Do you believe in fairies?
I’m not sure I ever did. But I grew up being told they were real in the same way other children are told about God. My mother told me about the first time she’d seen them, in the bluebell wood by the farm in Pen-y-Bryn. The time, in Ireland, when three moss-swaddled stones turned into a family of trolls. The trolls spoke to her, told her things. The banshee she heard one evening by the crossroads—coming home to her friend Kieran and telling him where she’d heard it and him replying, gravely, “ah, that’ll be the postman,” who was sure enough dead the next morning. The vision she’d had of Brigid bringing me to earth, giving me my name. She told me these things with a conviction that was hard to question.
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