The house was quiet for five days. No fairy squirreled away in my tote bag as I made my way from home to library. No moving shadows on the floor. There wasn’t even a tell-tale whisper of small feet on the bookshelves behind my head as there had been for the past month. Henry and I had barely talked about our strange visitor. Mostly it was just an exchange of “Did that really just happen?” 

“Yes, yes it did.” 

And we had gone back to our Sunday - a roast chicken, kissing on the couch, a short walk with the dog and bed. I had even managed to finished my book despite the distraction. 

I found myself listening more, sitting in silence in the living room with one ear open for the sound of him and wondering if I could hear the characters he had spoken of if the room was just quiet enough. I had not yet succeeded.

Henry didn’t understand why I was upset by his sudden disappearance when we’d only just met him. 

“Pen, he said he was looking for something. Maybe the tablet was what he was looking for. Maybe he completed his mission and went home. He’s probably happy to be back with his family.” 

“I don’t think so.” I couldn’t shake the sense of unease Learid had left with me. Stories ripped from pages sounded like a pretty painful enterprise and not something that was at all pleasant. And the look on his face had definitely been one of pain. Our e-reader didn’t feel like the solution to the problem Learid was trying to solve.

“Just don’t get any ideas about finding more books to stuff in this house,” Henry laughed as he headed to work one morning. “I don’t think our shelves can take it.” 

I stuck my tongue out at him and mimed throwing a book in his direction. 

“And don’t do anything silly in hopes of wooing him back.” 

I hunkered down in front of my laptop to write the carnival article that was now almost due and still had a lot of work to be done on it. It was an hour before I stopped to stretch and jumped out of my skin upon noticing my audience. An unfamiliar fairy was perched on the edge of my almost unused pencil cup, one hand under its chin and a knobby elbow resting on a knobby knee.

This was not the fairy I was familiar with seeing propped against my things. This fairy was lighter in color like a willow branch and with shades of green worked over its skin rather than purple. When its little mouth opened, the voice was soft and feminine in tone if not in meaning.

“Learid told us you were observant. I have been stalking you for twenty minutes, and you did not notice. He was wrong.” She was matter of fact and sharp. Clearly I was not the impressive creature she had expected. 

“Where is Learid?” I asked in response to her opening critique.

“He is replenishing his supplies, trying to convince another hunter to join him here. I do not think he will succeed. I have already told him that I will be the one to join him, but he does not want to be burdened with a smith. He will not have a choice in the long run. He told them of a device of metal and glass. They will insist he have a smith with him to tame it. A hunter knows not what to do with such things.” 

“I am not that obstinate, Platen. The Elders speak, and I obey which is more than I can say for you most of the time.” Learid appeared from behind the haphazard stack of bills and loose papers that fortified the backsplash of my desk. He bristled with thicker, darker armor wrapped around his torso and a micro-sized sack that hung from one pointed shoulder.

“I’ve been worried about you,” I said when he bowed in my direction. These fairies were quite proper in comparison to the men and women I interacted with daily. “We didn’t know that we’d ever see you again.” 

“You would have always known I was there, Penelope River. You would have always had the stories.” He smiled stiffly in my direction before waving his companion to his side. “Come Planton. Meet our new guide to this world that we have lost the ability to navigate on our own.” 

I had been right to label them fairies in my mind. The light green fairy floated down to the desk from her perch, and I could see just the faintest glimmer of what might be wings emerging from beneath whispy hair that flowed down her back almost to her knees. She was smaller than Learid. While he might have blended in with forest kindling or among the branches of a stout bush, her limbs were slender and rounded at the corners. She had no shoulders. Her midsection appeared almost bulbous in comparison to the rest of her like it was an unavoidable joint in a stick of bamboo. She was shades of green and yellow and white with only the faintest hints of brown at her points. 

How do you get introduced to a fairy? I couldn’t stick my hand out in expectation of her shaking it. She solved the problem for me though, assuming much the same position that Learid had when he met Henry and bowed with both hands clasped loosely behind her back. 

“I am Platon," she said unnecessarily. 

“I am Penny,” I answered trying to smile. Only a few weeks ago, I was sure that fairies were made up creatures that no one would believe and now there were two standing in front of me. I tapped out an email to Henry to let him know our number of houseguests had grown. 

“So there’s another?”

“Oh yes, my dear. There is another. She’s so happy to be here.” I rolled my eyes and worked my way through another bite of the autumn salad he had presented me with when I showed up at his office with the paperwork he had left on the kitchen table. He laughed at my expression. 

The day was bright. We sat in the courtyard of his building that would only be open for a few more weeks before it was too cold and too wet to do so until the spring. Despite the big meeting he had in a matter of hours, he had ordered us lunch and was calmly sitting across from me, in no rush to get through our lunch and back to his office. All that betrayed his stress was the insistent tapping of one knee beneath the table, and I tried to work through my lunch quickly so he would be able to get back to work. 

“Well,” he prompted, waving his hand encouragingly in my direction, “ what have you learned?”

“Not much,” I admitted around my mouthful of food. “Platon is less forthcoming than him. She called herself a smith and him a hunter. She looks different - like a different type of tree to be honest. She’s quite pretty if you find three inch trees pretty.” I paused to think about other details but they flitted through my brain with an unerring direction I couldn’t follow. “Given the ease she has with the hammer that I found strung across her back, I’d say she’s used to wielding it against almost anything.” 

“And she’s a girl?” 

“Yes,” I said it decisively even though I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen any indication aside from the slightly more delicate cast to her features and the coloring that she was not the same gender as her hunter friend. “I mean, I think she is.” I was starting to doubt my own memories. “She looked more girly? But I guess I don’t know what a girl fairy looks like versus a boy fairy?”

“Oh are we labeling them fairies now? I wasn’t sure.” Henry jumped right into even further classification, past gender and on to species. “I thought Learid might be an elf. The pointed ears? The knobbiness?”

“Well, Platon has wings?” There was nothing solid about my argument. How did anyone decide what species their odd little visitors are? All we really have to go off of mythology. 

From what I could remember from school - and it had been a few years at this point - elves were sturdier, darker, and larger than what we had seen, depending on the legend you read. There were Hogwarts house elves that were short and seemed toddler sized. There were Tolkien elves with their tall stately grace and perfect features. The only elf I could think of that might fit a description more like Learid was an “elf on the shelf” and those were so creepy that I didn’t even want to consider him in the same classification. Elves also didn’t have wings. Platon definitely had wings, but I had yet to see them on Learid. He had been clothed each time I’d seen him. Maybe his wings were trapped underneath the shirt that looked like it was fashioned from some sort of moss or leaf? 

Trying to recall their collective clothing made me pause again. Aside from the short moments of soliloquy, neither had really stood still long enough for me to get that good of a look at them. And I was having a hard time recalling their actual appearance. The memory of them was there in my mind, but the image was fuzzy. They felt like pictures from a night out with too much wine in college. I knew they happened. I recalled details. But the actual moments were gone from the recorder of my brain. 

“Your brow furrowed just then,” Henry said pointing his fork in the direction of my forehead. He made a comical picture: serious business man in a suit complete with cufflinks waving a fork of pasta salad in the direction of his wife. “What’s going through your brain?”

“I can’t remember what they look like…exactly,” I admitted. “It’s like it’s there in my brain but not. I don’t know how to describe it.” 

The wind blew through the trees around us bringing afternoon scents of water in the air and the oncoming winter. It was still vaguely warm when you sat in direct sunlight  but not enough to break a sweat or worry about sunburn. The sweaters had come out of our storage bins. Scarves were slowly making their way back towards the front of the closet. I relished the change while I turned the problem of my swiss cheese memory in my mind. I may not have gotten that great of a look at Platon when she had been glaring at me from the edge of the coffee cup where she ended up perching, but I had spent quite a bit of time with her companion. I worried me that I couldn’t remember the details. 

Henry’s face turned thoughtful across from me and he slowly chewed the mouthful of pasta that had been so recently mocking me from the end of his fork. I could see the thoughts marching through his mind in disorderly formation. He had a very ordered mind, said it helped him with the financial bits of his job, but it also helped him with everything else. I had long ago become convinced that this was why he rarely read fiction. Stories were disordered and left things up to chance. He preferred journalism and scholarly articles with charts and graphs to keep the data he had to interpret in order. He could come to the logical conclusion during a procedural without missing a beat but found my ability to miss the first twenty minutes of an episode and come in to predict the killer in my first ten minutes on the couch unnerving. 

“He looked like a twig,” he admitted, his voice trailing off. “There were clothes - I mean he wasn’t a naked twig. But did he have a hat? I’m vaguely remembering a hat?”

“I remember a color scheme more than a hat. There was something purple and black and brown about his head. It looked a bit like a hat,” I admitted before turning my attention to the salad I had been systematically decimating since it was set in front of me. Our minds were not going to repair themselves sitting here all afternoon, and Henry had things to get back to. I stacked things resolutely, topping off my little pile of things dish, lid, and utensils with the fork forcefully clasped to the top.
“I have to go, and you have to get back to work. The Smythes aren’t going to accept anything less than your absolute best. And while I have no idea how exactly you do the things that you do, I know you are very good at them when you have the right amount of time to truly prepare for these kinds of presentations.” A smile slowly spread across my face in answer to his. He secretly loved it when I attempted to talk about his work as though I had the slightest clue what he did. He had tried to explain the inner workings of the financial operation that employed him one time back when we were simply dating from coast to coast and finding anything and everything absolutely fascinating if it meant that we got to spend another hour on the telephone. I had given up after he had used the fourth seventh syllable word, but I appreciated that somehow the spreadsheets he memorized had something to do with predicting things for other people. Those people greatly valued my husband. 

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he quipped as he rose across the table, leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “I am the picture of preparation and decorum, and am completely ready for this presentation.”

He was already looking distractedly back towards the building and feeling his pockets for his phone. I rose with him, nodding and making noises of agreement in my throat. 

We walked swiftly towards the parking lot and parted with another kiss beside my car. I pulled out and headed back towards the freeway that was clogged no matter the time of day. Boston was a wonderful city. Rarely did I regret relocating back to my virtual hometown, but when I thought of the open roads and open skies on the west coast, I shuddered at the grey salt stains that seemed to wait until August to truly disappear from the cement walls that lined every freeway heading north from the city. Only now that the summer rains had washed them away and the debris from the spring and winter before had been carried to some wild waterway that didn’t want it anyways did Boston feel clean again. And soon the air would freeze again and we’d be back at the beginning of another long cold winter. I had to chuckle to myself when my mind wondered if my stick-looking little friends would lose their bark or hibernate in cold season.

I was clearly being ridiculous.