I Believe In Faeries

He had become frightfully cunning. "Wendy," he said, "how we should all respect you."

She was wriggling her body in distress. It was quite as if she were trying to remain on the nursery floor.

But he had no pity for her.

"Wendy," he said, the sly one, "you could tuck us in at night."

--J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy

When I wake I always remember the white birch forest. It's bright there, and quiet like sacred ground is quiet.

"Is this the way?"

My companion grins mischievously and seizes my hand: "Come on!"

She's not quiet human: doe-eyed with arched brows, a pixie's nose, full lips and a close-cropped shock of burnt sienna. Walking with her is like hearing your mother-tongue spoken in a far-off dialect, or tasting strawberry chewing gum for the very first time.

When I was very small my parents took me to see a stage production of Peter Pan. There I saw a grown woman dressed as a magical boy flying on wires, and was forever smitten. I'm in her country now, a lost boy, my heart thrilling again to songs that only she can sing.

She's different now, grown up along with me, exchanged her green tights and cock-eyed cap-and-feather for rough denim slacks of umber-ochre and a knit sweater space-dyed with violet reds and deep sea greens. No longer clownish or carnivalesque, she's still the wild spirit of the woods.

When we reach her cabin she beams proudly and crows, "Well what d'ya think?" Before I can answer she scoops a handful of birch leaves off the ground and sprinkles them over my head. "Faerie dust!" she says, and laughs.

As we enter a fire is already burning in the cast iron stove. It's musty and dark, but a ray of brilliant sunlight falls through the single window onto her face and neck and across her broad shoulders. She's radiant, transfigured.

"Give me a thimble," she says, pulling me close.

I lean in to taste her salt-stained lips; I fall into her embrace and my soul takes flight. In a little while I become, I won't say childlike, but playful and trusting, uncalculating, disarmed. I can feel her love at work within me, changing me, a vine with a thousand tendrils taking root in virgin earth, turning over unseen soil in the darkness.

I feel something else too, an unformed thought sensed just beyond the mind's horizon, vast and troubling, closing in fast, concealed for the moment behind her double-edged tenderness. So I hold her a little closer, kiss her a little more passionately, seek a little reassurance, find a little courage. In her embrace I am ready to accept fate and scorn suffering, brave like mothers in childbirth.

When in time she lifts my shirt to caress my swelling breasts, their strangeness no longer startles me. "Of course," I think, with dream logic, "She's Peter, I'm Wendy."

My metamorphosis pleases her. She regards me with a casual and proprietary air. As she carelessly fondles me I feel a heat rising, rising and then condensing again in a narrow burning ridge between my thighs. I'm paralyzed by its intensity, helpless in her arms. I coo and murmur, I kiss and moan. And as she fingers that blazing ridge, I cry out.

Her breath is the wind. My body is earth. Her hands call forth my fire, and water flows from a deep fissure within me. I feel it pouring out of me, tricking down my legs. I'm lost to her now, enchanted.

When she reveals her own nakedness I see that she possesses, like a stolen scepter, the soft instrument of masculine pleasure. A hesitation overtakes me, or rather, a tension, a doubt whether having acquired a woman's form, I might also have acquired a woman's vulnerability.

I'm dizzy. My limbs are heavy and torpid. She grins wickedly, imp-like and spreads my legs until I'm splayed wide before her. Teasing me open she slides inside of me begins to take her pleasure.

I panic. I try to wake, to shake her off. I struggle and writhe, but it only seems embolden her, and soon my body betrays me through bliss and we begin to struggle together toward something inexpressible. I kiss her tenderly.

"Please," I whisper, with all of the poignant ambiguity of passion.

She stops, as though pierced through the heart. She seems overcome by a sudden pity. She withdraws, and climbs until her knees are astride my ears.

"Are you afraid? Then save yourself."

I understand. I kiss it. I take it inside my mouth. I caress its soft underbelly with my tongue.

She reaches one hand behind her and caresses my thighs to stoke my fever heat. Our eyes lock and we begin a contest of pleasure. I take her more deeply inside my mouth and hope that her desire will burst forth in a flame upon my lips, like at Pentecost.

For just a moment she seems moved to distraction. For a moment the tables are turned in my favor. When she breaks away, I'm shattered. She mounts me again and this time I make no resistance. My body is hers now. I want no say in it.

She takes her time. She lets herself enjoy every slow thrust. She's pacing herself. I linger on the brink of ecstasy, patient, at her service, enduring innumerable shades of pleasure...

Afterward we hold each other tightly and I am slowly returned to myself, a little more whole for having been broken. It's a sweet dream, not a nightmare. Sometimes I wake and in confusion recall a line of Blake's: "The cut worm forgives the plow."

* * *

I look for her in my waking hours. (Evidently it's not an uncommon longing; my queer friends complain of "tranny chasers".) But I haven't found her yet in any form meant for me. Sometimes I joke that if I feel an immediate, deep, attraction to a woman at our first introduction, she is almost certainly a lesbian.

Every now and then I meet a hetero-tomboy. Once I pursued a soldier. Such women fill me with hope. But looks are deceiving, and plenty of strong, broad-shouldered women want nothing more than to be some man's pussycat. I wish them well; and yet I will always hope to meet such a one as the young admirer who wrote to Sacher-Masoch:

"As a child I liked to wear boy's clothes, and ruled over them as a king. To this day I have an impulsive, domineering, obstinate spirit, and the thought of being obedient to or dependent on anyone has always been intolerable. I have at times been loved, but I have never loved. I have a cold heart, and cold blood."

I'm growing older. It's long past time to settle down, to "get serious", to marry sensibly and perhaps start a family. But I can't—I still believe in faeries.