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well, that’s true.”
    We had to slow down for a light that had turned green ahead of us, but the line of cars was just getting back up to speed.
    “Oh, look,” Hazel said. “Damn pluikers. Don’t they just make you sick?”
    I had time to note a line of three or four fairies sitting on a fence watching the traffic go by. They looked and dressed like Native Americans—jeans and buckskin, checkered shirts—but I could see hare ears and antlers, which is how I knew they were fairies. And naturally, they were invisible to everyone except for me and Hazel.
    She raised her middle finger and waved it at them, sticking out her tongue.
    “Why did you do that?” I asked.
    She gave me a look that asked how did you ever get to be so dim.
    “Because they’re green-brees,” she said. “Duh.”
    “But what does that mean ?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what we call them. I think it means stagnant water—or the slime you find in stagnant water.”
    “So why don’t you like them?”
    I could still see the line of little figures in my rearview mirror. They seemed perfectly normal—in fairy terms, I mean.
    “Why should we?” Hazel said. “They don’t like us.”
    “They just looked like fairies to me.”
    “Well, they’re not. They didn’t have to come across the water to get here. They were already here when we arrived.”
    “So they’re native fairies.”
    “They’re not fairies. We’re fairies. They’re just pluikers.”
    “And what does that mean?”
    Hazel grinned at me. “That they’re great big fat pimples on the arse of the world.”
    “You’re beginning to sound like a racist.”
    “I’m not a racist. I just don’t like them. They keep us in the cities—right from the start they have, back when the cities were no more than a few shacks at the edge of the water. We rode those high seas for long, long weeks and looked to replenish ourselves from the green and the wild, but they kept it all for themselves and they still do.”
    “Well, it was their land.”
    Hazel sniffed. “There’s so much. Did they need it all?”
    “How would you feel if someone took something that was yours, and you didn’t want to give it up?”
    “I suppose. Except on the one hand they say that the wild and the green belongs to no one, it just is. Then on the other, they keep us out of what they claim are their territories. So what’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Maybe they don’t want what you call the wild and the green to be spoiled the way the cities already are.”
    Hazel shot me a frown.
    “This is a boring conversation,” she told me.
    She reached over and turned on the radio, stopping at a station that was playing a 50 Cent song. We listened to rap and hip-hop for the rest of the drive in, all the way to where she had me let her off downtown.
     
    Our conversation was still bothering me after I’d dropped the car off at the garage Christy rented for it and got back to Jilly’s loft. I don’t know why I still called it that. After her accident, Jilly moved into the Professor’s house and I took over her loft, but it’s been a couple of years now. And it wasn’t just me—everybody still referred to it as Jilly’s place. I guess it was because we didn’t want to give up the hope that one day she’d be able to manage the steep stairs of the building and move back in.
    When I got upstairs, I laid my fiddlecase on the kitchen table, shed my clothes, and got into the Murphy bed that I almost never bothered to fold back into the wall. It wasn’t like I ever had anybody over.
    I lay there, tired, trying to figure out this enmity between the local fairies and those that had started to come over when the first Europeans landed on these shores. I didn’t actually want to be thinking about this, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.
    I don’t know how long I would have lain there, unable to sleep, but something else came to me then, the memory of that elusive snatch of fiddle music