It took several frustrating minutes to convince my husband to come with me. The hurricane had passed just hours before and, sure, we were still frazzled from the long, terrifying night and hot from the lack of a/c but that’s no excuse. He kept trying to look at the size of my pupils.
“Honey,” he said, “you know there’s no such thing as fairies, right? Did something hit you?”
Finally I just dragged him to the porch and we watched from behind the screen. Out in our yard, under the newly-exposed roots of a tree that had been pulled up by the night’s tropical-force storms, was a tiny figure standing with his fists on his hips. He didn’t look happy.
He stomped around, muttering something we couldn’t understand that was clearly unfit for fairy children to hear. He was about 6 inches tall and was wearing clothes made of sewn leaves, which looked a lot more stylish than it sounds. The toes of his bright red shoes curled.
Finally he disappeared down the dollhouse-size wooden stairway that apparently had been hidden underneath the roots all this time.
My stunned husband turned to me. “You were…”
“I was right. Say it. I love it when you say it.”
“You really were. Hey, if fairies are real, what about fairy gold?” he asked, and began toying with the beer can he was holding, visibly sizing up the coozy for its fairy-trapping potential.
“That was kind of amazing, how you went from zero belief to fairy larceny in 60 seconds like that,” I said. “Shut up, he’s coming back.”
The fairy popped back up and began pacing in circles, looking up at the sky and occasionally angrily kicking a root. After a few long minutes another fairy arrived, riding a robin. He had a clipboard the size of a postage stamp.
The new one walked around the fallen tree a few times, ignoring the aggrieved yapping of the first fairy, who was following him. Eventually he stopped, scribbled something on a scrap of dried leaf on the clipboard, and handed it over. There was more high-pitched shouting.
“So that’s what that noise was I kept hearing outside,” my husband said. “I always thought it was a cat in a really painful heat.”
The second fairy waited serenely. Finally the first one stomped downstairs, still cursing the world in general, and returned lugging a heavy sack. He produced a full-sized gold coin from it and grudgingly handed it to the second one, who made it disappear before scribbling something new on the leaf and then flying off. The first one went back downstairs.
“We could–” my husband started to say, but he stopped when a third fairy came up, riding a squirrel. A similar scene progressed, only instead of a clipboard this one had a bit of string he used to take measurements. He also tsked a lot. Once, he whistled.
Two gold coins this time. He tsked less.
This new one spread out a blue handkerchief over the exposed stairway hole to cover it in an utterly ineffective way, clapped his hands together for a job well done, and left.
“How does he get them to show up so fast? Last storm we waited a week for Allstate.”
“You know,” my husband said speculatively, “he’s still got–”
This time it was a team of fairies, riding mole rats. They quickly trimmed the dangling roots away, covered the stairwell with fresh, new sod and a wooden hatch with a minuscule brass knob, and planted a sapling on top with a new shrub to hide everything. They smoked a lot. Many more gold coins came out and vanished again, and the team rode off singing.
It now appeared for all the world like our tree had fallen over to expose a new baby one underneath, like a freshly popped-up Kleenex. The fairy, his shoe toes visibly drooping, slung his empty sack over his shoulder and turned to go back downstairs.
“Looks like fairy gold really does disappear,” I said. “Hey, where are you going? Don’t let him see you!”
My husband was already halfway across the yard before I realized he’d left. The fairy saw him and tensed, ready to dive under the shrub.
My husband stopped a few feet away, walked carefully around the shrub to where the tree still lay across our fence, and sat down on the grass to lean up against it and watch the sky. He sighed, popped his beer, took a long swig, and then casually held it out to the fairy.
They stayed that way, frozen, for a long time.
Then the fairy scampered under the shrub.
My husband shrugged and took another drink, stopping when the fairy came back out holding a mug made of an acorn cap. A tilt of the can, a few drops poured, and they sat together and drank, exchanging the timeworn nods of every neighbor who has ever been through a bad storm before.
Sometimes, words aren’t needed. Or gold. Just shared experiences.
And a backyard barbecue, but that came later. Fairy cole slaw is *amazing*.
Note: Yes, Hurricane Matthew just came by. The image isn’t my tree, it’s from my brother-in-law’s yard. My tree was much, much worse.