y mother considers faeries household pests, like mice or ants. While I have never experienced mice, we dealt with ants last summer when we first moved into this one-side-of-a-duplex we now rent in town. Waking each morning to be creeped out by a gaggle of black ants crawling on my bedsheets. Having to knock my shoes on the floor to force out any ants before slipping my feet inside. Grabbing a book from the shelf to find a whole colony of ants had taken up residence in the binding; they fell onto my lap once I opened my book. I’m not even going to mention what happened with that bag of flour under the sink. Think of an unpleasant experience and multiply it by a googol (which is one followed by one hundred zeroes). That is what having ants in your house is like.

Of course, we couldn’t tell the landlord, who might blame us, and we couldn’t call the exterminator because perhaps the problem originated in the other half of the duplex. (While we are friendly with Mrs. Delavecchio, who lives next door on our non-duplex side, we have no relationship with the people who live in the other half of our duplex. They never smile or wave hello or answer their door when my mother goes over to knock, and we know they are home because we can hear them and their home karaoke machine.) Even after we killed all the ants we could find in the house, new ones kept creeping in somehow. So my mother made lines of spices around the inside edges of our house. Ants, it is said, won’t cross lines of salt, paprika, cinnamon, baking soda, or chili flakes.

Except, of course, they will.

When we were about to give up entirely, my arch-enemy Amber Holden suggested a white silica powder that destroys the ants’ exoskeletons or suffocates them or causes them to go crazy or something, but doesn’t harm other animals. Three weeks later the ants had gone, and they haven’t been back since.

All this to say, I don’t think faeries in the house would be quite as frustrating as ants. I doubt they’d be much more than a slight nuisance (like how sometimes you see something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, there is nothing there — that’s how little of a bother I think having a faerie in the house would be). However, my mother is rabid about guarding her magical privacy. Why she is only concerned about this privacy inside our house and not outside of it is still unclear. Maybe out in the world, faeries are less likely to make a scene? In any case, this section concerns itself not with the why but rather the how; my mother wants no faeries in our house, and she has us work diligently to keep it that way.

There are two ways to keep faeries out: permanent and impermanent (although the permanent method can be broken with a degree of effort, but calling the two methods longly impermanent and quickly impermanent adds a level of complexity to the entire process that I do not wish to entertain).

The Permanent Method for Vanishing Faeries: This involves planting trees at certain positions around your house. There is some leeway in the placement, but basically, plant the trees near the foundation (not too close or the roots will wreck your house, but too far and the protection is meaningless; there will be some initial trial and error to determine the right distance for your home). The trees should be no more than six feet from each other. Moonless nights, also free from other types of light pollution, are required for these botanical maneuvers. Should the moon and/or street lights render you visible, any astute night-dwelling faeries will be able to see you gardening at night, and they will sabotage the process by uprooting the saplings before the roots stretch into the soil. (Previous magical wranglings between faeries and nature mean faeries are not permitted to intentionally destroy trees whose roots have stretched into the soil.) Roots need at least four hours to begin stretching into the soil. Thus, if you finish between midnight and 1:00 a.m., by the time the sun rises, it will be too late for the faeries to interfere.