A tale from the Orkney islands. 

A lighthouse keeper’s wife died, and in his grief he visited a witch who taught him to summon his wife from the Otherworld, snatching her back from the fairies. The trick worked, and thereafter every month on the full moon he summoned his dead wife to be with him again for that one night. 

No one, of course, asked the wife if she wished to return.

I died on a night wild with wind and sea-spray, when the beacon was helpless to guide anyone to safety — even me. Waves crashing and the air fraught with danger, and the fairies found my body

and brought me home. A journey along candlelit spirit paths humming with their wingbeats, every ley line leading straight and true to the heart of the Otherworld,

where I breathed again —

far from the lonely lighthouse, the desolate outcropping of rock perched on a remote island. He had been kind to me, of course: I was never a woman scorned or abused; 

but I was never 

a woman happy, for all of that. The fairies taught me to sing, to taste delicate foods, 

to laugh. They filled my days with sunlight and music, and I gathered flowers they entwined in my hair, 

drank water so clear and pure it had to come from a magical spring. Every day a blessing, every night calm and deep and restful. They fought for me, when he came; 

they protected me 

as far as they could, but he had accessed dark magic and in the end prevailed. What he couldn’t see was that I didn’t want what he wanted. The keeper who kept my heart and my soul for so long 

and couldn’t let go, sick with love and grief, and brought me back to a world cold, 

sharp, and harsh, filled with storms and misgivings, with fear and treachery, and thought I would be glad and grateful —

and never understood why I wasn’t.

[Jeannette de Beauvoir is a poet and novelist who lives and works at Land’s End—Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Emerson Review, the Looking Glass Review, Avalon Literary Review, the Blue Collar Review, Sheepshead Review, On Gaia Literary, Merganser Magazine, the Adirondack Review, Perception, and the New England Review, among others; she was featured in WCAI’s Poetry Sunday, and received the Mary Ballard Chapbook Prize and the Outermost Poetry Contest national award. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com.]