Faery Tale Read Free

someone asks you what you’re reading, you can say, “Oh, this? It’s . . . an examination of the loss of myth in modern culture.”
    And it wouldn’t be a lie.
    I really don’t believe in faeries. But I really want to. Not just for me, but for all of us. Because we are battered by adulthood—by taxes, by loss, by laundry, by nine to five, by deceit and distrust, by the crushing desire to be thin, wealthy, successful, popular, happy, in love. All the while, we are walking on a planet that is disintegrating around us.
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    I would have thought this challenge insurmountable, had I not already encountered one such believer. And she just so happened to live in my building.
    I first met Raven Keyes not long after I moved into my first apartment in New York City. She and her husband, Michael, lived down the hall, and it wasn’t long before Raven and I were on a first-name basis. With her blond, curly hair and playful blue eyes, Raven exuded a warm effervescence that melted most people into a puddle of bashful smiles and adoration. I was no exception. She was a former actress turned Reiki Master, a tradition with which I was completely unfamiliar. Reiki, she explained, was an alternative form of healing where the practitioner moves their hands over your body without touching you. I was intrigued but had to admit at the time that for me, the best type of therapy was found either on the opulent sofa of an Upper West Side shrink, or the lavender-infused massage table at Bliss Spa on Lexington Avenue.
    However, our perfunctory chats in the hallway evolved into glasses of wine, and before I knew it, a year or two passed and I was volunteering my apartment for use as her Reiki studio during the days, in exchange for a small monthly fee.
    Raven’s clients were aplenty, and due to long hours at work my apartment was typically empty, so it worked out perfectly. In any case, it was Raven who first let me know that my apartment was filled, very certainly, I mean chockablock, with faeries. She just came right out and said it.
    You can imagine my surprise.
    After two years of living in that apartment, not once had I been woken in the middle of the night by a tiny ring of creatures dancing merrily around my ficus tree. Nor had I been pricked, prodded, tripped, or poked, and no imaginary toddler had ever wandered off into the depths of my dark closet only to find its way home again days later with a frightening, changeling-like look on its face. In other words, I had no evidence of an alien occupation of my remarkably modest living space.
    Not to mention, everybody knows that faeries don’t exist.
    At least not anymore , a small voice from the depths of my imagination said.
    Shut up , I told it. Because they don’t. Every adult learns this. Yet I found I was moved by Raven’s innocence, and I suspected I was somehow mourning the loss of mine.
    With my neighbor’s startling declaration that there were, in fact, faeries in my apartment, it really got me thinking.
    In the last few centuries, the archeological community has made some fairly astonishing discoveries, many of which point to the alarming number of myths and legends that possess at least a thread of historical basis. One great example is Troy, the legendary city at the center of Homer’s Iliad —now thought to have been located near the coast of northwest Turkey. Everyone thought that German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann was completely out of his gourd when he began to dig on a hill in the Turkish countryside in search of the mythical city. But by following geographical descriptions from the text, Schliemann’s obsession was rewarded when he found layers upon layers of a city that had been burned, pummeled to destruction, and rebuilt (about thirteen times). Among many other conclusive discoveries, archeologists have since unearthed shards of pottery that date to the time period that Homer’s epic work so definitively