Morgan Berry’s mother had always wanted a daughter and when she gives birth to a son, she simply dresses him as a girl and treats him as she would a daughter. When he’s picked on and teased at kindergarten, she homeschools him herself. Morgan is eight when his mother brings home a new beau, a no-nonsense man called Dennis O’Rourke. He compliments his new ‘daughter’ on how pretty she is and when his mother doesn’t correct the man, Morgan flees the room in embarrassment. Naturally, Dennis eventually discovers Morgan isn’t a girl. From that moment on, he barely acknowledges Morgan’s existence and is, in fact, openly hostile to his cross-dressing step-son. On the eve of Morgan’s eighteenth birthday, Dennis, now an alcoholic, bashes his stepson until Morgan loses consciousness. Morgan wakes up outside. He has no idea how he came to be under a tree on top of a small hill beneath a starry sky. He’s trying to work it out when he meets Reginald Batt, of the Big River Batts. Morgan and Reginald become inseparable and together they experience worlds of wonder and awe. Morgan is shown sights he could never have imagined and in the process he learns many things about the world, and about himself -- the most important of which is a revelation indeed.

Stranger Things

I suddenly felt enormously hurt.How could she assist Dennis in something as shady as dumping a dead body? Did she not love me enough to treat my body with at least a little respect?I felt my eyes water, but I clenched my jaws and forced those salty pearls back to where they’d come from.


If that’s the way she wanted it, then that’s the way she’d have it!


As it turned out I hadn’t died at all. In their panic they’d obviously made a mistake. But if my own mother cared no more for me than to leave my body to the crows—and on, what must have been by that time, my eighteenth birthday, then I’d forget all about her. I was an adult now. Legal. I could make my own way in the world and that’s just what I’d do.


I surveyed the way before me once again, but could see little on that dark, moonless night.


It was a man’s voice and it had come from above me. I searched the boughs of the mighty oak.


Chapter 3