHTMARES, BELL CHIMES, A LAST BREATH, LAST WORDS.” While the  labels are practical and matter-of-fact, the abstract contents offer power, whether it’s solace, knowledge, courage, or something else. The jars aren’t intended to be opened, merely owned, for their effects to become clear.

In the jars the sisters have captured the souls of dying animals as well as “energies” extracted from inanimate objects. Gloria captures the final breaths of an armadillo they pass on the road. Kit collects “UNSEEMLY LOVE” from a bowling show. “What we collect is either animal or atmosphere,” Gloria explains. Bonnie taught them to sense such ephemeral energies and to tip a jar just so in order to contain the essence. “Some are as easy as odors and fill the jar on their own. Other soul-based specters have a strong clarity, like recognizing the ghost of yourself while still alive,” Gloria explains. It is a “doubled feeling.” While this doubling refers to the physical and the metaphysical, it also points clearly to Gloria and Kit.

Gloria concedes that Kit is better at detecting these energies and always has been. But it’s Gloria who connects the jars with those who most need the benefits of their contents. To a gas station clerk who shares her anxious hallucinations and her insomnia, Gloria gives a jar labeled “WHAT IS LEFT AFTER A STAR IS BORN.” This jar of ultimate stillness is the result of a pressure-packed creation of a star, a change in form and matter reminiscent of the purpose of the sisters’ road trip—to spread their mother’s ashes.

The invisibilities foreground the narrative’s mystical elements, and Burner’s writing further evokes a sense of magic, of ineffability. It’s unsurprising that Burner is a visual artist as well as a writer. Their descriptions of animals, people, and places are striking. Gloria is particularly attuned to the details of her surroundings. She notices the “earth-toned” furnishings in a house where she finds refuge and “short coils of black hair” on a long-abandoned barber’s chair. More than just beautiful language, these descriptions of Gloria’s surroundings suggest how they are acting upon her: “The afternoon light is diamond hard; the road is a long mercurial tongue lapping us up.”

Gloria takes in the details of the desert, and she sees in them the doubling of the physical world and the associated invisibilities, and the doubling of her relationship with her sister. Walking in the desert in the early morning, she remarks on the depth of the landscape: “Every grain of sand that sits on top of the earth has a shadow growing behind it.” Even when Gloria finds peace in the desert or rests in that earth-toned living room, there is no sense of solitude that would signal an ease or an ending. 

Gloria develops an anxious fixation on an eight-legged calf she sees preserved in a jar. She marvels at the creature’s beauty, wonders how the animal died and even more, how it lived, and longs to own the calf herself. This obsession, which builds throughout the trip, distracts her:

The calf drifts into my mind. I wonder if I’m remembering feeling what Kit’s talking about, or if I’m superimposing a memory. The calf makes an ache in my heart and a seizing along my nerves. Am I thrown off by this feeling, this new wanting? 

Sister Golden Calf is deeply concerned with wanting, particularly the desire to own or contain objects. The sisters have a car full of filled-up jars, and they are always searching for opportunities to amass more ephemeral energies. Gloria yearns for the calf, but she questions whether she should own it: “A liberator is different from an owner, an adopter, isn’t it?” This hesitance is notable coming from a person who bottles invisible energies for sale, and it points to Gloria’s emotional journey through her grief and her doubts about her relationship with Kit.

In one early scene, Burner perfectly captures the essence of Gloria’s anxieties about belonging. When Gloria and Kit make a stop at a nude ranch, they meet The Calamity Janes, a group of four women traveling on motorcycles. The women are all tall, over six feet, with big, gregarious personalities. Gloria can’t help but watch them interact, noticing their ease and comfort with themselves and with each other. Gloria describes the women at length, cataloging distinctive features—one wears a braid, another is blond, and so on—before dropping a neat, prophetic summation: “Flesh folds the same, hairs crosshatch predictably. The mystery comes from how it belongs to someone.” 

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Colleen Burner (they/them) is a graduate of the MFA writing program at Portland State University and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient. Their short fiction has appeared in Fecund, Old Pal, Black Candies: Gross and Unlikeable, Permafrost, and Quaint. They are a coeditor of surely magazine. They live in Portland, Oregon. Sister Golden Calf is their first book.

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Ceillie Clark-Keane is a writer based in New Hampshire. Her essays, book reviews, and author interviews have been published by Electric Literature, the Ploughshares blog, Bustle, Chicago Review of Books, and other outlets.