My boyfriend noticed recently that the hawthorn tree in my garden has what looks like a little doorway in the trunk, right down the bottom. So I said, not making a big thing of it, Yeah, that’s where the Fair Folk live. He just laughed. I didn’t think anything of it then. But a few days later, he’s putting up a shelf, and somehow the nail he’s knocking in slips, and it goes right through the skin of his hand. You know the fleshy bit, between the bones of your thumb and index finger? Right through it. Blood everywhere.

So I drove him to the hospital, he got stitches, and we thought everything was fine. I mean, he was annoyed. He works with his hands, so it meant time off sick. But he was laughing and joking in the car. I stopped on the way home for pizza, and this is where it gets strange. While I’m in the pizza place and my boyfriend’s outside in the car, a nine-foot-long galvanised steel tube falls off the scaffolding above where I’d parked. Smashed right through the windscreen. My boyfriend got a face full of glass shards and was lucky not to lose an eye, and that’s when I started thinking, Something’s not right here.

So we’re back at the hospital, getting him cleaned up again, and I start asking: Did you do anything randomly stupid lately? And he’s all, What, like putting up a shelf for you, you mean, all sarcastic, like. And I says, no, more like walking between two weirdly close together trees either side of a path, or going into a ringfort or a stone circle. And he says, What? (He’s not Irish.) So I says, what about the hawthorn down the bottom of the garden, did you do something to it? And he gets this secretive look. Sort of smug but also nervous. Don’t be stupid, he says. It’s just a tree.

When we got back into the car, I took my jumper off, turned it inside out, and put it back on again. He didn’t say anything about that. There were no further incidents on the way home.

I dropped him at his flat and refused to stay over. He protested, said how was he supposed to manage with one hand, but I drove straight home. I went and looked at the hawthorn tree. And what my idiot boyfriend had done was, he’d made a little door, a carved wooden door with a handle, painted green, just the right size to fit the fairy hole in the tree. He’d fixed it into place with a pair of tiny hinges. I swore. Then I fetched a screwdriver and the saltshaker. After sprinkling the salt, I unscrewed the hinges, removed the little door, and threw the whole lot in the wheelie bin.

I couldn’t sleep after that. I felt powerfully that I was being watched, that the house wasn’t safe.

In the morning, I phoned him. I was fearing the worst. He was fine, but he’d lost his wallet. He asked me to check my car. It wasn’t there. I said he must’ve dropped it at the hospital. He said, a little petulantly, that everything was going wrong for him at the moment, and I said that’s no wonder, and I told him I’d removed the fairy door. He got upset, said he only put it there because he thought I would like it. I told him you can’t mess with the little people or they curse you. He scoffed. Fairies aren’t real, he said, and I clapped a hand over my own mouth and hung up.

It’s not that I exactly believe in them, see. It’s just, why would you risk saying you don’t?

I tried to help him after that. I really did. He got cross when I put salt in his pockets, and he threatened to cut down the hawthorn tree if I didn’t stop being so superstitious. Our friends all weighed in and said he’d be mad to go near that tree again. He got a bit spooked then, at the way we all sort of believed in it without ever talking about it, but it’s just one of those things you get from your grandparents, something that lurks at the back of your head when you find yourself alone in the woods or hear laughter but there’s nobody there. I couldn’t really explain it.

The bad luck died down, anyway. But a week or so later, we’re walking home from the pub, and my boyfriend sees an apple on a garden wall. A gorgeous, bright red apple. So he goes, Hey, look, and before I can stop him he picks it up and takes a bite. Big smile on his face. I’m horrified. I start shouting, Are you stupid, didn’t your mother teach you not to accept their gifts? But it was too late. He’d already swallowed. He was annoyed with me for calling him stupid. He kept saying it was just an apple. He ate the rest of it, petulant-like, trying to prove nothing bad would happen.

I’d been planning to stay at his flat that night, but I couldn’t. I was terrified. At home I changed my clothes, scattered salt across the doorways, and wrapped a scarf round my hair so they wouldn’t be able to recognise me. Then I hid under my blankets, ignoring the sounds of footsteps and cold laughter outside in the hallway.

My boyfriend’s apartment building caught fire that night. They said it was the cladding, but I knew it wasn’t. He survived, though he broke his leg jumping from the third-floor window. I didn’t visit him in the hospital. Bad luck is catching, after all, and I’d done what I could.

Some of our friends agree with me. Others think I’ve gone a bit far. But I don’t know what else to do. I’m not messing with the little folk, no way. He texts every day, asking to see me, saying he loves me, and I keep saying no.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from Juniper Alice Licht during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors