Deep in the woods behind my childhood home, the stump of an old apple tree rots. Once the home to a magical world; now an empty vessel returning to the earth. The tree gave its life for the sake of my girlhood. We now both stand stunted, in different shapes. The magic between us, lost, but still visible in the wood’s scars. Each ring around the stump, a year spent in innocent bliss. 

I grew up in an old, creaking house right on the edge of these woods. Before I cared about mud on my clothes, bug bites down my arms, or tall grass tickling my ankles, the woods were my favorite place to explore. My best friend from down the street, Maggie, would accompany me on explorations to the middle of what we thought was a dense forest. Though we could see houses and the lives of our neighbors through the thin line of trees, we had decided that the woods was a place we could disappear and be anyone or anything we wanted. 

The trees seemed to touch the sky and were even more beautiful at the end of September when the leaves faded to gold, orange, and crimson. It was around this time that Maggie and I first found a beautiful ginkgo tree that stretched itself out like it yearned to be known. Looming among the plain oaks and pines, the ginkgo tree possessed a lighter trunk, and its leaves were little fans. But our ten-year-old arms weren’t strong enough to pull us up onto its lowest limbs.  

In the distance was a small, limping apple tree. And it was just our height. 

The apple tree curved to one side like it was shying away from the sun or growing the wrong direction. The leaves on its branches were few and far between. There was only one limb sturdy enough to hold us, hardly big enough for two growing bodies. The tree was rotting from the inside, but we didn’t know that. We were just girls. 

In our imagination, the tree towered over us with strong, full branches. Its arms canopied over our heads as we sat at its base, protecting us from the rain. It stood a towering giant, scraping the sky and bringing stardust back down to us. Like a mother welcoming home a child, it sheltered us from the world we didn’t yet have a place in. 

Its apples, too, were rotted and home to worms. Our parents told us to never eat them. But in our imagination, the apples were as bright and fresh as Honeycrisps we saw on the farms around our town. They could have sustained us. Picked fresh off the branches and sweet and tart in every bite, we wondered if these were the same apples in the story we learned at Catholic school. 

When we climbed up its crooked trunk, we thought we were up so high; so breathtakingly high that we were breathing in the clouds. We pretended we could see the tops of the other trees around us, the neighboring houses, the hill beyond our street, our school, and possibly, a way out of our small town. 

We named our tree Lucy, after our favorite book character from The Chronicles of Narnia. We didn’t know it then, but Lucy means “of the light.” To this day, I still love the name.  

Although Lucy never spoke to us – not even in our imagination – we knew she was alive. She had her own thoughts, feelings, and a similar yearning for belonging. She kept our secrets and, in return, we kept her company. Every day after school, we trekked the three blocks to our secret spot carrying backpacks, a towel to sit on, a snack from one of our houses, and stories in our chests. 

We vowed to never tell anyone about our tree or secret place in the woods. We vowed to always be friends.    

*

In 1917, two cousins met for the first time. Frances Griffiths had grown up in South Africa while her father was stationed there during the war. When the Great War broke out, Frances’ father was sent to the Western Front. In turn, Frances and her mother went to live with Frances’ aunt in Cottingley, England. It was there that nine-year-old Frances was introduced to a stranger – her cousin, Elsie.  

The two found a fast sisterhood and spent most of their time playing near a stream underneath the garden. One day, after one too many times of coming back to the house with muddy clothes and wet shoes, Frances’ mother angrily asked what exactly the girls did at the beck. 

“We play with fairies,” Frances confessed in her thick South African accent. This was met with laughter and doubt from the girls’ mothers. Then the sixteen-year-old, Elsie, chimed in with support.  

“I’ve seen them, too!” she said. They were only met with more disbelief. 

Despite the pushback from the family, Elsie and Frances decided to come up with some way to prove they were telling the truth. So, they borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera and went down to the stream, determined.

Elsie crouched in front of Frances and took her first photograph. After Elsie’s father had developed the picture in his own dark room, it was clear. There was Frances, head resting in her hand, fresh-picked flowers in her hair, and four tiny, winged fairies dancing in front of her.

*

Underneath Lucy, we confided to one another that we felt that we were different. In between talks about the boys we liked in our grade, we spoke of the magical powers we felt in our fingertips. Among the fallen leaves, we practiced spells and told long-winded stories about how we would defeat evil. We vowed to never tell anyone about our magic or Lucy. We believed we were powerful girls with secrets, but it was the secrets that made us powerful.  

Even if we did tell, we knew no one would believe us. We were just girls.

Each day we passed each other in the hallways of school and giggled about our secrets. Then we raced home. One day, Maggie told me she found a shortcut in between our school and our neighborhood. I followed behind her as we took a left down the road before the hill at the top of our street. We skipped through manicured bushes and well-kept flowers until we reached a rock wall. Jumping over it, we landed in a neighbor’s backyard. 

“Are we allowed to do this?” I asked nervously. We were crouching so as to not be seen, although Maggie assured me we were fine. No one could see us if we were fast enough. Running through the yard and past the house’s side windows, we reached another street and then our neighborhood. By the time we got to Lucy, we were out of breath from both running and laughing. 

My mom got a call that night, and we were no longer allowed to take the shortcut.    

Maggie and I spent all our afternoons under Lucy until it started to get dark. We would then walk to the halfway point between each of our houses on the street, turn to each other, and count, “One, two, three.” We would spin and run as fast as we could back home. If we ran fast enough, nothing could get us. Together we were powerful. But alone and back home, we were a little less. 

*

A few years after the photographs had been taken and after the bloodshed of the war had ceased, Frances and Elsie’s mothers took the film to a theosophical lecture on all things occult. Spiritualism was on the rise, and this chapter of the Theosophical Society had drawn in hundreds. Sons, fathers, and brothers were lost to the war. Everyone needed something to hold on to in the aftermath.

When the mothers shared the photographs with the crowd, they weren’t expecting to be taken seriously nor met with belief. The photographs were sent around to other chapters and caught the attention of many, including Sherlock Holmes writer, Arthur Conan Doyle. A spiritualist himself, Conan Doyle considered the photos proof that fairies existed. For further evidence, he sent the negatives to someone at Kodak for authenticity testing. Kodak confirmed that the photos hadn’t been altered, but they couldn’t confirm if what was in the photos was real. Conan Doyle was convinced. He had lost his son to the war, but if fairies were real – maybe death wasn’t final.   

Conan Doyle provided the girls with his own camera and they took three more pictures. In one, Frances is surrounded by greenery, watching a leaping fairy to the right. Another is of Elsie, kneeling to a fairy offering a flower. The last is the blurriest of all the photos and doesn’t feature either of the girls. Three translucent fairies play in the grass.    

There was still doubt.

“She firmly believed that she and her cousin were the only persons who had been so fortunate, and was equally convinced that nobody else would be,” reports the Gazette in 1921 after interviewing a then nineteen-year-old Elsie. The reporter further pressed Elsie as to why no one else was able to see the fairies. “If anybody else were there,” Elsie said, “The fairies would not come out.” The Gazette wrote that Elsie responded with a smile and the “final significant remark, ‘You don't understand.’”

Conan Doyle never stopped believing, even up to his death in 1930. 

The 1921 Gazette article concluded with, “Elsie declaring that the fairies are now more difficult to see than in previous years.” She had told the reporter, “You see, we were young then.” Yet, she doesn’t explain what she means. 

*

The years wore on Lucy, and eventually the rotting couldn’t be covered up by our imaginations. We stop visiting our tree as often. We stopped sitting up on her highest branch. We didn’t like the mud on our clothes anymore. Maggie and I saw each other less and less. 

That year, my body betrayed me and grew before I was ready. Others noticed the change before I did. Men honked at me while walking down the street. Boys snapped my bra straps. Womanhood was a mad dog I couldn’t out run. It nipped at my heels.  

It seemed that the ending of my girlhood was decided by everyone but me. I cried when my dad said he had to cut the tree down. 

I felt rotted out, too.  

*

In 1983, nearly sixty-six years later, Elsie confessed. While the photographs themselves hadn’t been tampered with, the fairies in the girls’ pictures weren’t real. Elsie had copied fairy illustrations from one of her childhood picture books. She then drew wings, cut out her drawing, and put them on cardboard. With hat pins, the girls placed the fairies in the grass. 

Two small town girls, who had just wanted their parents to believe them, had unknowingly tricked Arthur Conan Doyle – and for a moment, the world. 

In the end, Frances claimed the last picture was real. The three fairies playing in the grass were snapped without any setup and without cardboard. However, both girls claim to have taken the picture. Photographers guess that they are both telling the truth. The slide is the most translucent of the photos, so it is possible that Frances took a picture of the grass and her fairies, and Elsie then took one of the cardboard cutouts. Through an accidental double-exposure, both worldviews could have ended up in one picture.    

But made of cardboard or not, the fairies were real to them. They had just wanted someone to believe them. And maybe a grieving Conan Doyle had yearned to see the world through the eyes of two girls playing make-believe in a stream.  

Alex Owen writes, “The photographs represent an effort to seize the initiative in an indirect and ingenious confrontation with adult authority, and must always stand as a beautifully contrived and executed testimony to childhood friendship.”

*

Lucy was cut down when I turned thirteen. She will never again shade us from the sunlight or stand with her crooked spine. Maggie and I will never again imagine a life upon our tree’s highest branch.

I will always be my mother’s daughter, an older sister to my brother, and someday maybe, a mother, a wife. But we will never again be girls – and not together, making secrets and magic underneath that tree. I gaze at Lucy’s stump now and remember what it felt like to be above the trees. The earth has reclaimed her, and my youth with it. 

I don’t remember the secrets shared. I don’t remember the spells we learned, I hardly remember why we loved a dying tree so much. But I remember the feeling of belonging in the woods with a girl who became my sister, making a world of our own. 

I don’t know much about sisterhood, but I assume it feels something like whispering to your best friend underneath an apple tree near the end of September.