To Ease the Passing of Time

On a cool and windy summer day long ago in Ireland, I was cycling on a narrow and shady road that I could hardly see because of the tall grass growing between the stones that it was made of. I wasn't completely lost because I knew I wasn't far from the main road to which I could go back to whenever I felt like it, but I kind of liked the idea of riding on a road that wasn't really a road and that must have been built at a time when there were no cars or bicycles. All of a sudden, I came upon a pile of rocks lying right in the middle of the path. The road just went around them. They could have easily been removed, I thought. I found it strange but didn't pay too much attention to it. 

When I got to the village not long after, I made a beeline for the the pub and ordered a pint of Guinness. As I was chatting with the waiter, I mentioned to him about the pile of rocks in the middle of the road and asked him why they were not removed at the time that it was built. He was a young man, a little older than me, and said he didn't know. An old man who was also sitting at the bar, and who had overheard our conversation, said without even looking at us, "That's because of the fairies."

"The fairies?!", the waiter and I said at the same time.

"In the old days, when that road was built, the fairies were dwelling in that pile of rocks, and the people who were building it didn't want to disturb the fairies because it would have brought bad luck on them. That's why they made the road go around the pile of rocks instead of removing them to make it go straight", the old man explained. And he just kept drinking his stout as if what he had just said was the most obvious and normal thing in the world. 

I was curious about the fairies and I would have liked to ask the old man a lot of questions about them, but when I turned to talk to him, he was already gone. I asked the waiter if he believed the fairies ever existed. He said that he had heard a lot of stories about them from his grandmother when he was a child but he said that he didn't believe they were real. 

I finished my Guinness but I didn't go back on the old road where the fairies used to dwell. I stayed on the main road where I thought it was way too busy and noisy for the fairies to dwell.