...the little girl said, and the man always did because he loved his children more than anything in the world. He'd sit on the bottom end of one of their beds and get very quiet and the children became very excited because they knew he was waiting for the story fairy to arrive and tell him the story.Sometimes the children could not keep their legs still. Sometimes the children were so excited by the waiting that their legs would move of their own accord, would just slide up from beneath the sheets and covers, would slide out, exposed, and plop on top of the bed. And if this happened to one of them it happened to all of them because there was some kind of a chain reaction, as if the children's legs had minds of their own, as if the minds in the children's legs could speak to each other silently.
That's what the man said, "Your legs have minds of their own," and he would reach out and touch them, one leg of each child with each of his two hands, and his big hairy hands would be hot on their flesh and they would tingle, a spark would climb up their spines and they would know that the story fairy was arriving because she was always preceded by tingles and deja vus and premonitions.
They never saw the story fairy. Not even their father could see her. He only knew she had arrived by a tickle in his right ear, the ear she always came to because she knew his left ear wasn't so good because of all the loud noises that ear had heard when he was in the War on the other side of the world. He knew not to scratch the tickle in his right ear when it came. Sometimes he almost forgot. Sometimes he lifted his big hairy finger to his ear when he felt the tickle of the story fairy, when she visited him in the middle of the day when he was all alone and the children were hours away from being home.
He would tell the children the story fairy came to visit him that day and they would want to know what she said, if she had told him an extra special story for them -- because they knew the story fairy only came to their father to deliver stories for them. He was just the messenger and they all knew that. He was simply the only one big enough to welcome the story fairy in, he was the only one with ear holes big enough to welcome her.
And he would lean down close to the right ear of each child in these instances, when they asked what the story fairy had said when she visited him all alone in the middle of the day, and he would touch the tip of his tongue to the inside of their ear and blow at the same time and the children would scream with glee and he would say, "Did you hear?" and they'd heard nothing---
