Laura Morrigan

 I'm the kind of faery That turns your milk sour And steals your bread And tangles your hair while you lie asleep at night I coax the weeds to grow in your garden I like them more than your neat and controlled Rows of flowers and vegetables I don't like things that have an order And a purpose I peel the paint And crack the plaster in your walls To let the damp in I like untidiness Wildness Disorder When the shelf crashes down in the night And the plates all crack That's me When you only have odd socks I've taken the other halves of every pair I'm probably wearing them Dancing in the dewdrops somewhere One spotted sock One striped But what if you let go Of this obsessive need for order? Use the mismatched crockery Come dance in the dew in your mismatched socks Let the damp in  And a rich carpet of moss grow on your roof And maybe flowers and vines Will grow out of the floor Making your own jungle garden And you'll dance Dance A wild dance In the garden of your ow...

Content Warning: murder My head pounds, my stomach growls, my fingers bleed. I cannot stop playing. The same song, over and over. The same silent song. My eyes are stinging, my tears dried up days ago. I have had no food or water for at least a week ;  I should be dead by now ,  but it wants me to go on. Wants me to keep playing. I don’t know if it will ever let me die. My body is not my own. It is perhaps a unique torture that my mind is still free, that I can drift back in time to when we first came here. How unhappy I was then, unaware of how much worse things could still get. * I remember when I first saw the house, solid and imposing   despite its ramshackle condition. An old manor house, with   peeling paint and boards on the windows . My mother’s face was white and stiff, holding back the anger that had been simmering for days now. My father was trying to make this seem like a big adventure. My younger sisters actually thought it was . They were laughing, runn...

 Content warning: Hunting, animal death * The officer slides the hot chocolate  to me across the metal table. His eyes are sympathetic, but I don’t know if this is one of those things to trick you into confessing to something you didn ’t do. “Look kid, I know you’re in shock, but we really need to know what happened. Do you think you can help us out?” I pull the blanket closer around me. It smells like someone’s dog has been using it as a bed. Maybe the police dogs were sleeping on it. I think of Skip, his warm fur and smelly dog scent. An image of his body flits before my eyes and I smell the bitter tang of blood in my nostrils. “I didn’t want to go,” I whisper. * I didn’t want to go on the trip but dad wouldn’t hear of it. Hunting, fishing, violent sports, getting drunk: They were all his idea of what it meant to be a man. I guess that’s why mum and dad weren’t together anymore. Mum was more like me. We didn’t like movies where the dog died or dad’s drunken friends. Once dad...

Me with Sabrina the Wedge-tailed Eagle and handler The Blacktown City Medieval Fayre took place at Nurragingy Reserve on the weekend of the 22nd-23rd of May. Run by volunteers from the Blacktown City Council, and many re-enactment groups, it was a large and enjoyable event.  There were a range of stalls selling food and medieval wares, and many demonstrations by re-enactors. The highlight were the jousting, fighting and the birds of prey demonstrations. Unfortunately I was only at the event for about three hours and was not able to see everything, but I was able to catch these three: One of the lady knights The jousting involved several trained horsemen and women who are professional jousters and participate in competitions around the country, some even overseas. There were quite a few broken lances, and it was a very exciting event to watch. The knights and ladies also demonstrated their skill at tasks such as collecting rings with a lance and hitting the quintain while riding pas...

I miss my wings. I miss the feeling of soaring through the sky untethered, the wind ruffling my feathers.  The witch  thought she cursed us but really she set us free. Free from rules and expectations.  Free from the human forms that bound us to the ground.    We were boys when we were turned into swans. Now we are still boys in the clumsy, over - large bodies of men. Everything feels wrong. In the years we were birds ,  our human bodies somehow kept on growing without us. They are foreign to us now , c overed in pimples and body hair ,   filled  with strange urges.  How can we tell our sister she didn't set us free, rather chained us back to the earth we had escaped?  She sacrificed so much. She was nearly burned alive. Her feet still bear thick red scars from the flames and she stumbles when she walks. I don't know how she could ever forgive her husband but she says she has. I know when he sleeps at night she still wanders the graveyar...

“Sweetie!” she calls, and I come, racing across the swamp, my feet leaving no footprints in the marshy ground. I run into her arms, she holds me tight. We dance among   the water and weeds. Mama and Sweetie, together for always. I was born in the Sweetgrass Swamp, in a house on stilts, to my mother, Dearest. The swamp was our home, and we spent our days and nights there. We knew which plants were safe to eat, which rats and frogs were good when cooked over our little fireplace. I never saw anyone but my mother, and she rarely saw anyone but me. Every now and again, she would need something the swamp couldn’t give us- perhaps our clothes were more holes than fabric or we needed more fishing line to catch mudfish. Mama would pack up some of the cure-alls she made from plants and swamp creatures and head off to the nearby town to swap them for what we needed. I would beg her to come, but she never let me. So I would lie on our mattress by the fire, watching the flames burn down all ni...

They call it an Antique store, although it has had many names over the years. A Curiosity Shop, The Wunderkammer. I remember a time before this shop even existed, before the antiques were even created. The people who work at this store are less than children to me, insignificant. I will still be here when they are dead beneath the soil, or ashes in a pot somewhere. Humans are ephemeral, I go on. I am tarnished now, you can barely even see the shadow of a reflection in me. Part of me hopes that means the spell is wearing off, that one day I will simply be no more. The other, more intelligent part of me thinks it’s just because no one knows how to take proper care of a mirror these days. The Queen used to have her servants clean me daily with soft cloths that tickled and polish that stung in a good way. Like how men say aftershave feels. But the queen is less than ashes now, no more than a story, a cautionary tale. And yet I linger on.   The bell dings merrily and the shop is flooded...