Free The Fairy Ring by Mary Losure

matter. “My husband always says he believes in fairies,” she once wrote, “but he always says it in the middle of when he is laughing.”
    Back in England, no one knew who Frances was. She could daydream all she wanted now and nobody asked her if she was thinking about fairies.
    She danced the Charleston, just like any carefree, pretty young woman. She went on vacation and sent back a picture of herself in a grass skirt, signed “Love, Frances.”

    Frances in a grass skirt
    In a long white gown and pearls, Frances married a soldier named Cecil Wilfred Way. She felt it was only right to tell him about the fairies, so she did. “It was one of those things that I thought he’d better know,” she told someone once. “And he believed me — always believed me.”
    For years and years, Frances never saw another fairy. Then another war started: the Second World War. Frances began to worry, just as she’d worried when she was only nine and her father went away to what was now called the First World War.
    Frances’s husband worked long hours, preparing for the great invasion of Europe that would decide whether England and its allies won the war or lost to Nazi Germany. Frances’s husband got sick and lost weight, and Frances got so worried that she had horrible headaches.
    Then one day, Frances was standing in the kitchen with a headache when she looked down and saw a fairy man gazing up at her.
    She ran from the room.
    After that, she began to wonder if being worried and seeing fairies had anything to do with each other.
    Sometimes, too, it seemed to Frances that she could hear people’s thoughts. It was very unpleasant, hearing what people were thinking as if they had spoken out loud, and Frances was glad when it went away.
    These days when she thought about the fairies, it seemed as though they’d haunted her all her life. She got a creepy feeling when she looked at the picture of herself with the dancing fairies. Their wings were much too large for real fairy wings. And the little gnome had a sinister look on his face.
    But the last photo, the one that Mr. Gardner had called the fairy’s bower, was different. She knew now that Mr. Gardner had been right about the last photo.
    There
were
fairies, real ones, in among the grasses.

    The fairy’s bower

F rances had two children, a boy named David and a girl named Christine.
    One day when the grown-ups were gone, David and Christine had nothing much to do. So together, they went exploring in the house.
    They snuck into their mother’s bedroom and rummaged around in her cupboard. On the second shelf, they found a book wrapped in brown paper. They leafed through the pages — and there, sitting in front of a waterfall and gazing straight at them, was their mother as a little girl. A ring of fairies seemed to be dancing all around her.
    The book was called
The Coming of the Fairies.
    David and Christine put the book back in the cupboard, exactly where they’d found it. They closed the door and never said a word to anybody.
    Years went by, and one day when David was seventeen and Christine was fifteen, they happened to be talking about a science-fiction story they’d both read. It was about hidden worlds that existed right alongside the everyday world and how, if conditions were right, the two worlds could meet. David and Christine were deep in conversation when they realized that their mother was there in the room.
    In a quiet voice, she told Christine to go to the cupboard in the bedroom and bring back a book, covered in brown paper, that she would find on the second shelf. Christine handed it to her in silence. Then their mother told them about the fairies.
    David didn’t think they were real, but Christine was thrilled.
    Her own mother had seen fairies!
    “Now I’ve told you,” her mother said, “and I never want to hear about it again.”
    Elsie was looking through a magazine once when she saw a cruel cartoon of Sir Arthur. It showed him squinting dreamily