Afternoon of the Elves

Hillary got down on her hands and knees to look more closely. She counted the tiny houses. There were nine, each made of sticks bound delicately together with bits of string and wire.

“Not a bucket. A bottlecap!” snorted Sara-Kate, twitching her long, shaggy hair away from her face. She was eleven, two years older than Hillary, and she had never spoken to the younger girl before. She had hardly looked at her before.

The roofs of the houses were maple leaves attached to the sticks at jaunty angles. And because it was autumn, the leaves were lovely colors, orange-red, reddish-orange, deep yellow. Each house had a small yard in front neatly bordered with stones that appeared to have come from the driveway.

Hillary looked at her suspiciously then. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe so much as that she couldn’t right away put Sara-Kate on the side of magic. There never had been one pretty thing about her. Nothing soft or mysterious. Her face was narrow and ended in a sharp chin, and her eyes were small and hard as bullets. They were such little eyes, and set so deeply in her head, that the impression she gave was of a gaunt, fierce bird, a rather untidy bird if one took her clothes into consideration. They hung on her frame, an assortment of ill-fitting, wrinkly garments. (“Doesn’t she care how she looks?” a new girl at school had inquired just this fall, giving every child within earshot the chance to whirl around and shout, “No!”)

“No she didn’t. Alison, that’s terrible!” Normally, fourth graders were too shy to risk comment on students in higher grades. But Sara-Kate had been held back in school that year. She was taking the fifth grade all over again, which made her a curiosity.

“Can you tell me where you found those amazing boots? I’ve just got to get some exactly like them,” Jane said to her one day, wearing a look of such innocence that for a second nobody thought to laugh.

In the middle of Sara-Kate’s backyard, Hillary recalled the sound of that laughter while she stared at Sara-Kate’s boots. Then she glanced up at Sara-Kate’s face.

“Why does it have to be elves? Why couldn’t it be birds or chipmunks or some animal we’ve never heard of? Or maybe some person made these houses,” Hillary said, a sly tone in her voice. She got off her knees and stood up beside the older girl. “We are the same height!” she announced in surprise.

“Look,” she said. “I didn’t have to invite you over here today and I didn’t have to show you this. I thought you might like to see an elf village for a change. If you don’t believe it’s elves, that’s your problem. I know it’s elves.”

So, there they were: elves—a whole village of them living down in Sara-Kate’s junky, overgrown backyard that was itself in back of Sara-Kate’s broken-down house with the paint peeling off. Sara-Kate’s yard was not the place Hillary would have picked to build a village if she were an elf. Where there weren’t thistles and weeds there was mud, and in the mud, broken glass and wire and pieces of rope. There were old black tires and rusty parts of car engines and a washing machine turned over on its side. Carpets of poison ivy grew under the trees and among the bushes. Nobody ever played in Sara-Kate’s backyard. But then, as Sara-Kate would have said, nobody had ever been invited to play in her backyard. Except Hillary, that is, on that first afternoon of the elves.

“Sara-Kate Connolly thinks she’s got elves,” Hillary told her mother when she came home, rather late, from looking at the village. The yards of the two families backed up to each other, a source of irritation to Hillary’s father, who believed that property should be kept up to standard. But who could he complain to? Sara-Kate’s father did not live there anymore. (“He’s away on a trip,” Sara-Kate always said.) And Sara-Kate’s mother didn’t care about yards. She hardly ever went outside. She kept the shades of the house drawn down tight, even in summer.

“They’re living in her backyard,” Hillary said. “They have little houses and a well. I said it must be something else but Sara-Kate is sure it’s elves. It couldn’t be, could it?”

“I don’t like you playing in that yard,” Hillary’s mother told her. “It’s not a safe place for children. If you want to see Sara-Kate, invite her over here.”

“Sara-Kate won’t come over here. She never goes to other people’s houses. And she never invites anyone to her house,” Hillary added significantly. She tried to flick her hair over her shoulder the way Sara-Kate had done it that afternoon. But the sides were too short and refused to stay back.

But how could Hillary invite Sara-Kate to play? And play with what? The elves were not in Hillary’s backyard, which was neat and well-tended, with an apple tree to climb and a round garden filled with autumn flowers. Hillary’s father had bought a stone birdbath at a garden shop and placed it on a small mound at the center of the garden. He’d planted ivy on the mound and trained it to grow up the birdbath’s fluted stem. Birds came from all over the neighborhood to swim there, and even squirrels and chipmunks dashed through for a dip. The birdbath made the garden beautiful.

“Now it’s a real garden,” Hillary’s father had said proudly, and, until that afternoon, Hillary had agreed. She had thought it was among the most perfect gardens on earth.

Sara-Kate’s elves began to change things almost immediately, however. Not that Hillary really believed in them. No, she didn’t. Why should she? Sara-Kate was not her friend. But, even without being believed, magic can begin to change things. It moves invisibly through the air, dissolving the usual ways of seeing, allowing new ways to creep in, secretly, quietly, like a stray cat sliding through bushes.

“Sara-Kate says elves don’t like being out in the open,” Hillary remarked that evening as she and her father strolled across their garden’s well-mowed lawn. She found herself examining the birdbath with new, critical eyes.

She turned toward Sara-Kate’s house next. Its dark form loomed behind the hedge at the bottom of the yard. Though evening had come, no light showed in any of the windows.

Now that Hillary thought about it, she could not remember ever seeing many lights down there. Gray and expressionless was how the house generally appeared. What could Sara-Kate and her mother be doing inside? Hillary wondered, and, for a moment, she had a rather grim vision of two shapes sitting motionless at a table in the dark.

Then she remembered the shades. Mrs. Connolly’s shades must be drawn so tightly that not a ray of light could escape. Behind them, Sara-Kate was probably having dinner in the kitchen, or she was doing her homework.

Hillary imagined Sara-Kate Connolly frowning after this remark. She felt sure that Sara-Kate was too old to be reminded of her manners. Too old and too tough. Not really the kind of person to have elves in her backyard, Hillary thought.

“Wait for me. Wait!” Hillary cried. She didn’t want to be left behind. Night had fallen so quickly, like a great black curtain on a stage. In a minute she might have been quite frightened except that suddenly, through the garden, the twinkling lights of the fireflies burst forth. It was as if the little bugs had waited all day for this moment to leap out of hiding. Or had they been there all along, blinking steadily but invisibly in the daylight? Hillary paused and looked about.

“Coming,” she called, and turned to run in. A gust of wind slid across her cheek. Like lanterns in the grip of magic hands, the tiny lights flickered over the lawn.