The Sânziene and the Forest Boy

Episode Five: The Truth About Fairies We married the following spring. Ilinca wore yellow flowers in her hair. Naturally. Bunica cried. Mama cried. My sister cried because everyone else was crying. Tata shook my hand. Ilinca gave her name to the priest as Ilinca Florescu. “Florescu?” I whispered. “I needed another name.” “You invented it?” “Possibly.” The priest looked suspicious. Ilinca smiled sweetly. He decided God could sort it out later. We built our house where the orchard met the forest. Not too close. Ilinca said boundaries were important. The first year we planted lavender, thyme and apple trees. The second year we added hives. The bees adored her. Obviously. By twenty-three I had accepted that I would spend my entire marriage pretending the strange things surrounding my wife were normal. Fox at the kitchen door? Normal. Dormouse sleeping in her apron pocket? Common. Wildflowers blooming in February because she was angry with me. Our first daughter was born during a thunderstorm. Ilinca bit my hand hard enough to leave scars and informed me midway through labour that if men designed childbirth, humanity deserved extinction. Our son arrived two years later, loudly. Then another daughter. Our children grew up believing every family kept honey, fed foxes and occasionally found their mother standing in the garden at midnight listening to plants. They became ordinary adults. Except our youngest can find lost animals. But that proves nothing. Years passed. The wonderful thing about a happy ending is that it does not feel like an ending while you are inside it. There are dishes. Bills. Mud. Coughs. Roof repairs. Children shouting. Grandchildren shouting louder. There are arguments about where somebody put the good knife. There are nights when two people are too tired to speak. There are mornings when one rolls toward the other in bed and suddenly remembers the nineteen-year-old boy and twenty-one-summer girl beneath all the years that followed. Ilinca did grow older. Little lines appeared beside her eyes. Her blonde hair became pale silver. She complained about her knees. I found this extremely reassuring. Fairies, I assumed, did not complain about knees. Then again, Ilinca has always been talented at complaining. The stories began later. People from outside the valley heard about the meadow. Visitors came looking for it. They never found it. An ethnographer from Bucharest interviewed us when we were in our forties. He asked where Ilinca had been born. “Over the mountain,” she said. “Which village?” “A small one.” “What was it called?” “I forget.” He frowned. I nearly laughed. Later he interviewed my mother, who told him Ilinca had been “some barefoot girl Matei dragged home from the woods.” Perfectly reasonable. Parish records supported the ordinary explanation. Matei Dobre married Ilinca Florescu. Age twenty-one. Parents unknown. Nothing about fairies. Nothing about enchanted meadows. Nothing about bees answering questions. If you prefer facts, there they are. Ilinca herself remains unhelpful. Our grandchildren ask her every Sânziene. “Bunica, were you really a fairy?” “No.” “Bunicul says you were.” “Your bunicul also says he had thick hair when we met.” “I did.” “You were already losing it.” “I was nineteen!” “Early signs.” “Cruel woman.” The grandchildren love this. Then one of them inevitably asks why the foxes still come. Ilinca says we feed them. Why do the bees land on her without stinging? Practice. Why do yellow flowers bloom beneath her bedroom window every year on the night of 23 June? Good soil. Why has nobody ever found the meadow? Bad navigation. She has an answer for everything. Last year, on our fifty-second wedding anniversary, I woke before dawn. Ilinca was not beside me. I found her in the orchard. Barefoot. At eighty years old. Her silver hair hung loose down her back. Yellow flowers crowned her head. For one heartbeat she looked twenty-one again. Or perhaps the light was strange. That happens at dawn. Beyond her, at the edge of the trees, stood several women dressed in white. Young women. Golden-haired. Still. Watching. My heart stopped. Ilinca turned. The women were gone. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Couldn’t sleep.” “You're wearing flowers.” “I like flowers.” “Were there women behind you?” “No.” “Ilinca.” She smiled. That same smile. The one from the bee meadow. I had been married to it for more than half a century and still could not tell whether it meant affection, wickedness or both. “Matei.” “Yes?” “You are eighty-one years old.” “I am aware.” “You sometimes enter a room and forget why.” “That happened once.” “Yesterday.” “What is your point?” “Perhaps you should consider the possibility that your memory is unreliable.” Then she came to me. She smelled of summer. At eighty. In the cold hour before sunrise. Summer. She put her arms around my waist. I held her. Birds began waking in the trees. Somewhere in the hives, bees stirred. “Do you regret it?” I asked. “What?” “Choosing uncertainty.” Ilinca leaned back. Her eyes were still green. Age had changed almost everything else. Not those. She looked toward our house. At the windows behind which children had once slept. At the orchard we planted. At the hives. At fifty-three years of ridiculous, difficult, ordinary life. Then she looked at me. “Not yet.” I laughed. “Not yet?” “I refuse to commit myself.” “After fifty-three years?” “Uncertainty, remember?” She kissed me. Softly. The kiss of an old woman. The kiss of the girl beneath the pear tree. Both. When she walked back toward the house, I noticed something in the grass. A crown of yellow flowers. Freshly woven. Beside it were footprints. Bare feet. Several sets. They led from the forest to where Ilinca had been standing. None led back. I looked at my wife. She was waiting on the porch. “Well?” she called. I pointed at the footprints. Ilinca looked down. Then at me. Then she shrugged. “Deer.” “Those are human feet.” “Unusually shaped deer.” “Ilinca.” “Breakfast?” “Were you a Sânziană?” She opened the door. “Bring the flowers inside, Matei.” “That isn't an answer.” “It is the only one you’re getting.” And that, I suppose, is the problem with this story. I can tell you what I saw. I can tell you about the meadow that appeared where no meadow should be. The bees. The fox. The dancing women. The flowers blooming beneath snow. I can tell you that a beautiful girl walked out of the Romanian forest one summer, kissed a foolish nineteen-year-old boy, and taught him that growing up was not the moment he first made love to someone. It was the moment he understood that loving someone did not mean holding them still. Perhaps Ilinca was a Sânziană. Perhaps she was simply a strange twenty-one-year-old woman who liked walking barefoot, talking to animals and tormenting beekeepers. Perhaps I was nineteen, in love for the first time, and the whole world looked enchanted because of it. I know only one thing for certain. Every year, on the morning of Sânziene, I wake with yellow flowers on my pillow. I have never once seen Ilinca put them there. And after fifty-three years of marriage, I have become wise enough not to ask.

This is the end of The Sânziene and the Forest Boy. Produced by Fabled Audio. Written by Unquenchable and narrated by (insert name).