Sarah asked herself what was impossible, after all. That pigs might fly? That the dead might come back to life? That you might get your heart’s desire? Well, she thought, we’ll see about that. Perhaps for once, the wish might be father to the fact. Or was common sense reality too intractable?

Perhaps a sort of trance might do the trick, or incense. These had never been known to succeed, but there was always a first time. Accordingly she began to hunt for some cloves, some frankincense, a few garden weeds of unknown parentage. The acrid smoke curled up and make her choke. Breathe, Sarah thought. Think. See.

Wait. What was that? She heard a rustling sound, and went out into her garden: and there, perched in the sycamore tree, was a colony of pigs. Now these were not miniature tea-cup pigs, but large porkers, and they made the boughs crack as they readied themselves for flight. Their wings were tightly furled, and they shook them with  a rustling sound: pinions, quills, down. And then they took off, making a grunting rather than a cawing sound. Sarah was worried that the effort might fill the air with the alluring scent of bacon.

But that was not how it turned out.  The rooks and pigeons that usually inhabited  her garden tended to use her furniture as a lavatory, and her cane chairs, her gazebo and her garden table were used first as perches and then as toilet seats. Sarah had to clean them off every morning. But the pigs were different. As they circled overhead, they relaxed their bowels in an ecstasy of evacuation and the shit splattered down. This was worse than hailstones, and the smell was frightful. 

Sarah scuttled indoors, thankful to have escaped the worst of it. So much for flying pigs. That was one sort of impossible. But the dead coming back to life, now? That was not a mere figure of speech, but a cornerstone belief of Western civilisation. And of others, indeed: that the dead, transformed or transfigured, would walk abroad again and vouchsafe their wisdom, speak to us once more. Well? And if they could, what would they say? She decided to wait, to look and listen. She had an army of dead folk to attend to. Lovers, friends, parents. Which one would come into the room first? Would they saunter, or sidle, or blunder in?

She didn’t have to wait long. The door creaked loudly and he stepped over the threshhold. He was the man who had given her the most pleasure when he loved her, the most pain when he left. There he stood, plump and jolly,  as he had been in his prime. He opened his mouth and struggled to speak, but in the end all he said was, “I had to.” He didn’t elaborate. The door swung open again, and she saw the whole queue of her dead. One after the other they said the same thing. “I had to. I  had to.” The mother. The father. The lost friends. Their mantra swelled to a chorus, plangent and seemingly without regret or apology. “I had to.”

What did it mean? It must have been this: that she had been incidental to them, that they had all had to follow their own agenda, and that they had all found their own way into the great stillness, where she could not follow them.

But what could Sarah learn from this? Was she any different from them? She had wanted the dead to comfort her, to tell her that all was well, that they knew she had done her best. But they had all had their own quietus to make, and her problem was that she had not accorded them their freedom, but tried to co-opt them into her own journey. Bringing people alive again was not the impossible thing. Memory and imagination could conjure that. What was impossible was to share their path.

And then Sarah knew that the only difference between her and them was that she was (or had become) more flexible than most people. She could now become what she saw: the jacket cast on the shingle, the blue feather hidden in the brushwood, the fox in the evening light, the man unable to catch fire, the woman giving birth, the hunter devouring the bloody prey. Wanting her heart’s desire had made her blind to these things. That had been the third kind of impossible. But now she could enter in to a new world, of things which were not her: something new was possible at last.