The Faery Reel

Though the sky was a peerless blue, there had been thunder since dawn. Low thunder, ground thunder, leaving an acrid odor in twists of gray gauze that the wind pushed across the fields. As if a hand had rubbed a rod of graphite against the horizon, sketching vertical shafts of ghost in the warming day

I rubbed the salve onto my corneas so I’d have the power to stare through glamour, to a person’s insides. A faery can do that without any ointment, a human needs a lot of it, and a half-faery needs a thin coating. Usually there’s moss, puffed-up feathers, and spiders swinging on threads inside people, and one glimpse of that is enough to make anyone turn and sprint for her life.

My faery mother, Aurora, liked to siphon the rich beauty out of milk, leaving us with just the whiteness.
Aurora would buy beads to string me bracelets, but she’d steal the brightness from the colors.
She sapped the juice out of papayas, the bite out of peppers.
What she robbed, worse than all that, was the strength from my father’s bones. Tonight I fried bean cakes with shrimp and sliced pineapple as tender as butter—he didn’t touch any of it. He claims that only the touch of my mother will save him. I scream that it’s been three years since she left us, and in faery time two months equal two hundred years, and you do the math, I’m weary of it, she’s a sprite, a firefly, a belch of swamp gas, an accordion made of sparks that you grasp in both hands and squeeze to hear music, but she explodes in your face. Aurora was born in water; the rain makes Papa wonder if she’s splintering into an army of needles hailing down on him.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of the faery painter Charles Doyle who, like Richard Dadd, had been confined to an insane asylum and whose imagery came from his personal visions. The faery painter Richard Doyle, by all accounts a sane, sweet-tempered man, was Arthur Conan Doyle’s uncle.

They are often portrayed as amoral beings, rather than as immoral ones, who simply have little comprehension of human notions of right and wrong.
The great English folklorist Katharine Briggs tended to avoid the “good” and “bad” division, preferring the categorizations of Solitary and Trooping Faeries instead.

Bishop Thomas Percy began to collect old English folk ballads, which he published in an influential volume called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Without Percy’s labors, many old poems and ballads might have been lost forever—he rescued one important manuscript from a cottager who was using it to light the fire

Opium derivatives like laudanum, called “the aspirin of the 19th century,” were available without prescription in Victorian England, and were commonly used for insomnia, headaches and “women’s troubles”. It may be no accident that the Victorian’s obsessions with fairies and Spiritualism occurred during the same span of years when casual opium use was widespread.