An Ordinary Fairy by John Osborne

you? What the hell are you?”
    He returned to the door and closed it, threw his cap and jacket on the bed, and turned back to the picture.
    “What did I just see, Ms. Brown ?”
    He paced rapidly, swiveling his head at each turn to watch the picture, lest she try to escape.
    “People don’t fly. They don’t have wings. They don’t glow. Fifty-degree air makes them shiver if they’re wet. You’re way too strong for your size, you can control animals, or at least communicate with them.” He stopped in front of the picture and pointed an accusing finger. “Those ducks were happy to see you!”
    He returned to pacing. “You look just like you did thirty years ago, when I wasn’t even in school yet! And why can’t I find any record of you?”
    Noah flopped into the easy chair with a loud sigh.
    “I wasn’t drunk. I haven’t even had a beer since yesterday. No drugs. No hallucination. I don’t think so, anyway. Maybe I should have sneaked one picture of you.”
    The thought had never crossed his mind to take pictures. Noah didn’t believe it was right, as some colleagues did, to photograph people without their knowledge. Their shutter fingers would itch at what he had seen.
    He turned back to the picture. He forced the words from his mouth: “You’re a fairy.”
    There. I said it. The ridiculous, the unbelievable, the impossible.
    Did this explain the eerie sensation he felt whenever she was near? Fairy energy? Noah knew all about the energies of people and places. He’d been dowsing for years, quite successfully. Willow radiated a different energy than he had ever sensed before, but he’d written if off to his own attraction to her.
    Perhaps there’s more to it.
    “Obviously there’s more to it. I just saw you fly.”
    Noah rose, retrieved the laptop from its hiding place beneath the mattress and set it up.
    I’ve heard things, heard stories, from my Wicca friends. But I thought … well, I thought they were a little off.
    When the computer sang its readiness, Noah typed “fairies” into the search engine. The first twenty of 2,846,593 hits appeared. He clicked a link near the top of the list about the Cottingley fairies. In 1917, two young girls convinced many people they had photographed live fairies in the forest near their home. Experts declared the negatives unaltered, and that the girls would not know how to do so. The famous, logical Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame became a believer. Seventy years later one of the girls admitted the fairies were cutouts from a department store catalog mounted on cardboard.
    The screen flickered with vast amounts of information. The ancient French word fee meant “enchanter.” That certainly applied to Willow. Every culture believed in some creature akin to fairies, by many names. Noah knew the European ones: elf, banshee, gnome, and leprechaun. While legends endowed the creatures with a variety of sometimes-sinister powers, most were small, though none as small as Tinker Bell in Peter Pan, who was strictly a creation of fiction. Who would believe such a story?
    If I told anyone what I saw, they’d think I was drunk or smoking something.
    What was the gain? For him, nothing but a tainted reputation, and for Willow, nothing but harm. He raised his eyes to her picture.
    “And Wiccans do not bring harm to others when they can prevent it.”
    Your secret will be safe with me.
     
    “We missed you yesterday, young man,” Harry, the Henning’s Gang leader, said as Noah sat down. He stifled a yawn before answering. Sleep had not come easy last night.
    “I needed to make an early start yesterday. I had an appointment for a shoot in Bismarck, and then I went to the library.”
    “What’s at the library to interest you?” Frank asked.
    “I was researching my next assignment.” No way would he tell them the truth about why he went, except maybe Louie, if he could get him alone. The old man sat sipping his coffee and listening. Noah had many