Cassie was four years old.

The tunnel had seemed bigger then, a yawning emerald portal to another world. She didn’t have to duck to walk through. There were more twists and turns, though, more canes to step over and weeds brushing her ankles. The chain link fence towered overhead, and the vines that trellised up its wire were supple and green, closer to the sun, since the bramble had only recently grown through the fence that summer.

This wasn’t the first time she had made her way through the gate to the secret bower within. She had already populated the space with an old blanket to sit upon, a keychain compass in case she got lost, and a cookie tin whose inside was lined by her best stickers: her treasure box.

A boy was crouched in the duff before the open box, picking delicately through her treasures.

“Hey!” Cassie said indignantly. “That’s mine!”

With a flicker of shadow, the boy disappeared. The marble he had been examining fell into the duff without a sound.

Cassie was overcome with remorse. “Wait!” she cried. “Don’t go, I’m sorry! Come back!” But nothing stirred.

She began to weep, certain she had just scared off a fairy. She flung herself to the ground and scrabbled for the marble. “Look,” she pleaded, voice gluey with tears, “I’ll show you everything! This one’s a marble. It’s green glass.” She put the marble back in the box and pulled out her next treasure, a banded feather. “This is a feather from a kestrel. Daddy says it’s probably a tail feather. Sometimes birds lose their feathers but it’s okay because they can grow new ones.” Next out of the box came two coins. “This is a Silver Eagle dollar, and this is a penny I found on the sundial in the Botanical Gardens.”

She methodically worked her way through the contents: a ceramic unicorn, the vertebra of some small creature bleached white by the sun, a polished amethyst, an assortment of holographic stickers. When she had finished, and the boy had not reappeared despite several more tearful entreaties, she left the box open, announced to the void that he was welcome to investigate its contents to his heart’s content, and exited the bramble. She raced to her room and plastered herself to the window with her plastic binoculars, and kept them trained on the blackberry bramble for the rest of the afternoon. She saw nothing.

She returned the next day with a glitter bead, a book, and two painstakingly-negotiated-for cookies (she had foregone dessert the night before). She added the bead to her treasure box, after describing its properties and provenance aloud, and sat cross-legged on the blanket to describe, in her own words, what happened if you gave a mouse a cookie, stopping to show the pictures at appropriate intervals. She ate one cookie and placed the second one in the middle of the blanket. There was no sign of the boy, so once again she left the bramble and staked it out from her bedroom window. Unable to withstand the suspense for another whole day, she returned late in the afternoon. The cookie was gone.

She ran back inside. “DADDY!” she screamed, “DADDY THE FAIRY ATE MY COOKIE!”

“Did she?” Dad was sitting in the kitchen in his scrubs, reading the newspaper he’d missed that morning.

“No Daddy, it’s a boy fairy.”

“Oh, my mistake.” He folded the newspaper away and rested his chin on his hands to give Cassie his full attention. “Did he like it?”

“I think so.” Cassie climbed onto her chair next to his. “He ate the whole thing.”

“Wow, he must have really liked it then; that’s a lot of cookie for a little fairy to eat.”

Cassie leaned all the way onto the table in her excitement. “No he’s not a little fairy. He’s the same size as me!”

Her father tapped his lips thoughtfully. “Are you sure he’s a fairy, then?”

Cassie hesitated. When she didn’t answer, he prompted further: “Did he have wings?”

“No.”

“Did he have pointy ears?”

“Umm, I don’t think so.”

“Did he sparkle with fairy dust and drink tea from a buttercup?” Dad’s voice was serious, but his eyes crinkled.

“Nnnnooooooo,” Cassie drawled, grinning. “But when I talked to him he disappeared and dropped my marble!”

“Oh, well that does sound appropriately magical. Very fairy-like. Will he require more cookies?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he might.” Dad stood and reached into the cookie jar on top of the refrigerator and pulled another one out. “Don’t tell your mom,” he whispered, and furtively slid it along the table to Cassie. “Thank you!” she squealed, and ran back outside.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

There was no sign of the boy as she scrambled through to leave the extra cookie on the blanket. She sat still for a moment on her knees, peering into the gloom; nothing moved, but she had the distinct sensation of being watched. “I got another cookie for you,” she called softly. Still nothing. Cassie heard her name from the kitchen. “I have to go now,” Cassie said. “I hope you like it.”

She tried a different tactic the next day. Armed with a book, a carton of chocolate milk sprouting a crazy straw, and one of Tyler’s rejected Hotwheels (it was pink), she took a sip and then rested the milk in the duff just beyond arm’s reach. She placed the toy car next to it. Then she settled in and began to ‘read’ her book, studiously ignoring her surroundings. After a minute, feigning fatigue, she lay down on the blanket, pillowing her head uncomfortably on top of her treasure box. Following a couple of ludicrously overacted yawns, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep.

For a while—a long while, in her estimation—nothing happened. Birds chirped and rustled. The occasional car drove by on the street. Tyler and Matt were at soccer and math camp, respectively, so there was none of the usual brotherly rumpus. Dad was at the clinic and Mom was quilting inside. It was the perfect time to lure a fairy.

There was a faint noise, as of a small plastic wheel being spun on a tiny axle.

Cassie opened her eyes to the barest of slits. The boy was there, crouched on his skinny haunches, gently flicking each wheel of the toy car in turn to make it spin. He wore rough brown pants of an indeterminate fabric, cuffed above the ankles of his bare feet, and a thin black sweater. His hair was black and very messy; Cassie could see a number of leaves caught up in its tangle, and a caterpillar inched along one strand. She couldn’t even see if his ears were pointy under that thicket. His eyes were the same improbable green as the glass marble in her treasure box.

Cassie risked opening her eyes all the way but otherwise didn’t move. He didn’t notice. He picked up the milk carton and examined each side, pausing once or twice to sniff it like a wild animal. Only when he went to put the milk down again did he see Cassie was awake. He locked eyes with her and froze.

She didn’t speak, afraid she would scare him away again. There was no expression in his face, but his body was as taut as a rabbit about to bolt. Cassie just lay there and breathed around her pounding heart. Finally, when she could bear it no longer, she whispered, “Hello.”

For an instant, it became hard to see him, as though there had never been a boy there at all but merely a very unusual concatenation of thorny vine and shadow that gave the illusion of a crouching boy. But a moment later he reappeared, behind a spray of canes, as though to keep something between himself and Cassie for protection. He didn’t answer, but his eyes never left hers.

Cassie risked raising her head slowly. When he didn’t move, she sat up all the way and wrapped her arms around her knees, trying to make herself look as small and unthreatening as possible. “Hello,” she tried again.

“Hello.” The voice was a breath of wind through the leaves. It didn’t seem to come from the boy at all. She wasn’t sure his mouth had moved.

“Are you a fairy?”

There was an uncertain wavering of vines. “What is a fairy?” whispered the wind.

Cassie was stumped. Fairies were self-evident. “They—it’s—fairies are tiny people with magic. Sometimes they grant wishes or make shoes or—or—take teeth. The ones with wings fly around.”

There was a polite pause while this information was considered, then: “No.” For the first time, the voice clearly emanated from the boy. He crept forward again cautiously and sat just beyond her reach. “I am not a fairy.”

“Oh.” Cassie tried to hide her disappointment. “That’s okay,” she rallied charitably, “You can still have the chocolate milk.” She watched as the boy raised the milk carton and eyed it uncertainly.

“You drink it by sucking through the straw,” Cassie explained. When he still looked baffled, she held out her hand. “I’ll show you.” He observed while she demonstrated and gave it back. Cassie watched as he hesitantly operated the crazy straw. “Are you a ghost?”

“What is a ghost?”

This one was easier. “It’s the spirit of a dead person.”

“No. I am alive.” He sipped at the milk.

Cassie had exhausted her limited knowledge of the supernatural at this point. The only other option vaguely occurring to her was wizard but those were old men with beards. “So you’re just a boy then.” Boys couldn’t disappear, though. “Are you a magic boy?” He didn’t answer; he was slowly extracting the crazy straw for further examination. “What’s your name?”

“What is a name?”

If she hasn’t already been looking right at him, Cassie would have done a double take. This sounded like the sort of deliberately obtuse answer Tyler might give in a fit of obnoxiousness, but this boy appeared completely serious. “It’s a word that we call ourselves. My name is Cassandra Nicole Harris.”

The boy looked puzzled. “That is three words.”

This was a fair point. “My nickname is Cassie. That’s only one word. You can call me that.”

“Cassie.”

“Yes. What’s your name?”

He seemed troubled. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know!” Cassie searched again for any signs that he was putting her on, but found none. “Did you forget?”

“No,” he replied, a bit defensively. “I’ve never had one.”

“Everybody has a name. It’s the law,” Cassie declared. “What do your mommy and daddy call you?”

He turned his attention back to reinserting the straw into the milk carton and didn’t reply.

“You don’t have to tell me your real name,” Cassie persisted, “but I have to have something to call you.”

He turned his luminous eyes to hers in abrupt interest. “What do you want to call me?”

Cassie felt her face grow hot. “Um.” She looked down and picked at the duff. “I don’t know.”

“You can make a name up for me,” he offered solemnly.

Cassie sensed a hook. “I’ll have to think about it,” she said. “Can I tell you tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be here? In the blackberry?”

“Yes.”

Cassie felt very pleased with her cleverness. “Okay, then. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”