His watch beeped at him and told him he was stressed. "Would you like to do a breathing exercise?" It asked.
"No" he thought. "I would not." The plane was close to arrival and the seatbelt light was on. He needed to pee. His foot hurt and one side of his thumb ached for no reason at all. He did not look at the thing standing by the lavatory.
No one else could see it, he assumed. It was one of the things he didn't talk about. Like the emails he should have answered that lay pulsing in his inbox, nagging at his guts and blinking behind a list of other undone things. Like his feelings about god or his father's death. You just didn't tell strangers you saw faeries on an airplane.
Some of them looked like regular people. They sat in their seats and queued up with everyone else. But there was something off about them. Once he had sat across from one and was sure that everyone else saw that she had carried a large basket of earth complete with turf and wildflowers growing out of it. It fit in the bin, but dribbled dirt and sweet pollen down the aisle. She was pretty. He couldn't look at her without staring so instead he looked ahead and imagined she was a college student in a hoodie and not an elven cloak.
Today it looked like a furry tree was growing out of the back of the plane. The flight attendants nudged the cart through the leaves and absently brushed the moss. It moved out of the way when someone needed to use the lavatory.
He needed to pee.
But he sat and tried not to notice that the tree seemed to get closer. Maybe it was going to sit in first class when we landed or it would squeeze through the pilots door and look out of the front windows looking for home, its leaves touching the pilot's shoulders and the controls.
A bird flew down the aisle and he lost sight of the tree. It smelled like wet earth and soft wood. He imagined pushing into a log to see what was inside. How had it gotten on the plane? How did it move? Why no one else could see it was a question he stopped asking. When you see trolls hiding as a rock along the road and faeries dancing on the sidewalk, the answer is easy. . . You're crazy.
It was a manageable insanity, he told himself. Once he talked to an online therapist about it. It went about like you imagine.
He set up the appointment after he tried to talk to the young man with hair like a house sparrow. the youth was surprised he had been spotted and shyly chatted with him on the trail as they walked together. the faerie had offered him a drink from his canteen as they rested together by the water. It tasted like elderberry and burned a little like it was distilled mead. His memory is a bit fuzzy after that. There might have been dancing. He could remember playing the fiddle while someone played a drum and pipes. The song nagged at him when he was on the edge of sleep but couldn't remember how it went when he was all the way awake.
He missed work the next day and woke up in his apartment, lying in a pile of leaves, in clothes that he didn't remember owning.
He was nervous logging into the therapy session. The woman that was on the screen wrote in a notebook he couldn't see. She seemed tired. They started with the basics - name, age, what he did for a living, some of the kinds of therapy she was comfortable with, how she ran the sessions. Then the real questions.
"Why did you set up this meeting." She asked
He shrugged and paused to find the words. She assured him that this was "a judgement free zone," that whatever he said to her would be kept in secret, unless it was something that she was "legally obligated by law to disclose, if you have harmed yourself or others or plan to."
She waited.
He hoped she would talk again. She waited. It was not her first time with patients that were reticent to say what was wrong. It was best to wait.
He sighed and looked away from the screen. Oddly this meant he looked directly at the camera by mistake. She stared in his eyes while he tried to look away. "I see things." He finally said
"Like what?" she asked after another long pause. Tapping her pen.
He paused again and then without a breath jumped directly into his story at the end instead of the beginning.
"There is a pile of oak and beech leaves in the corner of my kitchen." He said. " They are still green as if a wind blew them off of the trees or someone picked them off of the branches. The oak leaves have a dusty fuzz on them that rubs off. Underneath they are shiny. The beech leaves are veiny and stiff. I don't recognize the species."
She blinked and waited, Assuming that there is more.
"When I woke up the leaves covered my face and I didn't get up at first because I was afraid I had been buried alive."
"Why did you think that?" She asked.
"I didn't remember getting into a pile of leaves and waking felt like this was still a dream that could turn to a nightmare." He described the music and that he couldn't remember everything.
"Tell me what you can"
"I never dance." He said. I don't remember how. I am not sure that I ever learned and it isn't something that we did when I was a kid."
"Was this the dream?" she asked.
"Maybe, but when I dared sit up the leaves fell off and I was alone in my apartment. They are still there." He pointed behind him. "Can you see them?"
She couldn't. The angle was bad so he turned his laptop and pointed to the corner where the leaves touched the cabinets and the kitchen table. It was a big pile. He said. She still couldn't see them.
"I didn't think so" He said. She asked him why he wasn't more surprised. He shrugged again. "I see things." He said again as if that was an answer. She wrote in her notebook.
He waited.
She asked to hear more. He tried to explain. They only had an hour and he was frustrated. He wasted 20 minutes on what seemed like procrastination now that they had only 15 minutes left and he seemed unable to explain why ordinary things sometimes shifted and walked away or why some people seemed to leak magic in their wake like they were part in this world and part in another where it was perfectly normal to have antlers or be invisible. The more he talked the faster the time flew. She wrote and didn't interrupt. He didn't make much sense. He didn't tell her about the elven youth and his flowery drink or his lost time.
She wanted to meet again. Next week. As soon as possible. Recommended an appointment with a psychologist for a prescription. He was embarrassed remembering because he closed the screen and never came back.
Did it get worse after that? He didn't think so, but avoiding thinking about officially being diagnosed as schizophrenic broke a wall inside maybe.
It seemed like the magic was pushing into his life everywhere he went. When they landed everyone shuffled out of the plane past the tree. The leaves touched the shoulders of the flight attendants as they said goodbye over and over again.
When it was his turn he absent-mindedly reached over and picked an acorn and handed it to the flight attendant. She thanked him and then shivered as a wind rustled the leaves behind her. She furrowed her brow and pulled a leaf out of her hair as she wished him "good day".
He smiled, turned and walked away on the jet bridge, humming a tune that felt light and new.
