By the Forest Gate
The Londonist magazine ran a storytelling competition in February for original short fairy stories set in London. I entered, but didn't win (c'est la vie) but here is my entry below.... By the Forest Gate All that summer I waited for him, patient outside the Forest Gate watching the unseeing come and go. One warm day stretched into the next and the next, the squirrels’ antics at first distracting from the growing sense of concern. Yet those flashing red tails conjured thoughts of his burnished copper hair spilling down his back. Humans are so fragile – a simple accident, an ague, or an imaginary dread will render them bed-bound for weeks. Or leave them broken so beyond repair that they must shuck the warmth of flesh and assume another, fresher guise. They call us shape-changers, yet they alter their form far more often than we. Yet I confess myself drawn so strongly to that strange fusion of softness and angular strength that I found in his body that I yearned to
