Among Others

everything else seem like a distant distraction.
    After a while the sun came out, feebly. The clouds were scudding across the sky at a tremendous pace, and I was looking across the valley from almost as high as they were. There aren’t many trees up there, just two spindly rowans clinging by the entrance to the old diggings. There were flocks of birds circling about, probably deciding which direction to migrate, marking patterns across the sky. After the sun came the fairies, peeping out at me behind walls, and at last Glorfindel.
    It’s very unsatisfactory writing down conversation with a fairy. Either I put it into proper words, which really is making it up, or I try to represent something that’s only partly in words with just those few words. And if I write it down like I did yesterday, it’s a lie. I’m saying what I want him to have said, when in fact what he said was a few words and a whole lot of feeling going along with that. How do you write that down? Maybe Delany could.
    We didn’t talk all that much, anyway. He sat beside me, and I could almost feel him. Then I could feel him next to me, which is beyond unusual, and then I started to have sexual feelings. I know, unthinkable, with a fairy. All the fairies came closer, then, which worried me and once I’d started worrying about it Glorfindel was as insubstantial as ever, though still right next to me.
    I remembered then that I do know stories about women who had sex with fairies, and every single one of those stories is about pregnancy. I looked at Glorfindel, and yes, he’s beautiful and … ineluctably masculine … and he was looking at me soulfully, and yes I would like to, but not if it means that. No way! Even if all the normal men I meet look at me as if I am dogmeat. And in a way, that would be incest too, with Glorfindel. More so.
    “Untouched?” he said, or something like that, I’m never absolutely sure what that word means. But I knew what he was talking about.
    “So far, I’ve fought off everyone who’s tried,” I said, sounding much fiercer than I intended, though it’s nothing but the truth, not that Daniel needed fighting exactly. “You know about Carl.”
    “Dead,” he said, with gloating finality. Carl is dead. He was a policeman, and he went to Northern Ireland, because the pay was better, and he got blown up. Or, to put it another way, I had asked Glorfindel how to get rid of him, and I stole his comb and sank it in Croggin Bog. That was when he was staying with my mother and he came into my room and sat too close and kept trying to touch me. I bit him, hard, and he hit me, but he backed off. I knew that wasn’t the end of it. I was still fourteen then. Dropping someone’s comb in a bog isn’t murder. I thought it had worked when he went away.
    Glorfindel just looked at me, and I knew he was my friend, as much as any of the fairies are, as much as they can be, being what they are. Lots of them don’t care about people or the world at all, and even the ones that do aren’t like people. I don’t know what it meant to him for desire to be in the air between us. His name isn’t really Glorfindel, he doesn’t even really have a name. He isn’t human. I felt very aware of that.
    The sun was sinking behind the hill we were sitting on, but it wasn’t really set yet; in the next valley it was still full daylight. But I suppose there’s always a next valley, all the way around the world until you get to tomorrow. Our shadows were very long. Glorfindel got up and told me to scatter the leaves in a spiral through the maze, ending at the two rowan trees. I did, and then I sat and waited as the light faded. I wasn’t sure if I was going to see anything, or whether it would be one of those times when I do what I’ve been told and it makes no sense and I never know whether it worked or what it did. The sky faded until it got to that point where there’s no colour left in anything but it isn’t dark. I started to think about how awful going back was going to be.
    Then they came walking up the dramroad out of the valley through the twilight. They were ghosts, I suppose, the procession of the dead. They weren’t pale kings and pale maidens, they were work-worn men and women—perfectly ordinary people, except for being dead. You’d never mistake them for living people. You couldn’t quite see through them, but they were even more drained of colour than everything else, and they weren’t quite as solid as they ought