Among Others

very slowly. The fairy vanished. “I thought I saw something for a second,” he said, very quietly. “Did I scare it off?”
    “The ones around here are very easily scared. They won’t talk to me. In South Wales where I come from there are some I know quite well.”
    “What’s the best place to find them? Do they live in the trees, like in Lorien?” His eyes were darting about all over, but not seeing the fairies that were peeping back.
    “They like places that used to be human and have been abandoned,” I said. “Ruins with green things growing in them. Is there anything like that?”
    “Follow me,” Wim said, and I followed him downhill through a lot of mud and old leaves. The sun was out, but it was still cold and damp and the wind was freezing.
    There was a stone wall about shoulder high, with ivy growing over it, and as we followed it along we came to an angle of wall, as if there had been a house once, and inside the angle where it was sheltered, snowdrops were pushing through the leaf mould. There was also a big puddle, which we stepped around. There was a half-height wall there, which we sat on, side by side. There was also a fairy, the one I had seen before on Janine’s lawn, like a dog with gossamer wings. I waited for a moment, quietly. Wim didn’t say anything either. Some more fairies came up—it really was just the kind of place they like. One of them was slim and beautiful and feminine, another was gnarled and squat.
    “Hold the stone, and look at the flowers, and at the reflection of the flowers in the water,” I said to Wim, quietly, not that it made much difference how loudly I spoke. “Now look at me.” When he looked at me I put my hands on the sides of his face. I was trying to give him confidence. He wanted so much to believe, to see one. His skin was warm and just slightly rough where he needed to shave. Touching him made me feel more breathless than ever.
    “He wants to see you,” I said to the fairies, in Welsh. “He won’t do any harm.”
    They didn’t reply, but they didn’t vanish either.
    “Now look to your left,” I said to Wim, letting go.
    He turned his head slowly, and he saw her, I could tell he did. He jumped. She regarded him curiously for a moment. I wondered for a second if she’d enchant him and lead him away into wherever it is they go when they vanish, like Tam Lin. He put out his hand towards her, and she vanished, they all did, like lights going out.
    “That was an elf?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “If you hadn’t said so, I’d have thought it was a ghost.” He sounded shaken. I’d have liked to have touched him again.
    “They’re not all that human-looking,” I said, which was an understatement. “Most of them are kind of gnarly.”
    “Gnomes?” he asked.
    “Well, sort of. The thing is you read things, and you see things, and they’re not the same. To read about it, it all makes so much more sense, with Seelie and Unseelie courts, with gnomes and elves, but it’s not like that. I’ve been seeing them all my life, and they’re all the same whatever they are and whatever they look like. I don’t really know what they are. They talk, well, the ones I know do, but they say odd things, and only in Welsh. Usually. I met one who spoke English at Christmas. He gave me this stick.” I tapped it in the mud. “They don’t call themselves elves, or anything. They don’t have names. They don’t use nouns very much.” It was such a relief to have someone to talk to about this! “I call them fairies because that’s what I’ve always called them, but I don’t really know what they are.”
    “So you don’t know what they are, not really?”
    “No. It’s not the sort of thing. What I think is that people have told a lot of stories about them and some of them are true and some of them are made up from other stories and some of them are muddled. They don’t tell stories themselves.”
    “But if you don’t know, then they could be ghosts?”
    “The dead are different,” I said.
    “You know? You’ve seen them?” His eyes were very wide.
    So I told him about Halloween and the oak leaves and the dead going under the hill, which meant I had to tell him about Mor. I was getting cold by this time. “So how did she die?” he asked.
    “I’m freezing,” I said. “Can we go back to town and maybe get a hot drink?”
    “I won’t see any more elves or whatever today?”
    I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see them