Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

Not exactly in, because when I’m looking at the hidden people I’m not seeing the world the way you would if you took a photo of it. Where they live here, it’s a golf course, but I’m seeing it the way it was before the golf course was built. I’ve seen them building their houses in the trees and rocks, especially when the young elves are starting their marriages. Well, their relationships – I’m not sure they do get married. Starting their families.’

I do not ask about elf sex.

‘All the elves are starting to show again now. All but three types are hidden all winter.’

I sip my coffee. ‘Where do they go in the winter?’

Þórunn shrugs, glances outside, as if there is someone listening. ‘I’m thinking maybe it’s that I don’t see them, maybe because of the light. Because – I saw a therapist once, I was worried that I am not normal, and he said that most people see only five per cent of what there is to see, but people like me, born this way, we can see from fifteen up to twenty-five per cent. But there is still seventy-five we cannot see. So I’ve been thinking I don’t see them in the winter, but I can still feel them very strongly on my skin. We know that dogs hear what we don’t.’

There are lots of legends, across the North Atlantic, about animals seeing beings invisible to most people, horses refusing to pass a murder site and dogs that run to the door when the master’s ghost comes calling. I’ve felt things on my skin too, usually in darkness, on stairs and in long passages. I don’t much want to believe in them.

‘And small children,’ I add, remembering that Max used to be able to hear bats.

‘And small children. I just love them. Up to about six years old, you can just see that they can see and hear everything, just by watching them and talking to them, not feeding them a line. It’s such a beautiful time. Because they really know everything, until we start trying to teach them. That’s when they forget. It’s very sad.’

Tobias’s current favourite game is rounding up imaginary spiders and chasing them out of the flat. Sometimes he opens the front door to check if there are any on the landing, once or twice he’s been woken by them in the night. Tobias’s spiders are about a foot high and it’s quite important to me that they don’t exist.

‘Wordsworth thought that,’ I say briskly, mostly to myself. ‘But children learn other things that they need. Reading and writing. So do you hear the elves and the hidden people as well as seeing them?’

She has the patient expression of people who try to explain to me how aeroplanes stay up. ‘I cannot hear them with my ears the way I can hear people that have left the earth, but I can communicate with them. Actually, I have been writing down old stories the elves have been telling me, about where the hidden people came from, and how long ago, and why. I don’t care if anybody believes it or not because I know what the elves are telling me. Although not all of the elves are psychic. From the family down there, there are only two beings that are psychic for the whole community. But I can communicate with different kinds of elves. Once, I was walking in the mountains in the winter, with four other people. I met three types of elves, first an old man and a woman – she said, “What do you want?” – and then a younger mother with a crying baby. I wanted some way of showing my companions that there was more life there than met the eye. So I asked this old man, this small old man, if he could do something to let my friends see that he really was there. And there was a pine tree, a Christmas tree, and lots of snow – you know how it is beautiful. And he reached down, took one of the branches, and shook it so the snow fell down. And I was so happy! Because sometimes I wonder if I’m just imagining things. But luckily, I have had proofs many times. The elves can get physical. When it’s about Mother Earth, then they have a bit more control.’

I thought elves could disrupt road-building and move things around people’s kitchens. I thought that was how we knew they were there. ‘So they don’t have any control over the built environment?’

Þórunn glances around her little house. ‘They wouldn’t disturb anything here. But when there are eruptions in the land, on the earth, then they can make a difference.’

The ash cloud behind her shoulder is bigger and darker than it was when I came, surging across the bright sky. There are farms round the other side of the mountain that will be uninhabitable for years to come, villages where the children have not set foot outside for weeks. In earlier centuries, there have been eruptions that have depopulated half the island.

‘The elves can control volcanic eruptions?’

Þórunn smiles, doesn’t look behind her because she knows what I’m thinking. ‘No. But they can have a little to say about it. If they would like to stop an eruption progressing, they could do it. Not like taking a tractor or anything like that.’ (I think she means that elvish interference with volcanoes is less mechanical than human control of machines, but maybe elves have form for tractor-theft.) ‘But they can make it difficult. I never have any trouble with them. I’m often asked to come and talk to them, when people are trying to build something and it’s not working. It’s always just a lack of communication.’

‘So you negotiate?’

‘Yes. There’s always a way of coming to an understanding. If people aren’t selfish.’

‘So the elves can stop people building houses?’

‘They can make it really difficult. And anyway, people will never be happy