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

Not long afterwards, I became aware of someone approaching us from the side.


“Aha!” said a girl’s voice and when I looked up I saw a face I recognised.


“Helen!” said Reginald. “What are you doing here?”


Helen, who was now naked and whose hair was a mass of serpentine curls, put a hand on her hip and rolled her eyes. “They caught me,” she said.


“The killjoys that run this place. I was only out for a couple of days.” She stepped down into the lava, more woman than girl, and definitely not as innocent as she had appeared that day in the forest.


My eyes were riveted to her shaved pubic mound. I’d never seen a real one before and it just looked strange, like something more than the pubic hair was missing. It looked tidy though, a dark line with a small butterfly resting on it.


Chapter 15