Fairy Pools

I wasn’t about to assume that the title indicated that there would be actual faerie and changelings in this story. I did correctly assume the bit about the actual fairy pools in the Isle of Skye, Scotland.

This is ‘Fairy Pools’ by Patricia Lockwood, published in The New Yorker on May 18, 2025. This story is drawn from the opening chapter of the author’s forthcoming novel, ‘Will There Ever Be Another You’ due to be released in September. 

The unnamed narrator, her husband, her mother, and her sister who just lost her baby, all took a trip to Scotland together. Then the sister lost her phone at the fairy pools and is distraught because it held irreplaceable photos of her deceased baby in it. 

They drank the water. Her husband sat on the edge of the deepest pool, which touched the center of the earth, and scooped it into a survivalist water filter he had bought on the internet. “This will let you drink water from ANYWHERE, in any situation,” he had told her intensely when it arrived in the mail. More and more of these situations were arising. As a child, she had watched Kevin Costner drink his own freshly distilled piss in “Waterworld” and just assumed it was something she would have to do as an adult, for the world would be different. They all drank a long swallow of the cool clear water, which was somehow inflected with the word “green.” It went clear into the center of her, through the hagstone hole and the natural arch, plunging down the stairs of living rock. Inside her, Europeans stripped and splashed. “Now we are refreshed,” he said. “Now we can go on.”

Twenty pictures in her photo roll later, her sister’s phone disappeared. Her black‑and‑white scarf and her rose‑gold phone, with the Child’s whole short life on it. It had been in the hospital with them, in her right hand, always. It had been what the next phone would not be, a warm eyewitness. Her sister was holding it in one picture, and then she wasn’t, a bald mountain behind her, her face closed, impassable; there and then gone.

The family thought that it was because they drunk the water at the Fairy Pools, the faeries demanded something in exchange. And to the readers, this meant the sister's phone. Then they found the phone, via photos on the narrator's phone. Scrolling through the photos, the narrator found the exact moment that sister set down the phone and the scarf at the Pools. 

There isn’t a non-human child replaced by the fairies in this story, although the motif of changelings runs through each paragraph. There was talk about thistles too. To be honest, I was a bit lost halfway through the story. The narrator came down sick to the point of being delirious. The narrator rambled on so far that I didn't know what she was talking about. One shouldn't be drinking water from the Pools since it carried bacteria. The author mentioned that the family might have gotten food poisoning, that they were "geeted to the gills with clam neurotoxin". Okaaaay.

The author drew on her own experiences and her family and the loss of her niece in her books. In an interview, the author is asked about her views of fairy pools, and later on changelings. 

In the story, the family drinks water from the waterfall-fed Fairy Pools on the Isle of Skye, and then the sister loses her phone, which has irreplaceable photographs of her baby on it, and the main character gets very sick. These things could be coincidental, or could, as the main character suggests, be the work of fairies upset that their pools were desecrated in this way. Where do you come down on that question?

It does seem possible that landscapes shape what you think and what you believe in. On our first trip ever to Europe, my husband and I went to a writing festival in Stavanger, Norway, and the guide on a fjord cruise pointed out some boulders and said, “That could be a troll,” and, “That could be a troll.” A certain percentage of the Norwegian population believes in trolls, and you go there and you understand why. So, yes, I believed in fairies instantly in Scotland, as soon as we were set down. Also, the poetic logic of it made sense to me: there are these exchanges, you’re paying into something, you’re receiving gifts from nowhere, and you don’t know how the balance is struck. Fairies are as good a way to describe that as anything. I mean, if they’re good enough for William Blake, they’re good enough for me.