Kim & Jessie

Kim and Jessie were two girls who grew up in Kensington Market.


They looked like sisters, but they weren't. They did have the same mother, but she didn't raise them. They were officially raised by the village.


The most popular and supported rumor about their mother was that she died during childbirth in the largest of the market's parks. She apparently went to the hospital but was denied entry for unknown reasons. She said nothing as she left the hospital, and her silence continued until, as she was dying from blood loss after delivering her two twin girls, she whispered "don't let them leave," and then passed on to the next life (or hell). During the few minutes of her life after the delivery, she avoided physical or eye contact with the newborns.


Despite being born at once, the girls were not twins. They had not equally shared the womb's resources and so Kim was significantly smaller, was terrifically colourblind (only green was a colour, everything else was monotone), and was mentally unstable. When she was six months of age it was discovered that she was somewhat clairvoyant.


Jesse had an overactive brain. She was perpetually tall for her age, with strong, lean muscles and a sharp tongue. Jesse's ADD was the subject of some award-winning literature by a specialist at the College St. CAMH facility, who had to visit her in one of the market's parks to do his evaluations.


He had to come into the market to see the girls because they would not leave. Their mother had arrived in Kensington Market four years before the girls' birth and had left only twice, to visit a Canadian man in Buffalo who could not cross the border. He was rumored to be wanted by both Canadian and American police, in connection with some trafficking and spousal assault charges, respectively.


The girls' mother gave a different name each time she was asked, and since no-one could develop a nickname that stuck, it was difficult to talk about her or gather information. The girls were named after a song that was playing at a nearby club after Jesse had been born, and before Kim's little head emerged from her mother, surprising the group of cannabis dealers who had been assisting three nuns from St. Felix on Augusta Ave in delivering the children.


As babies, if Kim or Jesse were taken near the boundaries of the market, they would become histerical and spasmotic, producing terrifying yelps and shrieks (although the children both cried for the first time when, at three years of age, they were told their mother's known history.


The man from Buffalo, who was assumed to be the father, had not arrived or sent any message about the children. Since the nuns could not take the girls back to the nunnery, the drug dealers who had aided them brought the girls to their loft at Kensington and Baldwin, their first official home.


Kim and Jesse were taken care of by the dealers, and their many girlfriends, until they were six, when they decided, together, that they would live in the Market's many trees until they started to menstruate, and then they would join the Daoists on College, just east of Augusta.