He comes to the old church sometimes when it rains, and when it rains I always go back to that church.

Mother once said there's magic in rains. Our kind depends on things growing and dying in the forest, on water feeding new lives, and water that washes away old ones. Humans don't like that. Uncertainty, change, and death are what they fear, and what they fear they try to eliminate. They fear us, most of all, like all things they don't understand. We were taught to never trust humans, that they aren't very bright and their hearts are very small. My human is no exception. His heart, too, is very small.

There was a new book in his hand today. I tried to look at the title from the upper gallery where I like to hide and couldn't make out the words. It didn't matter. He would tell me soon enough.

No, he would tell her.

"Taking Chances," he said in his baritone voice. "I know you hate the ending, but you still love the book, don't you, Krista? Sometimes I think you're in love with Kyle. I used to be so jealous." He smiled a lover's smile, his fingers caressed the pages as he did. "Anyway, here it goes."

I folded my wings and leaned against the wall, watching him as he read to his wife. She'd died years ago, and since then he'd returned to the church where they were married, to read to her ghost the way he'd done by her sickbed. It was how he kept her alive, he'd once said. She liked the rain, and it reminded him of her.

Is it so wrong to be in love with a human? Is love ever wrong even if our hearts beat a different tune? How much of a crime is it that I want to be the one he reads to? That I wish those smiles were for me, or that it had been my face his fingers caressed so gently?

Faeries would hate me for it. Humans would hunt me down for thinking those thoughts. And yet I will always go back to that church when it rains. To my human with a tiny heart only big enough for one woman. The one who comes to read to a ghost, but maybe, just maybe, also to me.

***

A/N: Since this challenge is only open to Canadian residents, I am not eligible to enter, but I thought I'd post this little writing exercise here for keepsake. I enjoyed writing it very much and I hope you did too. :)