Secret Agent #23

TITLE: Garden of Impossible Things
GENRE: Adult Upmarket

When we were born, my sister and I, we were impossible. Our mother had been told repeatedly—and in no uncertain terms—that she would never bear her own children. Yet there we were, red, screaming and very much alive, though not without complication. We would spend the first eight weeks of our lives in the NICU, jaundiced and premature, impossibly small.  

It’s how our father would refer to us: his impossible girls. It was a moniker we embraced. After all, there was a certain freedom that came with living when you weren’t meant to exist. And we had been just that—impossible. Two wild girls, with wild sun-stained curls, practically raising themselves while their widower father worked to keep food in their bellies and a roof over their heads. We were eleven before he gave up practicing law and moved us from the city. Our new home a small town in northern Pennsylvania along the Susquehanna River. Our father had bought a ramshackle Victorian on one corner of Main Street that had a failing bookshop on the ground floor and a three-bedroom apartment spread over the two stories above.  

There was a garden out back, surrounded by eight-foot high brick walls with no gate and a curved glass roof, inaccessible except through a window in the back room of the shop. It was there that we played during endless summer days. And it was there, six years later, that I discovered my sister’s body, tangled in weeds, pale and naked, impossibly cold.