by Sailor Rose
As a child, my favourite fairytale was always The Princess and the Pea, but looking back now, I don’t quite understand why I loved it so much. I like to imagine that it was the absurdity of the whole situation that kept me entertained, namely the thought that a single pea beneath a stack of forty mattresses could cause enough distress to prove the delicacy of a woman enough to warrant a marriage proposal. Now that I’m no longer five, I’ve decided to fix the story: it wasn’t the pea that kept her awake, it was the eyes that watched her in the castle that night; the eyes of the king and the prince and the queen and the servants. That’s how we know she’s a princess: she knows people are waiting for her to perform.
Author Bio
Sailor Rose (she/her) is an emerging Australian author who is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She adores reading fantasy and queer romance novels and loves to write both creative non-fiction and fiction pieces. Her short story ‘Triple Infatuation’ was published by Glass Magazine and won their Winter Edition Writing Prize. Her travel memoir ‘The Editorial Expectations of the Modern Traveller’ and her poem ‘Signet’ were published on ScratchThat Magazine’s website and her short fiction piece ‘My Cousins Grew Up in the Trees’ was published in their ‘Timestamp’ print issue. Sailor was a member of ScratchThat’s 2026 editorial board in semester one and is currently Head of Art. In her writing, she intends to create beautiful worlds for people to become immersed in, filled with characters that occupy both the hearts and minds of her readers. As long as she has a cup of tea, she’s ready to write.