Fairy Pools

As soon as she touched down in Scotland, she believed in fairies. No, as soon as the rock and velvet of Inverness rushed up to her where she was falling, a long way through the hagstone hole of a cloud, and she plunged down into the center of the cloud and stayed there.

- Patricia Lockwood

You used to set a child out for them, she thought, and was caught in the arms and awoke on the green hillside.

“Sco'land,” she heard her mother say, in a voice weak from lack of iced tea—they were barely alive after five hours on the runway in Chicago and another ten in the air. “It’s not the first real day,” her husband kept reminding them. After a short stay in Inverness that night, they would go on to Skye tomorrow. He jangled a set of keys. In Ireland, two years before, it had transpired that her husband, a contrarian, was born to drive on the wrong side of the road, while her mother, a worse contrarian—whom she had defeated by marrying the former—planned to drag them all to Hell that way. “I'll drive,” he told her mother now, very loudly, “and you sit on the passenger side and slam your foot to the floor whenever I get too close to a low stone wall.” “Deal,” her mother agreed. She would also provide commentary, and throw in those sharp little gasps for free.

As for her, she was silent and let herself be carried on and on toward the green hillside. The trees corresponded to an obsessive high-school reading of “The White Goddess.” The sheep were spray-painted according to who owned them. Actual lambs frisked in the fields, on legs like little girls'. Wait, she thought, am I confused about changelings? You put them out—did you get anything back? Or they were taken from you in the night, and you woke up one morning ...

Her sister sat apart from her in the rental car. Her head was full of the Child, her child, who'd been lost to them all just that January. From time to time she saw her sister flicking through pictures on her phone with a chipped hot-pink manicure, so quickly that the Child appeared to be alive. It was as if her sister were smoothing a forehead, or touching away an eyelash, or wiping milk from a mouth, and once again the whole life was in motion.