Free Afternoon of the Elves by Janet Taylor Lisle

still awake.
    â€œWhat an independent child you are,” Mrs. Lenox said, coming over to give Hillary a hug. “What did you do all evening? I never heard a sound, and now you’ve even put yourself to bed. You won’t need a mother at all by next year. I’d better start interviewing for a new position.”
    â€œSilly,” Hillary said, smiling up at her. “I’ll always need a mother.” But she offered not a word of explanation, and after her mother had gone she lay awake thinking wild and dazzling thoughts that made her feel quite separate from her parents and their ordinary lives.
    For Hillary had seen an elf that night. She was sure of it. To lie still in bed and think everything through only made it clearer. All those days of peering into bushes, all those afternoons imagining faces in the leaves seemed ridiculous now when the real thing had been walking around in plain view the whole time.
    How stupid she had been to suppose that elves must have pointed feet and little caps. How idiotic to think they must always be tiny. These ideas were held by a world that knew nothing about elves, by people who had never really looked, who were afraid to look, maybe, Hillary thought, remembering how she had pushed Sara-Kate’s appearance in the upstairs room from her mind because it seemed so strange and frightening. Not that seeing an elf was easy even when you did want to look. Hillary had been looking at Sara-Kate Connolly for two solid months and only tonight had she finally begun to see.
    Sara-Kate had thick skin not because she was “like an elf” but because she was one. Sara-Kate wasn’t miniature or green but she had the elf’s thin body and the elfin quickness. (“I’d never seen a person that small run so fast,” Hillary’s father had said.)
    Sara-Kate ate elf foods like berries and mint leaves. She hid herself inside the sagging folds of her old clothes in the same way the elves hid within the junk and disorder of the Connollys’ backyard. And how had she come to know so much about elves in the first place except by knowing them from the inside, by being one?
    The elves in Sara-Kate’s yard had not come to live there by chance, Hillary now saw. Sara-Kate hadn’t simply found them one day outside her back door as she pretended. The elves were there because Sara-Kate was there. She was their leader and protector. She kept their small community safe from the outside world. When Sara-Kate went away, the elves went with her. And when the weather grew too cold for even the thickness of an elf, she brought the precious magic beings inside to live in her empty house—an elf house, it must be—with her strangely sick mother.
    Hillary lay in her bed shivering with the force of these thoughts. It seemed that her mind had become ten times sharper, ten times brighter, and that it could go into dark places that had confounded it before. Such was the energy of her imagination, that she wondered if she were becoming a bit of an elf herself. Was it possible to become an elf by associating with one?
    Hillary stayed awake for hours that night. When she slept at last, she entered dreams that were filled with magic and the impossible possibilities of things, dreams that, oddly enough, were not so different from what was happening to her in her real waking life at that moment.

    Hillary woke the next morning to a world in silent frenzy outside her window. Armies of snow-flakes swirled before her eyes. The round outline of her father’s garden was already erased and the birdbath had collected an odd-looking drift on top. It rose in the basin like a lop-sided white flame, giving the birdbath the unexpected look of an Olympic torch.
    â€œA foot of snow fallen and another foot predicted,” Mrs. Lenox informed Hillary when she arrived in the kitchen for breakfast. School was cancelled and “The snow blower’s broken, of course,” her