Philosophaerie.

I was weeding the garden when I became aware of a curious scruffing noise, the sound of a small heavy object in friction with damp grass. I turned and saw a small garden fairy with butterfly wings shoving a thick volume of Kant across the lawn.

"Good afternoon, madam," I said. "May I inquire why you are filching my copy of the Critique of Pure Reason?"

She stopped and drew a dainty hand across her sweating brow. "I'm not filching it, I'm borrowing it. And if you must know, I've become tired of all this where-the-bee-sucks-there-suck-I type of business. I flutter here, I flutter there. Occasionally I titter and twitter. Is this all there is? Is there no more?"

"Intriguing," said I. "How long have you had this existential problem?"

She looked at my sundial. "Twenty minutes."

Forever, in fairy terms. "But isn't Kant a bit much for a beginner? Perhaps you should consider some more introductory work, perhaps a survey of the field such as Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy?"

She hopped up onto the book. "That would make more sense," she admitted. "There are problems with having a brain that weighs four one-hundredths of an ounce, one of which is a difficulty with contemplating multiple paths to an end."

I picked up the book and its passenger. "That will make proper study of philosophy difficult. Many of my Philosophy students have difficulty with the subject, and some of them have brains more than ten times as big as yours. Perhaps you should enquire in the realms of faerie and magic as to a method of enhancing your mental capacity."

She clapped her tiny hands. "Of course!" she cried. "I shall do that straight away, and return to read Cottleston's Mystery of Phylogeny!" And she fluttered off, twittering.

I returned to my weeding, and the afternoon came to an end with no sign of the fairy's return. The evening passed, and night came — and eventually day again, and I was awakened by a knocking at my front door. After stuffing myself into a robe and making my way to the aforementioned portal I found the fairy outside. She was now five feet eight inches tall, but still had butterfly-size butterfly wings. She was not happy.

"Did you know I'm full of wet squashy tubes?" she demanded, without even saying hello. "And blobby things that drip, and — and damp huffing bags?"

"It had not actively occurred to me, no," I said.

"My head is full of jelly!"

"A not uncommon condition," I said, thinking of my students.

"My body is full of bones!" she said, and walked in without waiting for invitation. "And it's all your fault!"

"I'm sorry?" I said. "It is my vague impression that you were full of such things before you ever met me."

"But I didn't know!" she said. "I asked the queen of the fairies to make me smarter, and she made me into this! Suddenly I had all these questions in my mind about what was under my skin and — and I really didn't want to know!"

"Oh dear," said I.

"And now I can't fly, thanks to the stupid square-cube law!"

"Oh dear," said I.

"Well," she said decisively, "this is obviously some form of Monkey's Pawism and can't be helped. Let's see the Cobblestone."

She spent the next week reading philosophy from morn till night and through the night till morn again, all the while eating my crumpets and drinking my tea. My study became a battleground, or at least came to look like one, as competing world views battled for the heart and mind of the fairy. The determinists and the free-willers fought to a standstill by the hearth, Baron Holbach met Teilhard de Chardin on the field of honor next to the rolltop desk, and Jean-Paul Sartre drank all the coffee in the house. Or so I was told. Someone did. The floor slowly filled with books, the books slowly filled with scraps of paper, the scraps of paper slowly filled with notes, and the fairy quickly filled with crumpets.

"The materialists and the spiritualists have annihilated each other," she informed me one day. "Nothing is left."

"Very true," I said, inspecting my empty crumpet tin. "And under some circumstances, not presently obtaining, no-thing is highly desirable. The Buddhist texts are in the hall cupboard."

I left her to her own devices whilst I graded bad essays, and it wasn't long before she had read everything from the-other-Copleston's text on Theravada to the Alan W. Watts book I had found abandoned in the classroom.

I was just about to tidy the library when suddenly she bounded through the door and onto my desk in a series of leaps that were as graceful as possible under the circumstances.

"Eureka!" she announced, fluttering with delight. "I was a Buddha to begin with! To be a fairy is simply to be. No more is necessary; what is, is sufficient."

"Better get yourself shrunk, then," I said. "When ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise, as it says in Bartlett's."

And she did. Now she titters and twitters happily once again, and I eat my own bloody crumpets. And, on occasion, contemplate referring a difficult student to the queen of the fairies...