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

We walked through the forest a little way, the evening filled with animal sounds—birds settling for the night, frogs croaking messages to each other, the batting of wings and squeaks of bats. Every now and again a breeze would sweep through the canopy, rustling the leaves.


“So Mr Berry,” Reginald began, “we’ve been riding together all day and I know very little about you.”


Reginald laughed. “That you could, friend. That you could. But I think the time is ripe to exchange some basic details about each other like, where are you from, for example?”


“I was born in Mount Durum,” I replied. “So I guess I’m from there. But then my mother met…someone and we moved to Napier’s Valley, which probably wasn’t very far from where you found me.” The thought of my mother and what she had done, what she had helped Dennis do, brought a lump to my throat. I swallowed it down. “Where I found myself,” I mumbled. “And you?”


Chapter 6