OMG! My Uncle's A Fairy!

I was ten when I found out my uncle was a fairy. I overheard my dad and mum arguing about Uncle Jeb. “He’s a bleedin’ fairy, Eileen. I don’t want him hanging around Jason.”

“It’s not something you can catch,” my mum laughed. “It’s not like the common cold that can be passed on in sneezes.”

“And that mate of his, Hal. He’s a fairy too.”

“Jason adores both of them,” Mum said, her voice icy. “You going to tell him he can’t see his favourite relative anymore?”

My dad grumbled like he does every time he loses an argument to my mum. Then he always has to have the last word. “It’s not right. They spend far too much time over here. They’re a bad influence.”

I wandered out into the backyard to throw ball with Daz, our ageing Jack Russell terrier. He looked at me, as he always did whenever I kicked the bald tennis ball for him to fetch, as if to say that he was way too old for this sort of energetic behaviour. Nevertheless, he would always waddle away obediently and fetch, then slump over the ball, growling if I attempted to retrieve it.

I realised he was getting old, his reflexes not as sharp as they once were when he would almost beg for a game of fetch. Age was a foreign concept to me. I knew my nanna was as old as Daz. She used to nap every afternoon as well.
I was too hyperactive to ever want to rest, something that drove my mum and dad spare so I’d go outside when I felt over-stimulated.

Like now. Finding out Uncle Jeb was a fairy. I wouldn’t have believed it just on my dad’s say-so because he was prone to exaggeration. But mum, that was a different matter altogether. She had never steered me wrong. She told the truth when I asked if Santa Claus was real. When I questioned my dad about what I’d heard at school, he merely looked guilt stricken, telling me to ‘go ask your mother.’

So if my mum said Uncle Jeb was a fairy, then I believed her. Trouble was he was such a big guy. So was Hal. I always thought fairies were girls. And they were tiny little things like in cartoons on the telly. They hopped around on flowers and rode on the backs of bees and that sort of thing.

Jeb and Hal were my favourite people in the world. They didn’t treat me like a little kid. They listened to what I had to say and gently steered me to draw my own conclusions from what I’d observed. They never told me I was stupid even when I said the dumbest things. They also had the coolest stories because they’d been places I only ever heard of on the news or looked up on the computer when they talked about them. They always encouraged me to seek out knowledge if I was interested in where they’d been after they returned with little wooden gifts or colourful stamps, or unusual postcards they brought from exotic locations. I kept them in a cardboard shoe box underneath my bed and, sometimes, after my dad had grizzled about ‘It’s all right for some, but I have a family to support,’ I’d take them out and place them all over my bed and dream of being like Uncle Jeb.