
Part of Series
THEN 1984 When Mama got sick, Father crumbled with her. It was as if they depended on each other to be a whole person. I like to tell Oliver that Father placed him in my arms when they got home from the hospital, but in truth, he was an afterthought. Oliver didn’t have parents, he had me, his fifteen-year-old brother who had never held a baby before let alone looked after one. Watching Mama wither should have been the worst of it, but what came after that shadowed her death like a cold mountainside. I was never the same. NOW 2009 It’s natural for Oliver to be curious about our past, but watching him cry as he flips through the pages of my journal triggers all my protective instincts and I want to stuff him in my ’73 Monte Carlo and head for Canada. It stirs the punishing emotions I wanted to keep long buried. Butterfly. Butterfly. Butterfly. I had to leave with Oliver. Leaving was the only way to save him. “Nothing will ever hurt you again, Eaglet. I’m not much, but I’ll become something for you.” But I left something behind. Something so forbidden, all it’s done is burn me from the inside for twenty-one years. I have been running from this moment ever since. It has found me. More accurately, it has always been watching me. This is a dark story with dark themes. There is horror and terror and very, very, bad things. Also forbidden things. There is love within the pages, but this is NOT a romance story. There is also a beautiful found family of men. Beautiful gay husbands and boyfriends. Brotherly fortitude. And as always, the caretaking dynamic Mock (S. Legend) is known best for.
Author

Some of you know her as Mock, others as S. Legend, or Miss S. She welcomes all names but will often go by Mock, a name given to her by her readers. Mock is an ambitious creative, weaving the most precious aspects of her soul into stories. She is an architect, building fascinating worlds, designed from inquiry, rooted in worldly wonderings. It’s an intuitive process where she is the scribe, the translator, the conduit. It helped that storytelling was the language spoken at home. One simply didn’t say, “We have an ant infestation,” in Mock’s family it was, “I was on my way to the living room, when a peculiar ant crossed my path. I looked to my right, a suspicious line of them marched toward the pantry. In that moment I knew; my kitchen was under siege.” The natural flow of conversation always took this form. And so. When Mock wrote her first novel, she didn’t plan it chapter by chapter, there was no outline, no “plotting” to speak of. But she didn’t “pants” it either, she didn’t make it up as she went along. She knew how the story felt, where it curved in places and hollowed in others; she knew the destination it rushed toward. Instead of orchestrating, she let the world inspire her, and held space for the words to come, trusting the characters knew what they were doing. All she had to do was tell a story, as she always had done; like breathing. This is her peace, her healing and solace: Gifts better shared. Mock’s works are the comfort you seek when you need to come home. Her unique writing style will take you, wayfaring reader, to unexpected destinations. She always says, “I’m not in the business of making up stories, I couldn’t if I tired. I’m lucky enough to get picked to share someone else’s story when I ask a question to the universe. Someone answers; I write it down.”