August 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 4

Once back in the day, one of our professors theorized that faeries led cattle to higher ground before thunderstorms so they wouldn’t drown. Rather than keeping this idea to himself, as good sense would suggest, he wrote a letter to the editor of the largest newspaper in the state.

Well, you can guess what happened. Everyone from the alumni association to the campus Bible study got up in arms about it. Some alumni said the letter was an embarrassment to the university. Some people thought it was evidence of the decline of rational thought, an assault on modernity. Still others said it just proved that these academic types needed their heads aired out, preferably by a head shrinker.

The whole thing climaxed when a regent’s meeting, originally called to discuss dorm fees, was hijacked by the various combatants. The result was a shouting match where the usual people said the usual things about the weirdness of the over-educated. At least, that’s what my older brother, who was there, said.

Eventually, the affair was eclipsed by the next scandal, I believe it had something to do with steroids. It was decided by sophisticated folk that having a genuine nutty professor around added character to the university making it more than just another cow college. In a rational world, this would have been the end of the matter. Yet, with the funky persistence of fish odor, the letter lived on taking its place in urban legend.

It should have surprised no one that mad Merrill would gravitate to the letter. Don’t get me wrong, the man was a certifiable genius. Had he not been certified in other ways, he might have been teaching at MIT. You could not call him crazy; you don’t use that word for a genius. Instead, folk used words like “eccentric,” “unorthodox,” and “maverick,” to describe the man.

Nor did it surprise me that he had developed a way to test the theory at the heart of old Dr. Griffin’s theory by seeking out the realm of faery. What surprised me was that I became part of the test.

For that I have Tim to thank. “Hay Joe,” he said, “you’re into fantasy and all that stuff. Why don’t you come to Dr. Merrill’s office with me and here about his new experiment; I promise you’ll be blown away.”

I’d talked to Tim about my graduate work in the English department. The point of my thesis was that space aliens were the faerie folk of the technological age. The work was too good, and too fun, to be true. Best of all, I could read authors like Gaimen, Bradburry, and Swanwick and tell my mom that it was for my schoolwork. I had no idea that my work would get me out here, literally in the field, to play scientist with a bunch of other crazies as a truly terrifying storm moved over us.

“Hello,” a voice boomed breaking my reverie. “What you guys doing?”

“Science,” replied Dr. Merrill, “very important research.”

“Same here,” replied the voice, “we’re storm hunting. We heard that there was a big one just north of Boone, a twister, maybe half a mile wide. We’re checking it out. We should get some awesome photos; real front-page stuff.”

“Good luck,” replied Dr. Merrill as the storm chasers drove off.

“No one left but us fools,” commented Dr. Jones, the campus skeptic.

“So,” replied Dr. Merrill, “are you including yourself in our illustrious company?”

“Hey,” the skeptic replied, “I got to see this. I might even write an article about it in my newsletter. I’ve just finished a piece about Baptists who think that God will protect their church from lightning, so they don’t need lightning rods; I might be able to put together a special issue. I could call it Weirdos VS Wild Weather.”

“He’s such a good writer” said Amanda, his assistant. “His peace on Dr. Goode the psychic and the radio in his ear was a classic.”

“I’m sure it was” replied Tim as he scurried about hooking up Dr. Merrill’s various arcane machines doing marvels with tape, clamps, pliers, and other tools that would have made Merlin green with envy. “If it ever comes out in Braille, I’ll have to read it.”

Tim made the last connection, putting together a mess that belonged to Dr. Frankenstein’s yard sale. The main piece in all of this was the electron flipper, a gismo that looked like an oversized grill with connections to a lot of other stuff, a generator, a range finder, and a bunch of other incomprehensible machines.

Dr. Merrill explained his theory the previous week. He said that spinning an electron once got you an upside-down electron. You had to spin it again to get it pointing in its original direction. He theorized that there was an alternate reality where the electron was right side up after the first spin. This, he theorized, was where Dr. Griffin’s faeries lived.

I pulled myself back to the moment and fired up the computer. I got the computer gig because I’d achieved a reputation, in the one computer science class I’d taken, for knowing where the semicolon went when you wrote code. Also, I was available.

“You’re a magician out there,” I said to Tim as I invoked a wizard to connect the computer to the range finder.

“It’s engineering,” he replied, “the best magic in the world.”

He sat down and asked in a shaky voice, “Could you hand me a beer? I’ve always been willing to do anything for someone who would give a blind guy a chance; but I wish we had picked a less impressive storm.”

Tim seemed worried that I wouldn’t be the only one blown away; after all, this was Cyclone country.

As I invoked the powers of the computer, Dr. Merrill and his assistant Beth discussed all sorts of stuff I didn’t understand. Where the physics left off and the magic began, I couldn’t tell; so, I contemplated Clarke’s law, that any sufficiently advanced, or weird, science would be indistinguishable from magic.

“The system’s ready for testing,” I said, invoking the last wizard.

“We’re ready here,” Dr. Merrill said as I pointed the field projector, a thing that looked like a cannon, capped by a magnifying glass, at an empty stretch of field.

“Testing it now,” I replied clicking the start icon. A droning sound, like a hive of disturbed hornets, arose and something that wasn’t light began to gather at the target. Suddenly, a patch of strangeness appeared about thirty feet in front of the projector. The black thunderheads that wallowed across the sky looked even darker, viewed through whatever it was, than they’d looked before.

“We’re drilling right into the astral plane!” cried Dr. Merrill with mad joy.

“Looks empty to me,” Dr. Jones replied, “it looks like the faeries are staying in where it’s dry.”

Suddenly a bolt of lightning lit up the sky on the other side of the darkness. The new territory seemed to act as a prism breaking the light into a fearful spectrum that expressed the darker colors of the rainbow, a sight more wondrous than beautiful.

“You can turn that off now,” Dr. Jones said with a voice trembling with awe, or perhaps with fear.

I played around with direction and field width to make sure I knew how the controls worked. Then, to Dr. Jones’ relief, I clicked the field generator off.

“Be on the lookout for strange behavior from the cows,” admonished Dr. Merrill as Tim went back to checking the connections and I made sure everything worked. The sky continued to darken. Clouds with great black distended bellies full of rain crowded a sky that felt ten months pregnant with a storm; I was sure that the water would break at any minute.

Ironically, it was Tim who noticed something happening. “Hay folks!” he exclaimed, “the cattle sure sound upset.”

“OK, turn it on!” yelled the physicist. I hastily fumbled with the keys to get maximum width and tried judging how far it was to the milling herd. I hit start.

The droning began once more and the bizarre dark returned, but this time it wasn’t empty; beings, faeries I suppose, flitted about the cattle using prods, or were they wands, to move the beasts towards a low hill in the middle distance; it seemed to be working.

As for the faeries, they were small, I’d say between six inches and a foot tall with iridescent wings; they shimmered against the bizarre darkness. The ones herding the cows seemed dressed like cowboys as envisioned by Disney; the one supervising, the faerie queen I called her for it was emphatically female, was not dressed at all as if clothes would not dare trespass upon the golden beauty of her body.

“The next time you run this,” Professor Jones quipped striving to stifle the reverence in his voice, “you should get a grant from Playboy to study nymphs.”

“I don’t think this is going in any skeptic’s newsletter,” muttered Tim.

I continued to scan the scene, the weird cattle drive, the rationalist learning how strange reason could be, the academic discussion between Dr. Merrill and Beth, and the high weirdness before us.

The faerie queen then turned; it seemed she was looking directly at me saying, “I thought you had enough sense to come in out of the rain.”

Suddenly, thunder blasted through the gravid air with a sound like the world being sundered and torrential rain slammed down. We were instantly soaked.

………………………………………

“I didn’t think we had to protect your people from drowning,” the faerie queen said. “We thought you were more intelligent than that. Maybe we were wrong.”

“We were curious,” I replied. It seemed an insufficient answer, but it was the one that came to me. “We believed you existed, helped the cattle, but we didn’t know for sure. We wanted knowledge, proof, of your existence.”

Coming into the faerie realm had been disorienting. When I’d crossed the boundary into faerie the dark realm had lit up while the mundane spaces I’d left fell into shadow, as if the light before me were turned on while the one behind was extinguished. Also, the fay had grown to human size while my folk became faerie small. So, if I was giving dumb answers, I could blame the weirdness.

“Knowledge is good,” the winged one replied. “Wisdom is better.”

“If you say so,” I said still trying to orient myself to this reality.

“We love the creatures of Earth,” she said. “We love you, the cattle, all of nature. It distresses us that you bring danger down on yourselves, that you destroy yourselves and your brothers in acts of folly and hate.”

“We love you too,” I said going through all the fantastic works I’d read. “We love you enough to find a way to know you. That’s why we sought you out.”

“To love is good,” she repeated. “To love wisely is better. We protect the cows whenever it rains. You could have picked a less dangerous storm for your experiment.”

She continued lecturing to me about human folly; said lecture seemed epic in length, but I later realized that it hadn’t taken long at all. Perhaps time did strange things in this neck of the astral woods, or maybe I was still disoriented.

“If you insist on staying out in the rain,” the winged lady said, “at least take off your clothes as I have done. That sodden mess has to be uncomfortably heavy,” she continued as she rubbed my back with a delicate wing.

“But your companions,” I said.

“They’re dressed for their duties.,” she replied. “They have to work with the cattle, we don’t.”

I began to disrobe thinking about her naked body, her delicate wings. The strangeness around me seemed to liberate my spirit from awkward shyness. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck the electron flipper filling the sky with actinic fire and dumping me back into mundanity. As with the best faery tales, my affections for the winged lady would remain unrequited.

I picked myself up from the ground pulling my pants back on in the process. All around me, Dr. Merrill’s equipment was sending up fireballs as if the gods of science and magic were having at each other with Roman candles. Soon, the authorities officially terminated our experiment.

---------------

I found myself answering a multitude of questions. Dr. Merilll wanted to know what the fay had told me. Tim wanted to know what it felt like to be in the faerie realm. The authorities wanted to know what we were doing, who was in charge, did we have licenses, etc. Most of those questions I passed on to Dr. Merrill. Dr. Jones, a reluctant believer, didn’t ask any questions at all.

The press also asked questions because I’d been spotted disrobing in the field; they felt cheated by my answer, for it fell short of the lurid details they craved. Soon, they lost interest as other news came along.

Eventually, the questions stopped; this I found unfortunate for I felt a compulsion to pass on what the fay had told me. I’ve said they loved us and had always respected our intelligence, but this respect was warming thin. They have ways to protect those they love from themselves, and I was promised that they would use them if necessary.

“I’m not allowing the fay to run my life,” Tim told me in a bar a few days later. “I’ve had enough of being told what to do at the braille school. I’ve not works as hard as I’ve worked to get out from under one set of custodians to replace them with another, no matter how wonderous,” he continued.

I found that I lived differently now. I stopped getting drunk; I stopped partying till dawn. I paid more attention to my schoolwork and started serious planning for my future that I’d never done before. I wanted to run my life without the guidance of the fae. But I know that my efforts alone cannot save us from that fate.

And so, I pass this message on to whoever will hear me. Whoever does not think I’m stone crazy hears my message. I tell them what the faerie queen told me. "If you want to keep your freedom, then don’t be stupid.”