The Weird Sisters

by Eleanor Brown

“I wish my sisters were here.”

See, we love one another. We just don’t happen to like one another very much.

Instead, we were going to wrap ourselves in cloaks woven from self-pity and victimhood, refusing to admit that we might be able to help each other if we’d only open up. Instead, we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at: we’d read.

Because sisters’ secrets are swords.

This was a previously unseen development. Had we always been so selfish, presuming our parents’ lives began only when we did, and ceased, living in suspended animation, when we were outside of their orbit?

only we’d been there to talk to her, to soothe those fears, to tell her that no, we could not have done it without her all those years, it was only now, only after all we had been through, only because we had seen her managing things that we could step in and take up the reins, do our part. That what Jonathan had said was right—people could change.

We’d inherited our father’s genius to squander it on food service and academic peripateticism and librarianship? Life wasn’t supposed to be like this. Life was supposed to be martinis and slick advertising campaigns in slick offices with slick men by her side. Not stupid, frumpy Barnwell and its narrow alley of possibilities.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m exactly like you. We’re all exactly alike, you know.”