The Door of the Sidhe

First published on Ripple Effect Radio, DDR (2025)

It is dark in the bungalow. Conchobar sits in front of his TV and waits for the Toy Show to come on, the artificial glare the only light. His daughters are both out with friends, they expressed no interest in wanting to watch it this year. Too old to spend time with their daddy, better things to be doing at Christmas. He put it on anyway, feeling the tradition should be kept regardless, although he now feels odd sitting alone in his boxers with a few cans watching a bunch of children on the telly. His phone buzzes but it’s not the girls, it’s work. He ignores it.

The big decorated tree on the show brings Conchobar out of his dark living room and back, many Christmases ago, to a hike in the Wicklow mountains, surrounded by similar trees. Utterly lost in the woods, enveloped by the dark, dead undergrowth of a Sitka forest. The imported trees, planted too close together, blocked any sunlight from reaching the forest floor, and life ceased below.

In his stumblings to find a way out back into the light, he reached a clearing in the wood. A felled tree barred his path, thick brambles and nettles on either side. Out of the corpse grew a new, smaller tree, somehow finding life where none was offered. Stranger still, this new tree rose straight up into the air, before splitting into two separate trunks, growing away from one another in parallel with the felled base, then turning skywards in unison. The result looked like a doorway, inviting him in.

Through the doorway the vegetation was rich with undergrowth, plants of all types bursting with life and colour. A red deer flashed through the trees, a pine marten darted into the safety of the shrubbery. The vision, dead on one side and living on the other, with this little doorway as a port, captivated Conchubar. Only once stepping through did he think of the fairies, the Little People, the Sidhe, and their ways. He wondered then as he wonders now, sitting in front of the telly, if in stepping through that door all those years ago, he had stepped through into another world. He wondered if he’d been living a life different than he would have, had he stayed on the other side. Conchobar remembered looking back through the doorway, at the dead undergrowth, and feeling no desire to return. Equally he felt that staying there, where he didn’t belong, would bring nothing but trouble to himself.

He didn’t know if he believed in any of it. Just a way to find excuses for mistakes he’d made in his life. He wasn’t even sure if that was how it worked anyway, the door and the other world. Seanchaí, the storytellers, weren’t around anymore, and no one could remember stories like they used to, not since the internet. But that wasn’t how it should be, getting the stories from a website. You have to be sitting in a pub, hiding from the elements with a pint of plain, listening to some auld man or woman, who’d heard it as a child from some even older man or woman. Passed down through the ages, unaware of the passage of time. That Ireland didn’t exist anymore.

Still, things happened sometimes, things uninteresting but nonetheless unexplainable, that took him back to the Sidhe. A jar of honey arrived in his press one day, unannounced. Real, natural honey, just sitting on his kitchen counter waiting to be eaten. The same thing with a bottle of Limoncello, something he’d never heard of, let alone bought for himself.

They weren’t all good messages, either. Once he’d taken out sixty euro and only forty had come out of the machine. The bank teller said it was impossible, that the sixty must have come out. So that was twenty quid gone, lost to the fairies.

He didn’t get promoted. His car got a flat tire two weeks running. His wife left him. Gifts and warnings all, sent from Tír na nÓg. Or maybe he’d just forgotten about buying the honey.

He liked to say he believed in it, even if he didn’t really. He wouldn’t cross a fairy fort if he could help it. Maybe his ex-wife was an evil spirit, a cailleach or something similar. Although he didn’t like to think of her like that. He liked to think maybe she’d left because she was an mhaighdean mhara, a sea maiden or mermaid, who’d had to return to the sea, never again to grace the land with her presence. Although, word was she’d shacked up with her CrossFit instructor, living in a new build over in Sligo town.

He checks his phone. His daughters haven’t replied. The Toy Show is in full swing now, Tubridy flying around like a mad yoke, throwing a toy tractor at a chubby little kid from Tipp. He wonders if his own children might be Changelings. They did that, the Sidhe. Stole your kids and replaced them with fairy doubles, new kids who didn’t like you. His girls had the same rude obstinacy as him, unfortunately. Definitely his.

As the show continues, uninterested in the problems of Conchobar, his thoughts keep returning to the Sidhe. He tried not to think about them too often, but they crept into his mind at times like this, and festered. He wonders if all his failings in life were down to the Sidhe, punishing him for stepping into a world he had no right to be in. 

Perhaps there was a different version of himself, on the other side of the door, who’d made better choices with his life, who hadn’t been tempted by the green beauty of the other world. Who was still married, who people liked. A success. He might be sitting in some big house with his daughters and his wife, all watching the Toy Show together, as he should be, instead of sitting here, alone, in the dark. Again he thought of that little dead tree and its living doorway, but he knew that he could not return through it.