Fairy Pools Quotes

It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about.

I refuse mirrors," the Fairy King said. "I refuse them for you, and I refuse them for me. If you want to see what you are, look into the tide pools at dusk. Look into the sea.

Do you know where Blue is? Can you get him for me? Please?" "Frederick," Bliss said. "Do you always bring a sword to a pool party? You are familiar with the concept of rust, I hope." "I - yes, of course," Freddie said, looking as if he wasn't sure whom to answer first, but deferring to the fairy out of respect for his magical elders. "I have it in case there's trouble, and I need to decapitate Fel - er, someone. Anyone, rather. Anyone in need of decapitation." "Frederick, that is very disturbing," Bliss said. "I do hope you're joking." "Where's Blue?" Mira shouted.

Ahhh-ahh! I'm so sorry! You were right! I am not the box of tomatoes fairies at all! It was all lies, lies, LIES! Please don't shoot me! I'm too young to die, and what if I don't die and but am just mortally wounded and forced to lie there in misery in a pool of my own blood?! Please, I'll do anything--well, I mean within reason-- I don't want to diiiiiiie!" -Italy's "I don't want to die" rant part one

The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor; and I didn’t know if the sky was the earth or the earth was water. I had been turned upside down. I had to hold the rock with my fingernails to stop me falling into the sky of the earth or the water of the sky. But I couldn’t hold on.

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two. Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland. And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel to mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

The hot water pools are steaming, Fagan and Monsanto and the others are all sitting peacefully up to their necks, they're all naked, but there's a gang of fairies also there naked all standing in various bath house postures that make me hesitate to take my clothes off just on general principles. (p. 106)

I think it is right that you should know I am here in the capacity of a private enquiry agent." If she had announced that she was there in the capacity of a Fairy Godmother or of First Murderer, she could hardly have surprised him more. In fact, the Fairy Godmother would have seemed quite appropriate by comparison.

If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn’t trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?

She got dressed at the side of the pool, schooled her limp into a rolling gait and headed for the hall.

There long he sojourned alone and roamed about the shore or fared over the rocks at the ebb, marvelling at the pools and the great weeds, the dripping caverns and the strange sea-fowl that he saw and came to know; but the rise and fall of the water and the voice of the waves was ever to him the greatest wonder and ever did it seem a new and unimaginable thing.

There he was: perfection. Tan skin, square jaw, twinkling blue eyes, and blond hair that curled slightly since it was still wet from the pool. Brody threw his head back and laughed at something his friend T.J. said.

This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses. In this magic pool, lifting from her throat like a rare discharge of fluid from the mouth of a remote and mysterious shrine, I saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit, distilled from a mouth whose contours only a few minutes before had drawn steadily against my penis.

Lamium Migraine dreams, jagged seams, A badge of love and pain. Or dreamy eyes, sleepy eyes, Drooping, closing, losing light. Packages scattered under the tree, Some torn open, some tied tight. Is there a heartbeat in those purple veins? Are those embryos or mouths or rosary beads? The color of my first dress, gathered with love, Fairy cups stirred with blades of grass, notes clustered on a windy score, Three blooms, three friends, alas! Grape flowers, cloud flowers, love flowers, Paper parasols upside down, a butterfly herd Stopped to rest by a deep green pool. Petals small as a child's tears good-bye, Dropped stitches everywhere From a blanket the color of sky.

To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp. To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.… The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

Have you ever been in a large forest and seen a strange black tarn hidden deep among the leaves? It looks bewitched and a little frightening. All is still — fir trees and pines huddle close and silent on all sides. Sometimes the trees bend cautiously and shyly over the water as if they are wondering what may be hidden in the dark depths. There is another forest growing in the water, and it, too, is full of wonder and stillness. Strangest of all, never have the two forests been able to speak to each other. By the edge of the pool and out in the water are soft tussocks covered with brown bear moss and wooly white cottongrass. All is so quiet — not a sound, not a flutter of life, not a trembling breath — all of nature seems to be holding its breath listening, listening with beating heart: soon, soon.

And with that, we resume our trek. It takes an annoyingly long time to get to the palace. I mean, the walk is scenic and all, the forest lush with life, the ground sprinkled with glittering pools and rippling creeks, and blah, blah, blah—lots of pretty shit. But it’s still a stupidly long walk, and now that Des and I have five billion guards hemming us in, our conversation is next to non-existent. To be fair, I have been entertained. Des has spent most of the last hour plaiting one guard’s hair into at least fifty braids (he hasn’t yet noticed) and moving branches into another guard’s way. “Mother fucking trees,” the fairy mutters under his breath. “I swear they’re moving in my way.” “Lay off the spirits, Sythus,” another says.

(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.) Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn’t take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodies like tiny human beings dressed in flower petals. (Fish, which flew through that most dangerous element, water, were believed not to exist. Fishy-looking beings in pools and streams were either hallucinations or other things under some kind of spell, and interfering with, catching, or—most especially—eating fish was strictly forbidden. All swimming was considered magical. Animals seen doing it were assumed to be favourites of a local water-sprite or dangerously insane; humans never tried.)

I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery – “the piazza," sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. It was the same child-the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts – that last mad immortal day behind the "Roches Roses." The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

The Night-Swans by Walter De la Mare 'Tis silence on the enchanted lake, And silence in the air serene, Save for the beating of her heart, The lovely-eyed Evangeline. She sings across the waters clear And dark with trees and stars between, The notes her fairy godmother Taught her, the child Evangeline. As might the unrippled pool reply, Faltering an answer far and sweet, Three swans as white as mountain snow Swim mantling to her feet. And still upon the lake they stay, Their eyes black stars in all their snow, And softly, in the glassy pool, Their feet beat darkly to and fro. She rides upon her little boat, Her swans swim through the starry sheen, Rowing her into Fairyland-- The lovely-eyed Evangeline. 'Tis silence on the enchanted lake, And silence in the air serene; Voices shall call in vain again On earth the child Evangeline. 'Evangeline! Evangeline!' Upstairs, downstairs, all in vain. Her room is dim; her flowers faded; She answers not again.

The sun was up and I want to say that it was golden, but it wasn't golden, it was the color of treacle. I want to say the grass was green, but it wasn't, it was turquoise, the color of a quarry pool. The rocks were lion-colored and glimmered with quartz, and the sky I wanted to call blue was in reality lilac. And the colors were moist. It was as much as I could do to prevent myself from getting off the horse and putting my hands into these colors, to see if they would come off on my fingers.

The track led into a sort of tunnel made of forest. They left daylight behind, a thousand leaves hemming them into dusky shade. As she traipsed behind Jack's torn blue jacket, he squinted into the foliage, hearkening to every cracking twig or bird-chirrup. After what seemed an age, they came out into blessed sunshine again. They were in a clearing, their ears filled with a thundering wind, the air itself trembling. A few paces further they came upon the source: above them, a waterfall tumbled from a clifftop as high as a church steeple. The water fell in milky blue strands, shooting spray in the air that danced in rainbows of gold, pink and blue. At their feet was a deep and inviting lagoon. It fair took her breath away. Jack crouched to look at the pool's edge, where a mud bank was scrabbled with marks. "We should go back," he said. "Something drinks here." She didn't care. She was spellbound. "Look, a cave!" Across the lagoon stood a dark entrance hung with pretty mosses, like a fairy grotto. "Just one peep," she whispered, for there was something powerful and secret about the place. "Then we can go back." But Jack was still peering at the tracks around the water's edge. "Whatever drinks here, it's not here now. I dare you, Jack. A quick look around the cave and then we'll be on our way." She had a notion, from some story or other, that caves were places where treasure was hidden; she reckoned pirates might have left jewels and plunder behind long ago. "It's the end of the rainbow," she laughed. "Let's find our crock of gold.

They weren’t stronger than him, they weren’t smarter, they weren’t more prepared. But circumstances had brought them together and allowed them to succeed where so many others had failed. Patricia knew how they looked, a bunch of silly Southern women, yakking about books over white wine. A bunch of carpool drivers, skinned-knee kissers, errand runners, secret Santas and part-time tooth fairies, with their practical jeans and their festive sweaters. Think of us what you will, she thought, we made mistakes, and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot car pool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.

Where are you going this hot day, Mis’ DeJong?” Selina sat up very straight. “To Bagdad, Mrs. Pool.” “To — Where’s that? What for?” “To sell my jewels, Mrs. Pool. And to see Aladdin, and Harun-al-Rashid and Ali Baba. And the Forty Thieves.” Mrs. Pool had left her rocker and had come down the steps. The wagon creaked on past her gate. She took a step or two down the path, and called after them. “I never heard of it. Bag — How do you get there?” Over her shoulder Selina called out from the wagon seat. “You just go until you come to a closed door. And you say ‘Open Sesame!’ and there you are.” Bewilderment shadowed Mrs. Pool’s placid face. As the wagon lurched on down the road it was Selina who was smiling and Mrs. Pool who was serious. The boy, round eyed, was looking up at his mother. “That’s out of Arabian Nights, what you said. Why did you say that?” Suddenly excitement tinged his voice. “That’s out of the book. Isn’t it? Isn’t it! We’re not really ——” She was a little contrite, but not very. “Well, not really, perhaps. But ’most any place is Bagdad if you don’t know what will happen in it. And this is an adventure, isn’t it, that we’re going on? People in disguise in the Haymarket. Caliphs, and princes, and slaves, and thieves, and good fairies, and witches.” “In the Haymarket! That Pop went to all the time! That is just dumb talk.

Using the sword as an extension of my arm, I gestured with a flick of the wrist, signaling for the swine standing between me and freedom to move aside and clear the exit. He failed to comply. “Where will you go?” he asked, allowing no time for an answer. “Anywhere but here is unsafe. There’s no other sanctuary in which you can hide. My mother will sense the awakening of her gemstone. She will seek it out the moment you exit these walls. And if she and her loyal gargoyles are not threat enough, then consider your cruel fairy godmother—the sorceress responsible for the violence that left you unconscious in a pool of your own blood. She will no doubt come after you again if you leave these shielding walls.

If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew that I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn't trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you kenw existed on the inside. And wouldn't it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn't it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?

She met a lot of people, and some people who weren’t people. The more rural houses occasionally played host to minor demons and lesser fairies and local geo-specific nature spirits and elementals who lent street cred to the establishment in return for God knows what in the way of goods and services, she didn’t ask. There was a certain romance to these beings; they seemed to embody the very promise of magic, which was to deliver unto her a world greater than the one into which she had been born. The moment when you walk into a room, and the guy playing pool has a pair of red leather wings sticking out of his back, and the chick smoking on the balcony has eyes of liquid golden fire—at that moment you think you’ll never be sad or bored or lonely again.

What to Make a Game About? Your dog, your cat, your child, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your mother, your father, your grandmother, your friends, your imaginary friends, your summer vacation, your winter in the mountains, your childhood home, your current home, your future home, your first job, your worst job, the job you wish you had. Your first date, your first kiss, your first fuck, your first true love, your second true love, your relationship, your kinks, your deepest secrets, your fantasies, your guilty pleasures, your guiltless pleasures, your break-up, your make-up, your undying love, your dying love. Your hopes, your dreams, your fears, your secrets, the dream you had last night, the thing you were afraid of when you were little, the thing you’re afraid of now, the secret you think will come back and bite you, the secret you were planning to take to your grave, your hope for a better world, your hope for a better you, your hope for a better day. The passage of time, the passage of memory, the experience of forgetting, the experience of remembering, the experience of meeting a close friend from long ago on the street and not recognizing her face, the experience of meeting a close friend from long ago and not being recognized, the experience of aging, the experience of becoming more dependent on the people who love you, the experience of becoming less dependent on the people you hate. The experience of opening a business, the experience of opening the garage, the experience of opening your heart, the experience of opening someone else’s heart via risky surgery, the experience of opening the window, the experience of opening for a famous band at a concert when nobody in the audience knows who you are, the experience of opening your mind, the experience of taking drugs, the experience of your worst trip, the experience of meditation, the experience of learning a language, the experience of writing a book. A silent moment at a pond, a noisy moment in the heart of a city, a moment that caught you unprepared, a moment you spent a long time preparing for, a moment of revelation, a moment of realization, a moment when you realized the universe was not out to get you, a moment when you realized the universe was out to get you, a moment when you were totally unaware of what was going on, a moment of action, a moment of inaction, a moment of regret, a moment of victory, a slow moment, a long moment, a moment you spent in the branches of a tree. The cruelty of children, the brashness of youth, the wisdom of age, the stupidity of age, a fairy tale you heard as a child, a fairy tale you heard as an adult, the lifestyle of an imaginary creature, the lifestyle of yourself, the subtle ways in which we admit authority into our lives, the subtle ways in which we overcome authority, the subtle ways in which we become a little stronger or a little weaker each day. A trip on a boat, a trip on a plane, a trip down a vanishing path through a forest, waking up in a darkened room, waking up in a friend’s room and not knowing how you got there, waking up in a friend’s bed and not knowing how you got there, waking up after twenty years of sleep, a sunset, a sunrise, a lingering smile, a heartfelt greeting, a bittersweet goodbye. Your past lives, your future lives, lies that you’ve told, lies you plan to tell, lies, truths, grim visions, prophecy, wishes, wants, loves, hates, premonitions, warnings, fables, adages, myths, legends, stories, diary entries. Jumping over a pit, jumping into a pool, jumping into the sky and never coming down. Anything. Everything.

Stillness pooled like blood and Devon sat, stunned and terrified to move in case her universe tilted again. The aunts were already cleaning up: wiping blood off her legs, changing the sheets around her as best they could. Someone carried the placenta away. “Your milk will be black, when it comes in,” Gailey said. “Don’t be alarmed by that. All perfectly normal.” Devon just nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. Perfectly normal? How could anything be normal ever again? Her life had been a series of twisted fairy tales in which she had imagined herself the princess, but this, here, living and breathing and snuffling in her arms, had more truth than all of her swallowed stories combined. She was her daughter’s whole world, a realization both humbling and empowering. Devon had never been anybody’s world before—had never been anything at all, in fact, except the sum of paper flesh she’d consumed without thought.

Her eyes watered triumphantly, and she let her gaze drop back towards the house: the window of her bedroom, the Michaelmas daisy she and Ma had planted over the poor, dead body of Constable the cat, the chink in the bricks where, embarrassingly, she used to leave notes for the fairies. There were faint memories of a time before, of being a very small child, collecting winkles from a pool by the seashore, of dining each night in the front room of her grandmother's seaside boardinghouse, but they were like a dream. The farmhouse was the only home she'd ever known. And although she didn't want a matching armchair of her own, she liked seeing her parents in theirs each night, knowing as she feel asleep that they were murmuring together on the other side of the thin wall, that she only had to reach out an arm to bother one of her sisters. She would miss them when she went. Laurel blinked. She would miss them. The certainty was swift and heavy. It sat in her stomach like a stone. They borrowed her clothes, broke her lipsticks, scratched her records, but she would miss them. The noise and heat of them, the movement and squabbles and crushing joy. They were like a litter of puppies, tumbling together in their shared bedroom. They overwhelmed outsiders and this pleased them. They were the Nicolson girls, Laurel, Rose, Iris, and Daphne; a garden of daughters, as Daddy rhapsodized when he'd had a pint too many. Unholy terrors, as Grandma proclaimed after their holiday visits.

She knew the effort it took to keep one’s exterior self together, upright, when everything inside was in pieces, broken beyond repair. One touch, one warm, compassionate hand, could shatter that hard-won perfect exterior. And then it would take years and years to restore it. This tiny, effeminate creature dressed in velvet suits, red socks, an absurdly long scarf usually wrapped around his throat, trailing after him like a coronation robe. He who pronounced, after dinner, “I’m going to go sit over here with the rest of the girls and gossip!” This pixie who might suddenly leap into the air, kicking one foot out behind him, exclaiming, “Oh, what fun, fun, fun it is to be me! I’m beside myself!” “Truman, you could charm the rattle off a snake,” Diana Vreeland pronounced. Hemingway - He was so muskily, powerfully masculine. More than any other man she’d met, and that was saying something when Clark Gable was a notch in your belt. So it was that, and his brain, his heart—poetic, sad, boyish, angry—that drew her. And he wanted her. Slim could see it in his hungry eyes, voraciously taking her in, no matter how many times a day he saw her; each time was like the first time after a wrenching separation. How to soothe and flatter and caress and purr and then ignore, just when the flattering and caressing got to be a bit too much. Modesty bores me. I hate people who act coy. Just come right out and say it, if you believe it—I’m the greatest. I’m the cat’s pajamas. I’m it! He couldn’t humiliate her vulnerability, her despair. Old habits die hard. Particularly among the wealthy. And the storytellers, gossips, and snakes. Is it truly a scandal? A divine, delicious literary scandal, just like in the good old days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? The loss of trust, the loss of joy; the loss of herself. The loss of her true heart. An amusing, brief little time. A time before it was fashionable to tell the truth, and the world grew sordid from too much honesty. In the end as in the beginning, all they had were the stories. The stories they told about one another, and the stories they told to themselves. Beauty. Beauty in all its glory, in all its iterations; the exquisite moment of perfect understanding between two lonely, damaged souls, sitting silently by a pool, or in the twilight, or lying in bed, vulnerable and naked in every way that mattered. The haunting glance of a woman who knew she was beautiful because of how she saw herself reflected in her friend’s eyes. The splendor of belonging, being included, prized, coveted. What happened to Truman Capote. What happened to his swans. What happened to elegance. What truly was the price they paid, for the lives they lived. For there is always a price. Especially in fairy tales.

He stared into the golden pools of her heavy-lidded eyes, and her emotions easy to read. "Have you bewitched me after all?" he asked softly, drowning in honey.

How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand starts in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don't feel like they're disappearing to the people who are living there. I went to Accomack County and I found endless metaphors for a dying county in a changing landscape. There were endless metaphors that went the opposite way, too: rural life as a fairy tale, better than the rest of the country. The reality is probably somewhere in between. The people who lived in Accomack were happy to live in Accomack. It wasn't small, it was close-knit. It wasn't backward, it was simple. There weren't a hundred things to do every night, but if you went to the one available thing, you were pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you knew.

A chill crept into his limbs and he began to question his struggle against the sure demise of his damaged flesh—so much easier to surrender, to cease the pain, to accept his fate. Instead he raised himself from the damp ground and leaning back against the willow’s gnarled trunk, he gasped for breath, his lungs heavy with fluid. And as he sat, his chin resting against his chest, his eyes upon that ancient pool, his mind began a swift unravelling, the memories cascading like a turbulent river bound for union with the endless sea.

She stepped inside a vestibule with a silver bowl of pure, clear water set on a pedestal made of what Delphine could only assume was a very large, very sturdy zinnia. Was she supposed to wash in it, or was she firmly barred from touching it? She glanced in its shallow depth, and it began to pulse and swirl with pale light. She stepped away quickly. A filmy veil of light separated the interior; she held out a tentative finger, and the light brushed it like organza and separated for her. She stepped through into the Court, sprawling and open to the sky above, yet bound by the pale walls on all sides. Inside, the Court looked back at her. Dozens of Fae, gathered in twos and threes, beneath trees of gold and silver and around pools of deep azure blue, inside pavilions made of sheer flower petals and on carpets that must have been woven bird feathers. They all watched her, silently, unmoving. Each was almost painful to look at, beautiful and yet sharp and cold. All of them were arrayed in the spoils of their bargains, with sheer gowns of watercolor silk and robes of pliable silver, elaborate braids adorned with finely wrought metal and tautly bound silk, and even, on a few, wings and horns and talons refashioned from wood and bone and glass. Delphine was terrified of them, and yet also drawn to them. A great and terrible power hummed among them, just below the surface, a nearly tangible potential for change, for creation, for more than anything the world on her own side of the veil could offer.

Rainy Nights I like the town on rainy nights When everything is wet — When all the town has magic lights And streets of shining jet! When all the rain about the town Is like a looking-glass, And all the lights are upside down Below me as I pass. In all the pools are velvet skies, And down the dazzling street A fairy city gleams and lies In beauty at my feet.

If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to Grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn't trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside. And wouldn't it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn't it be wonderful to look at your face in the morning and know you would always belong?

I refuse mirrors,” the Fairy King said. “I refuse them for you, and I refuse them for me. If you want to see what you are, look into the tide pools at dusk. Look into the sea.

taping of the Hollywood Palace TV show. In America then, if you had long hair, you were a faggot as well as a freak. They would shout across the street, “Hey, fairies!” Dean Martin introduced as something like “these long-haired wonders from England, the Rolling Stones.… They’re backstage picking the fleas off each other.” A lot of sarcasm and eyeball rolling. Then he said, “Don’t leave me alone with this,” gesturing with horror in our direction. This was Dino, the rebel Rat Packer who cocked his finger at the entertainment world by pretending to be drunk all the time. We were, in fact, quite stunned. English comperes and showbiz types may have been hostile, but they didn’t treat you like some dumb circus act. Before we’d gone on, he’d had the bouffanted King Sisters and performing elephants, standing on their hind legs. I love old Dino. He was a pretty funny bloke, even though he wasn’t ready for the changing of the guard. On to Texas and more freak show appearances, in one case with a pool of performing seals between us and the audience at the San Antonio Texas State Fair. That was where I first met Bobby Keys, the great saxophone player, my closest pal (we were born within hours of each other).

In the summer of 1845 she buckled down to the task of making ends meet by writing a novella, La Mare au diable (The Devil’s Pool), which she claimed to have thrown off in four days. It is generally regarded as one of her more beautiful stories, a pastoral fairy tale set in the heart of the rustic countryside around Berry. We gather from one of her letters to Delacroix that she had intended to dedicate the book to Chopin, but for reasons unknown she changed her mind.13 It is an interesting fact that has drawn scant attention, that neither Chopin nor Sand dedicated a single work to each other.

Hidden behind a veil of velvet shadows pooling beneath low-hanging branches, Violet waited until Em had turned the corner of the path toward the sunlight, then collected the gifts. Wool black as night, glass like ice threaded on silk, and a jangle of pins the color of last autumn's leaves. She held each reverently, the potential of transformation shining in each. The girl had changed, her soft freckled face gaining the planes of an adult's and the sharp timbre of her laugh softening, transformed by the magic of the earthbound that couldn't touch Fae. But something of Fae remained in the girl-turned-woman, a thread binding them together as surely as blood might have. Violet smiled softly, pride in the girl she'd sent from Fae into her earthbound fate swelling like the bloom of magic.

The whirlpool splashed into view, swirls of blue and green simmering against an outcropping of grayish-brown rock in the glow of half-light. I stared out at it in fascination and wonder, feeling as if I had entered the setting of a fairy tale and this was a magical pool, perhaps the looking glass of a unicorn or the home of an enchanted prince, ancient as time itself.

But it was Ireland’s mercurial folklore that supplied Bax with the dominant voice in his compositions. Beginning with Cathaleen-na-Hoolihan (1905), written three years after encountering Yeats, the list of his tone poems (spanning the years 1909–31) reads like the contents of an Arts and Crafts compendium of decadent fairy tales: In the Faery Hills, Rosc-catha, Spring Fire, Nympholept, The Garden of Fand, November Woods, Tintagel, The Happy Forest, The Tale the Pine Trees Knew. A sensualist and erotic adventurer (in 1910 he pursued a ukrainian girl he was infatuated with from St Petersburg to Kiev), Bax created lush, richly foliated sound-forests that attempted to conjure up a sense of narcotic abandon and the intoxicating conjunction of myth and landscape. In the Faery Hills (1909) takes its cue from a section in Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin in which the Sídhe force a troubadour to sing them a song. Aware of their reputation as festive types, Oisin launches into his most joyous ditty. To the Sídhe, it still sounds like the most depressing dirge they’ve ever heard, so they toss his harp into a pool and whisk him away to show him how to party like it’s AD 99. Bax claimed to have been ‘possessed by Kerry’s self’5 while writing it.

The Origin" of what happened is not in language— of this much I am certain. Six degrees south, six east— and you have it: the bird with the blue feathers, the brown bird— same white breasts, same scaly ankles. The waves between us— house light and transform motion into the harboring of sounds in language. Where there is newsprint the fact of desire is turned from again— and again. Just the sense that what remains might well be held up— later, as an ending. Twice I have walked through this life— once for nothing, once for facts: fairy-shrimp in the vernal pool— glassy-winged sharp-shooter on the failing vines. Count me— among the animals, their small committed calls.— Count me among the living. My greatest desire— to exist in a physical world.

You can call the spirits that live in the pools and trees God’s grace if you like, old man. But if Jesus were from this land he’d be putting milk out for the fairies himself.