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‘My girlfriend and I had recently moved in together and we were getting used to our new apartment. As our work schedules were offset at the time, I gladly prepared dinner for us both nearly every night. We were lucky because our apartment had a large kitchen separate from everything else, so it was easy to work in. That night, I had decided to make chili. I got all my ingredients together and opened the cans and packages, started getting my spices in order when I realized that I couldn’t find the chili powder. This really stood out because, as we had just moved in together, a lot of the dry goods that we had were from her parents’ kitchen and chili powder was something I expressly bought because she wasn’t given any. So then I got mad. I had already opened all these cans and a package of beef and I sure as hell was going to make chili! I ransacked the kitchen. Now when I say that, I don’t mean ‘oh I looked everywhere’ like it was some affected resignation. I actually took all the contents out of every cupboard and the refrigerator and lined them up on my kitchen table. No chili powder anywhere. I have been a long time Fortean Times reader and I studied anthropology (mostly because of that), so I’m Fairy Agnostic. I don’t believe that there are literally fairies, and I dispute socio-psychological explanations of them (like Jung’s, for instance). I think that fairies are something more in the middle – like a Baudrillardian-type post-modern fairy. Its real enough if we’re talking about them. Otherwise, there is no fairy tradition in my family that I haven’t looked into myself (I’m Finnish-Canadian) because nobody was interested. My girlfriend is a fairy agnostic too, but I would say that she can at least imagine the possibility that there actually are physical fairies hanging around somewhere (she’s Swedish-French Canadian). So having examined carefully and honestly and openly accepted the magic/religious belief systems of people all over the world, I did what others have done when faced with the same situation. I said out loud ‘Fairies, Fairies, your fun is done. Bring me back my stuff’. I went back to the kitchen to put everything back in place. When I had my shoes and coat on ready to go to the grocery store, I closed an open cupboard door but something caught my eye: chili powder. NOT POSSIBLE. I was genuinely moved and felt that I had experienced something totally eerie and supernatural. Not lost on me either (and I hope not on you) was that this was also totally stupid in its banality. About fifteen minutes later, my girlfriend came home and I explained everything that had happened and what I said to ‘fix’ it. She was pretty excited as well after that and eventually we started to refer to them as the ‘Tex-Mex Fairies’. Sometimes we’d tell each other stories about them, ask them for help, blame things on them, experiment with them in good fun. Alas we live in a new apartment now and in the stress of the move, we forgot to follow some guidelines of ‘Fairy Protocol’ and left them there. For all of that, they were already living in that apartment and I hope they’re still there