Below is a portfolio of unpublished writing, including prose and poetry. I also have multiple published works in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, but this portfolio is a reflection of my unedited and latest work.

Excerpt #1: From PETTY TYRANTS

The smoggen sun cast through her curtains set the room in crestfallen yellow. The sores on Caja’s back stretched until they split, greeting the morning as she sat up. Her chest seized and she gagged on the cough, eyes blurring, hands feeling for her medicine. 

Coins and a cup fell from the table before Caja’s fingers snatched the little bottle, uncorking its top and pouring its honeyed blue past her lips and into her throat. It cooled and it soothed, but its sweetness felt sour in the esophagus.

Sucking in a lungful of air, she coughed again. The pain was worse with each day. Pulling the curtain open, Caja got a look at the thing replacing her. It stared back at her with sunken eyes with brushes of red about the edges, a face of death that whispered of an ending.

Caja’s stomach growled. Reaching under her pillow, Caja grabbed the little letter-knife beneath. The fantasy played out, miming plunging her secret weapon into her neck. The blood and the relief would make her heart soften, for just a moment. Her shoulders relaxed. 

Something in her, something new, was breaking.

“Caja? Caja, that you?”

The light of a lamp found purchase beneath the door. Caja pictured it; Throwing open the door, wrapping her bony arms around her beloved, wrapped in turn by the warmth of everything she wanted. Instead, Caja crawled back on her bed, away from that feral beast, that hunger that wanted so desperately to snatch away the only thing Caja had left.

“I got food.” Isyla’s voice was always sweet. A plate rattled on the floor. “I hope it’s not too much.”

Caja lowered her jaw, and her voice creaked like a rusty hinge. “Eat it yourself. Don’t waste it.”

“No, no. Don’t be talking like that. We’re getting through this!” Isyla slammed something against the door. “I’m going to get you into one of them fancy sanitoriums.”

“I’m not crazy.”

Isyla laughed, “You’ve always been crazy.” Isyla pressed herself against the door, pushing it in ever so slightly. “They’re sayin’ consumption gets better there. I’ve got a plan. Please, Caja. Just trust me, ‘aight?”

Caja stood, and her body revolted. A twinge went through her gut and she coughed, retched, and coughed again. Wading across the room, she stumbled into the door, embracing all of herself to it.

“I don’t want you to save me.”

Isyla sniffed, and thumped her fist on the door a second time. “No, no. No, I’m not given’ up on ya. Never.”

“Isyla…” Caja wept. “Isyla, I barely remember your face.”

That gave a moment of silence. Beneath her feet, the lamplight danced against the floor. Caja could smell the must, and her own stink, invading Isyla’s lovely perfume. She pulled away, knowing she was too close. Isyla sighed.

“Caja, the sickness only lasts two years. You made it through one. You can make it through ‘nother. Stop with that talk. Then we can be together again.”

“But…”

“Shut up, Caja! You’ve always been the smart one, and I know you’re probably thinkin’ of the numbers or whatever, but just shut up!” Isyla snapped. “Givin’ up on you ain’t an option, so don’t you dare even think of it.”

Isyla stormed away. Caja’s hand went to the door handle, and she had to strain all the muscles in her arm to stop it opening that door. All she wanted was a peep. Every month distorted the image. Every month, Caja’s thoughts were becoming more jumbled and confused. Once Isyla was away, Caja opened the door and scooped the plate off of the floor. 

It was meat and potatoes. Caja closed the door and sat on the bed and ate it. Each swallow hurt. When that was done, Caja watched the world pass outside. The sun did its round in the sky. Caja then read books she had read a thousand times, and did what meagre tidying her body would let her do.

Excerpt #2: From Rhienne Everflower’s Guide to Botany and Death

Beyond the burned houses of the southern lane, on the other flank of the river where the reeds grew coarse and tall, Rhienne tread out of the fjord’s shallows to the slouching trees that let down their tangled leaves like a wall of mother nature’s lovely hair.

Boots stamping the river into the leaves, Rhienne ventured through glades of the pink-petalled dream-boughs and lanes of delightfully bright fire-lilies that lit the forest in delightful hues of pink and orange. 

It was a labyrinth of delights; Flora in countless forms and boundless colours, their magic tasted in the veins like the smell of her mother’s bakery or a cuddle with Old Nab’s dog; Rhienne plucked each new one she found, collected each one she found on her way to Giant’s Gorge.

A gash through the earth, long and sharp, decorated by the remnants of bridges and a civilisation once prosperous. The signposts long-rotted into uneven poles, the roads eroded into uneven dirt,  leaving only a single bridge. A great tree, roots upended and reaching out towards the village, one side paved so flat by footfalls and vast enough for a horse and carriage.

Excerpt #3: Apologia

We spoke for a short time, until I asked where my mother might be found. My father pointed me to the place fashioned from tragedies, where the leaves of the trees were black and the animals were bereft of faces. There, I was nothing but a streak of colour on a pilgrimage to the tallest tree in all the underworld.

Its roots were deep and vast, but not as vast as its branches were tall. They scraped at the invisible, crystalline glass of the sky, leaving long grooves of gorgeous red on a canopy of perfect clarity. At this tree, I found the colour found nowhere else in this part of the underworld, and the animals had faces.

The branches clawed for the cosmos, but they could not make it.

She was chained on the tree, my mother, by ivy and hemlock. Her naked feet on thick dirt, head locked upon the sky and all there that she was denied. I watched butterflies feast on her flesh, and my mother did not weep or tremble. It was her deaths that fed the tree, and she stood proud on it, with an expression on her face painted with a serenity I didn't quite understand.

I had come to the underworld with so many questions. Seeing her reminded me of all the wretched ways in which she failed me. Seeing her reminded me of all the ways in which she was a fool. But seeing her also told me something new, and the daydreams of spitting venom in my words turned to cold ash on my unhoneyed tongue.

“Mother?”

She turned her eyes to me. For just a moment, my mother looked at me, and I did not find guilt or pain or rage or sorrow on her face. Instead, I saw a look of satisfaction lift her brow, crook her mouth into a smile, and alight her eyes anew.

Our met gaze lingered a little longer.

“Are you sorry, mother?”

My mother gave no answer, save to put her eyes back upon the heavens.

“Was it worth it, mother?”

She crooked her head down and looked at me one last time, to nod. 

“Well… I’m sorry.” I told her. “I must be going.”

I left my mother bound to the boughs of the underworld’s tallest tree, and began the long journey home.

Excerpt #4: From The Apostate Saint

Kedda sucked on her teeth. Grey clouds were obscuring the sky, and the coast behind her was being battered by the sea.

It was a bad day to die.

She allowed herself some resignation. A sigh, a slip of her hands into her pockets. Some part of her mind counted them again, desperate that it would change. But, even if she could avoid death at their hands, there was one person she could not avoid. 

His shadow was longer, his body thicker, his presence more awfully august. Leviachus held out his hand, and one of his grunts handed him their crossbow. Without so much as a word, Leviachus took aim.

Kedda had spent so many countless nights picturing this moment. Kedda had wondered what emotions she might feel, how much of a fight she would put up. She thought of all the things she had thought of saying, and they all came out in one, empty grunt.

Leviachus said nothing. She could see it in him; That lingering, twisted affection. It was holding him back, holding his trigger finger still, dragging out the moment.  She was waiting. The others were waiting. Then, he began to weep.

“Just do it, you cu…”

The sensation was a dramatic wallop into the gut, followed by a piercing that sliced through her body, and stung deep inside. Her feet, so firm, found themselves dancing towards the edge, the pain flooding her head with noise. Through it, she managed to strike one foot down, anchoring her from tumbling any further.

The sea sprayed upon her back, drenching her hair, blurring her eyes, casting them as shades. The shades raised their crossbows, and Kedda closed her eyes.

She listened to the storm. Its roar drowned out even the wicked thumping of her own heart. The blood from her stomach was pumping out hot over her abdomen, and Kedda did not cover it. Instead, she raised her arms, doing her best to look at Leviachus, even as her vision split him in three.

“I married the love of my life today,” Kedda proclaimed. “I’ll die knowing that no-one loves you, Leviachus.”

Leviachus averted his gaze.

“Loose.”

They struck her, a half-dozen hammer blows at once, force enough to throw her over the precipice and skewer her flesh clean through. Her feet were suddenly planted on nothing, her body was twisting and breaking, and she was plummeting under a spray of her crimson. For a moment, her eyes were on the heavens.

The tide below reached up, and dragged her down to their dark undertow.

Extract #5: From Apologia

My last memory of me was the day I became a mother.

A wound in my stomach pushed me to sorrows I had not yet known; The morning kicks at my womb, each afternoon I was sick, every strange gluttony I wallowed in. I cursed Polysys and the sweet god’s kiss of fertility.

My bedchamber was my cocoon. Countless days of careful agony and bitter sweat culminated in the moment I cradled Altosa in my arms. Only then did the winter’s frost on my heart give way to the exhausted bloom of spring.

The loveless woman found herself loving.

I chose Altosa the moment I saw her. A name passed from my mother to her. An unspoken mantle, burdened on the shoulders of a girl too little to even kick her feet.

She would have the world, and everything that world denied me. Peace, love and dignity; My heart learned those words when Altosa’s soft head pressed against it, and the confused clouds of the future gave way to crystal blue.

As a girl, I had been a princess. In that bedchamber, Kelena the Bride died. I had given the king a child, and oddities of the fates gave birth to Kelena the Queenmother.

My husband came to speak to me and to cradle his daughter in his own arms, so I spun him a fancy; I was too drained for such splendid company. Truth was, I never wanted to let go of Altosa. Not for a moment.

I wanted to hold her. Soul to soul. Heartbeat to heartbeat. All in the desperate hope that her ancestry, and the memory of all who came before us, might seep deeper into her veins. From my mother and the mothers before her, I knew it would be long before Altosa ever understood what that was.

Poetry Samples:

Papa

We’re the spoiled children of God.

That’s what papa said.

Rotten like green eggs and ham.

Yeah, papa said, always askin’

for another penny,

never ready to take a pound.

Faerie Circles

Fairie circles;

Circlets of berries, bramble and petals,

colourful and natural

and hewn from the rawest things.

Nana warned,

‘My child, keep away from their trap,

if you step in, you will dance, if you

dance, you dance forevermore.’

In the cold woods

I found a plastic table, fit with

a cheap paper birthday cloth

and old dolls about a teapot.

With them

I drank, and spoke, and drained

the ichor from my thorned heart

through tears and melodrama.

With them

I learned that there was never

a fairie circle in those old woods.

Grandma

only knew the far-off places

she was never told she could see.

DOLLMOTHER

their eyes have all the love I can’t savour.

I make their clothes, and they’re so pretty;

petticoats, little tights, and all the 

colours of the human face.

I must be made of porcelain.

I can see so many delicate cracks,

all black,

like my pips of eyes,

or the hole where my heart is.

I drag my strings,

‘cause I cut ‘em

hunched and crone because I’m not made

to stand on my own. 

this face can’t smile, but theirs can.

they can’t love, but I will. 

we’ll always be dressed up pretty, though

I stitch them, after all.

their eyes, forever glass.

glazed lips, so they aren’t crass,

and stuffing down the throat 

so their screaming doesn’t last.