By Ilse Eskelsen
On my sixteenth birthday my sister took me to the woods and told me we were looking for faeries.
The woods were a living, reaching thing, a mass of mossy oaks stretched out behind the elementary school. Rocks and roots broke up the pressed-dirt paths on the edges of the creek. In spring, as it was then—the bare beginnings of spring, with the slowest stirring warmth of a paper sun—unexpected green burst from the ground, patches of what looked like lettuce or maybe cabbage, weeds that grew in two days to waist height.
“If we haven’t found them by now…” I told her, like I’d been telling her since we were kids, but she shook her head with cheery, half-serious disapproval.
Lauren was two years older than me, clever and dreamy. She wore a long pink sweater and dangling beaded earrings and jeans she’d patched by hand. Mud patterned the sides of her lace-up boots, fresh from last night’s rain.
I trailed behind her in muck-drenched sneakers, hands hidden in my sleeves to protect from thorns. “So where are we looking?”
“The oaks,” she said.
I nodded. That was east, away from the school. The oaks had been our favorite place to search when we were young, though we’d looked everywhere practically, back when we went to the woods every chance we got. Now we only looked on special occasions, birthdays and bank holidays. There was a certain sense of ritual to it: me and my sister the believer, reveling in wonder, in search of the sacred.
“If we find them,” Lauren told me, “it’ll be the best birthday present ever. Which will make me the best sister ever. Which will make you eternally grateful, perhaps enough to do my homework and laundry for the rest of the year.”
“Don’t count your chickens,” I murmured.
But I spoke quietly because I was listening. A flutter of wings, a buzzy, near-insect voice. The swoop of wind that followed a faerie’s flight.
If we find them, I thought, I’ll do her homework and laundry forever.
Lauren knew not to talk too much as we tramped along past stretches of sand in the creek bed, past whispering weeds and curling roots, everything lovely, but mundane.
I didn’t need that, the same old everyday magic. I needed to see a creature with a soul.
And what was more soulful than the copse of oaks? I had climbed those trees as a child. I had cried between their roots. I had felt with certain fingers every bump and knot in the trunk, wondering if those were the little faerie doors, the entrances and exits to an undiscovered kingdom. Faeries like children, Lauren had said, when I was six and she was eight, because children are better at seeing things.
“Lauren,” I asked now, “is sixteen too old for this?”
She paused, disentangling an earring from her hair, before she spoke. “I guess we’re about to find out.”
The oaks rose suddenly to our left, five or six of them, tall and cool with their dark wood and heavy branches. I was quiet as quiet, intent on the sounds of a forest in spring: something skittering over branches, something splashing in the stream, something flying overhead with a wingbeat and a cry.
(Not a faerie’s cry, though. Faeries would not sound like crows.)
Lauren slipped in between the oaks, and I followed. There was a perfectness to Lauren among the trees. She fit. I thought about taking a photograph, hair spilling down her back, hands outstretched, each hovered half an inch from a different trunk. I decided against it, though. I thought the faeries might not like my phone.
My sister found a spot in the center of the grove and patted the ground beside her. I sat, leaning my shoulder against hers. We looked up into the branches, a lattice against the sky.
“It’s a pretty view,” Lauren whispered.
I said, “It’s more than a pretty view.”
She rested her head on mine. She seemed to hesitate, and then she spoke, an unfamiliar rawness in her voice. “You know, when I was little, I thought this place was holy. I thought for sure faeries lived here. I thought God lived here. I would volunteer to walk the dog, and I would come here, and I would sit and just be quiet. Especially in winter, when no one else was around. My pants would get all wet.” She laughed under her breath. “It was pretty silly of me, looking back.”
“Did you ever see any faeries?” I asked.
I was still looking up through the branches. My ears were still pricked for wings.
Lauren swallowed.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Not exactly?”
Her sentences came out slow and incomplete, like she was picking up something delicate in her fingers and putting it down with extraordinary care. “There were glimpses, sometimes. I thought there were. Edges of wings that didn’t look like insects, sounds I only heard in one ear. But I don’t know…” She came to a full stop, then started again. “I don’t know if any of that was… real.”
The words that came out of my mouth were, “Sounds realer than anything I’ve ever gotten.”
But that wasn’t really what I meant. What I meant, what I was thinking, was something confused and indistinct, something about the sorrow at the edges of her voice. What I meant was, part of me still thinks God lives here.
Lauren whispered, “You said you didn’t think we’d ever find them. You said it.”
I said, “Not believing you’ll ever find it is different from not believing it’s there.”
She sighed, the heavy sigh of an eighteen-year-old girl on the verge of a life, and if it drowned out a footfall, if it drowned out a song, if it drowned out a flickering flutter of wings beyond the places my mortal eyes could see, I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t hear a thing.
Ilse Eskelsen is a BYU student who has a major in English, a minor in French, two cats, two ukuleles, and a life-sized plastic crow that she keeps on her desk. She has lived just north of Washington, DC; in Stuttgart, Germany; and just south of Washington, DC. Her pieces are published in literary journals like Penultimate Peanut, The Showbear Family Circus, Barrelhouse, and Inscape.
