Lifer

They watch us in secret. Eyes aglow in the wand-like blossoms of hyacinth. Watch as we jog, walk, bike, bird through wooded corridors of quiet rivers. They enjoy the birders most—the passion they exude—but question their dependence on binoculars and cameras. If only they’d be fully present with nature! They might then remember the language. And the birds would fly right up to them and pose, and converse with them, and tell their secrets. But humans have truly forgotten, haven’t they. Erected walls, shut their doors, kept wildness at bay; a million boundaries set inside and outside the mind. For this, and more, the fairy folk weep for us, their buoyant tears evaporating into soft blankets of morning mist. Yet still they watch from their pale blue towers of enchanted hyacinth, entertained by our strange attempts to slow from perpetual busyness. Holding tiny, binocular-like devices of their own—mock toys, really, like children with long sticks for swords—for the fairies see us just fine without them.

“Look!” you might hear in a patch of flowers some spring morning, enthusiastic but faint as a leaf landing on water. And then—in the guise of tree creaks and insect buzzes—words a birder herself might say when encountering a “lifer,” a species she has never seen before: “Look, over there! See it? Coming up behind that elderly power-walker. A skateboarder in juvenile plumage. Lifer!”

First published in Illumen in 2022.