With only a handful of short stories to her name (only four that I’m aware of) Micaela Morrissette was, for a time, one of my favourite writers.

‘The Familiars’ is a beautifully written tale of a mother vying for her son against the imaginary friends who keep appearing from under his bed. The great thing about this story is that there is so much detail and such ambiguity that it can be read and enjoyed anew again and again with the reader noticing different things each time. I’ve read ‘The Familiars’ about five times now and I still haven’t quite grasped what’s actually going on in this story. Are the boy’s friends real or only imaginary? There does seem to be some sort of magic going on. In one scene the mother visits her dead husband’s grave, then goes to a stream and casts away some of his belongings. Yet we are never told why. This made me wonder if the friends are actually the father returning in a different form, and this was the mother’s way of trying to be rid of him/them. Or perhaps the story is about the mother’s attempts to rein in her son’s imagination before he starts school and enters the real world. Or perhaps it’s merely about loss and mourning, and the ways that people deal with it. That’s the beauty of this story, it seems designed to make you ponder and speculate; an approach that in the wrong hands could simply frustrate the reader, but here it keeps you coming back again and again to re-read.

First published in Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realities, 2009