The person in bed beside me feels like a stranger. Her sleeping form, chest rising and falling in the dark and the sound of her breathing barely audible over the rain battering against the window. In the morning the ground will be soaked, the skies like iron, London commuters shaking umbrellas outside red busses and cursing. The person in bed beside me hates the rain but I remember a woman who doesn't, one who will let the drops soak her clothes to transparency and look at me with wet eyelashes and rile me to murder. There is a creak in the hall as the house settles.

In the morning, all the umbrellas in the house are missing and the stranger in my bed blames me.

------

He infuriates her as much as she infuriates him, the biting back and forth, the inability to be in the same room together for too long before the storm between them crackles and one of them bows out, fearful that someone will notice. She boasts she will cook her partner a chicken that weekend. He dismisses her out of hand: I'd rather be poisoned than eat what you make. She'd love to poison him, she says and she has won this round.

When did that fury, that rumble of anger, become something else entirely? A different emotion, but one that scares her more, somehow.

She goes home to her partner, three umbrellas hidden in her handbag. When she shops, every chicken in the supermarket has been sold. The bare shelves taunt her. Her partner cannot understand how there is no chicken. He throws a plate and she screams until she's white in the face.

-------

We're both sick of chicken, this stranger and I. The freezer is stuffed to the gills. She tells me she is becoming vegetarian.

I cannot find it within myself to care. We tiptoe around each other in the house, the furniture holding itself stiff. Apprehension makes the paint peel from the walls. Toast burns in the toaster of its own accord and the towels do not dry on the rail. Fight builds in me and I see it struggling to escape in my tense knuckles, my aching neck, my rounded shoulders.

The stranger makes the decision for me. I am repentant, a coward. She leaves and I stay.

------

Her time is up. The sands of the hourglass have run out. Her mother will laugh. Can't keep a man, can you? She hasn't found a man who can be kept. The one she wants, the one she fears, is much more than that. A drunken bargain, woken from a threat (I wouldn't marry you if I were forty and desperate) (I'd marry you, forty and desperate. Then, I'd have won). She'd spin him like a hurricane and in return he'd throw her to the wolves. Her equal, her rival.

But this man is white faced and drawn this morning.

An argument with the missus?

She left. Go on, gloat, you with your man under your thumb.

A spark, a moment of pure fire.

Actually...

That’s an amazing compliment to receive - thank you!

Thanks! I had fun writing it :)

Thank you!!

I am four and a woman in a green dress and her teeth filed to sharp points holds her hand out to me in Paddington Station.

“Come, little Prince,” she croons and I hug Bunny tighter.

I am ten and in the woods a mushroom circle is set out for me. Faeries fly at me and pinch my arms and my cheeks until they feel hot. With cold hands they seize my sleeves and pull me to the circle.

“Your birthright, little one! Come, come, come!”

I am fourteen and a hard circlet of black gold is left on my pillow, stained with red which is not rust but hot blood. I do not touch it, but bundle up the pillow and burn that and the crown with it. My mother (she is here these last six months) cradles me the way she has not done for years and sobs into my hair.

I am twenty, a man full grown and the signs are stronger. Doors open which should not exist. A woman rises from the waves and tries to hand me a sword. When I do not take it she tries to drown me with her wrath, white water sucking at my boots.

I am thirty and my mother is sick. She calls me to her bed and I come. In a nursing hospital, the corridors grey and bleak, she lies upon a bower of flowers the nurses cannot see. Her thinning hair has been laid out and she is Ophelia, drowning. Around her attend the fae, the wet naiads and dappled dryads.

Her court, I realise.

“Do not go,” she begs me. “I have kept you from your father these thirty years. Not hidden, but safe from him.”

“Come,” the attendants cry. “Come with us.”

Never sick, never dying, never hungry, they promise. Never to share my mother’s fate. A birthright, unknown.

I leave my mother to her death and follow them.