So, for whatever reason, I’m a huge fan of stories and tales involving the May Queen. To the point where I’ve written (and humbly been able to publish) my own. There’s just something about the idea of the personification of spring, or any season for that matter. Because, in the eyes of the horror world, the May Queen, this representation of spring and rebirth, is an avenue for the world to strike back at us. To lull us with beauty and femininity before wrapping vines around our skin and pulling us into the dirt until flowers bloom from our eyes. Ah, folk horror and eco stories are the best.

If you haven’t watched Ari Aster’s Midsommar stop reading (it’s fine, I give you permission) and GO WATCH IT NOW.

I started with that because unfortunately I missed May Day this year, as I was passed out cold (then hot then cold then hot then…) with a darling case of covid. I envy those of you that only suffer a minor cold when you catch it; for whatever reason, it spikes my fever and I’m asleep for days with no questions asked. Thankfully, I’m back to normal now but that still doesn’t change the fact that I slept through one of my favorite holidays.

Karma for something I’m sure.

Well, that’s just how it goes sometimes. But we can’t wallow in that now can we. Not with a few events coming up! That’s right! Come see me at two boozy book fairs this spring (yes, pop-up book shops at breweries) and let’s have a beer together!

The first is on Sunday, May 19th at Long View Cidery located at 36 Long Bottom Road, Southington, CT. The event is rain or shine and will run from 12:00-4:00. There will be plenty of authors and artisans, as well as cider, beer, and food trucks! Come say hi!

If you can’t make that one, I’ll be at the Shortstop Bar & Grill for Book Club On the Go’s largest book fair yet. Over 15 authors and vendors will be at the bar and grill located at 99 Springfield Road, Westfield, MA on Sunday, June 9th from 12:00-4:00. I have a DD home for this one so let’s have a good time, yeah?

If you want any more info on either of these, visit https://www.bookclubct.com/news-and-events

Hope to see you there!

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In honor of May Day, here’s a bit of fiction for you. Originally published in Funemployement Quarterly in August, 2022, When Death Met the May Queen is a slow burn folk story about two entities who happen to cross paths when they didn’t realize they needed to. This one was special. If you read it, I hope you enjoy. And if you don’t, maybe next time!

We’ll chat soon, friends. I’ll be back in a week or two with the next edition of the Pallid Ponderings of Poe. Stay tuned and stay safe out there!

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When Death Met the May Queen
By Benjamin Thomas

We were at a bar beneath Stockholm, one of the world’s last true speakeasies.

Underground, there was no need to hide who or what we were. We could just be. She was standing at the bar wearing a white dress, the bottom hem a line of deep purple. I pointed to the flower bracelet elegantly hanging from her wrist. “Are those real?”

She flashed a noncommittal smile, her blue eyes partially hidden beneath stray strands of dirty blonde. I rapped my knuckles against the mahogany bar. “Sorry. Buy you a drink? Can take it and run if you want.”

Her cheek twitched but she didn’t look up until after she ordered a vodka cranberry. The drink was blood in her pale-skinned hand. I held a glass of scotch in the air and the sleeve of my coat slid back. When she saw bone holding the glass, she didn’t flinch. Just smiled and touched her drink to mine. We chatted for a few minutes. What we did for work. Where we lived. When our drinks were nearly empty, I ordered a second round.

We found a corner booth and stared at the occupants until they became uncomfortable and left. I held my arm out and she slid in, the corner cushions hugging her shoulders.

“I’ve seen you here before,” I said.

“Usually try to stop by when I’m in town visiting family. See what’s changed… what hasn’t.”

“They live in the city?”

She shook her head. The faint smell of spring fields and fresh air drifted toward me. “Up

north.”

“Annual trip? I feel like I always see you around early June.” “Creepy,” she said but didn’t move away.

I shrugged. “I tend to learn the regulars.”

She pursed her lips. “Which means you’d be one yourself. Has to be kind of hard, no?

Doesn’t your job have you travelling all over?”

“Eh, I have a good deal of agency. Can do my own thing if I want. The bosses don’t really bother me unless there’s something big going on. I have a good team in place, hired a slew of them looking for redemption with no way to do penance. To be honest, most of them stayed on; they must like it. It’s all about who you hire.”

She took a long sip of her drink. “I wish I could hire someone.” I laughed. “Aren’t you a one-month employee?”

“Pft. Not even close.” She waved her drink in the air. “Everyone thinks it’s just a few weeks of leading parades and celebrations—the goddess of spring, the flower bride, a symbol of nature that just needs to head the festivities. Let me tell you: with folklore, the background work is the real killer. Then it all culminates in one month of go-go-go. It’s honestly hell.”

I tapped a skeletal fingertip against the glass in my hand. “What do you know of Hell?”

A waiter walked by and she hooked him toward her with a single finger in the air. He leaned in and she whispered something in his ear. The waiter looked in her eyes for only a few seconds before standing straight, palm against his chest. When he turned from the table, she looked at me and nodded. Colour me a grey shade of intrigued.

The waiter led us around the bar and down a blue-lit hall. He pushed open a door and this time she held her arm out. The shadow of a tattoo crept around her forearm.

“I didn’t know you had ink.”

She pulled her arm back and faked a smile. “Bad decisions.” “I tend to be the grand prize at the end of those.”

She rolled her eyes.

At the top of the stairs was another door. Her hand appeared on the bar before I could push it open. I turned. She was standing on the very edge of the top step; our bodies buzzed with just the fabric of our clothes between us.

“No judgement,” she said.

Colour me a greyer shade of intrigued. “No judgement,” I repeated.

She wanted the agreement because out on the floor of that ground-level bar, blue and purple LEDs glowing around her…she was one of them. She jumped and danced and laughed, and none of the people doing the same around her knew who she was. I couldn’t believe it. It was unreal to see her not have to fade into the background like our kind always did—exist as shadows or blurs in someone’s vision that are gone upon second glance. Or, as so often occurred

in my case, adopt the skin and embodiment of those above ground. The music pulsed and so did she. She twirled with an arm out, the hem of her dress a spiral galaxy around her legs.

In that moment, I knew sirens were real.

#

That weekend was a hurricane, and picking up the debris took an entire year. She was gone come Monday and, after a while, I thought I’d never see her again. I spent too many nights in that bar looking for her. I neglected work. People stayed alive longer than they should have. Their families were left to suffer while I dragged on the taking of their loved ones, too selfish to recognize the fallout my delayed actions created. I’ll never forgive myself for that. My job is what it is and I do what I have to do—if I didn’t someone else would—but needless suffering… that’s not my thing. It’s what they do to each other, not what I impart on their kind.

A little less than a year later, I finally saw her walk in. Her hair was slightly darker and the flower bracelet no longer hung from her wrist. It had been replaced by a necklace of blue, white, and purple petals—fuck it took everything to look back at the bar and not watch her reflection in the glass wall behind the bottles. Each second that passed the urge to turn around multiplied. Then I heard her voice as she slid into the seat next to me: “I’ve missed you.”

I counted to three before I allowed myself to respond. To turn to her with my elbow on the bar, a glass of amber liquid a few inches from my lips. “You have no idea.”

We didn’t go to their bar like we did the year before. Rather, she reached over the one we were at, pilfered a bottle of vodka and we went back to my place. She found the wireless speaker on my mantel and connected it to her phone.

“One thing I will say,” she said as she scrolled through Spotify. “Only having to use one of these a month out of the year is nice.”

I closed the fridge, stirred our drinks, and glanced at the calendar. It was only April. “It’s a little early for you to be swinging through, isn’t it?”

She picked a song. The drums hit with a metallic clang and the harmony transported us to a hallowed hall meant for royalty. The woman’s voice dripped through the speakers like a millennial femme fatal, her microphone a knife and her palm lines red with blood.

“So? Maybe I just don’t want to go to work.” She took the drink and shrugged. We touched glasses, a crystal clang that smelled like sin swirling in the fountain of youth. “Don’t tell me you never think of playing hooky.”

“All the time,” I said. “And have you ever?”

“Mhm.”

“How was it?”

I leaned against the back of my couch. “Well, last time I did, the Korean war ended.” “I think the only one who would see that as bad would be you.”

I put my glass on the end table and found myself gazing at the bookcase against the far wall. The keepsakes that outlived the friends who gave them. Friends who knew who I was, either by their own volition or because, for lack of better judgement, I showed them.

Shakespeare—signed. Dumas—engraved. The Divine Comedy infused with memories of fireside drinks with Dante when we finished the semi-biographical epic; his laugh and parting words: Se mai mi ritroverò di nuovo all’inferno, rimarrò un po ‘e mi verserò da bere. If I ever find myself in hell again, I’ll stay awhile and pour myself a drink.

When I turned back, she pressed her forehead against mine and asked, “Where’d you just disappear to?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said and took her hands, my gaze meeting hers. “I’m here now.”

I got pulled out of bed in the middle of the night for work—a 737 disappeared off the coast of Indonesia. When there’s confusion about survival rates and people begin entertaining the idea of miracles, well, it’s better that they called me. When I got back, she was gone.

A week later she knocked on my door and held up a ruler-sized pole with ribbons strung around the top. When she flicked her wrist, they twirled. “Any chance you want to come with me? Maybe meet my family?”

#

The ride north from Stockholm was long, but she insisted on us driving rather than taking the train or using our instantaneous abilities. She was stalling and my curiosity caused me to wonder if she’d open up if I played along. She leaned back in the passenger seat and rested her bare feet on the glove box. The hem of her dress slid down like melting snow. We pulled over and added a half-hour to our trip while the setting sun burned the sky orange.

“Just to warn you,” she said as we looped around the base of a large lake. “Things get a little… weird… sometimes. Especially with my cousin.”

“How so?”

“We’re just… different. Her side of the family favours the idea of change while mine values tradition.”

“And where do you fall?”

She didn’t answer. For the rest of the drive, I wondered if it was because she was ashamed to say or if she honestly didn’t know. I parked the car and gazed out at a darkening field; the towering flames of a bonfire licked the curve of the moon.

No sooner had we closed the car doors did a wild pack of children run toward us while gleefully shouting her name. They wrapped themselves around her legs and she feigned falling backwards, the act causing them to erupt in raucous laughter. On the surface, she looked happy. But you don’t spend the length of humanity hearing deathbed confessions and not learn when someone’s struggling.

Her parents greeted her as affectionately as parents who see their eldest once a year do. She turned back to me and said, “I want you to meet someone.” Her father held out his hand. Though I thought against it for a second, I let the mask drop, and the mirage of my hands vanished. I gripped his palm with one of bones. When she saw, she smiled and I swear the tension in her shoulders evaporated.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” her mother said. She pulled a shawl over her angular shoulders. “May never brings anyone to the festival. Sometimes, I swear she’s embarrassed by us.”

“Mom.”

I smiled. “Happy to be here.”

They told us stories of things that had happened over the course of the last year. Asked questions. Skirted around certain conversational topics much like expert bomb technicians intricately avoiding catastrophe. The fire crackled and the oaky, charred smell of burning wood drifted toward us. An hour or so before midnight her younger cousin came over, a crown of flowers atop her head.

No sooner had the girl sat down did she say, “Mom said I get to wear the crown this

year.”

I’ll give it to May, despite the flash-curl of her lip, she remained stoic. Offered a sympathetic smile and said, “It looks good on you.”

“Don’t you think someone younger should lead the—” “Enough,” May’s mother snapped. “You know the tradition.”

“She dyed her hair.” The girl sneered. “Shouldn’t the person representing purity be pure?

Not that she has been for a while.”

Her mother was on her feet. “You devilish little child. Go. Now. Or the only thing you’ll be wearing is a handprint on your face.”

Later, before we turned in, I came up behind May with a bouquet of flowers I rummaged from the valley’s verdant fields. At the last second, I added a personal touch. She took the bouquet and gave me a bashful smile. “You got me flowers… with blood on them?”

I shrugged. “Wanted them to remind you of me.”

We slept apart, out of respect. The next day, her cousin refused to relinquish the crown.

However, after a fair bit of diplomacy, everything eventually rolled forward. The amount of dancing and singing both around the maypole and through the fields was spirit-lifting. They asked us to stay. Asked May to visit more. We smiled our goodbyes and left. On the ride home, she leaned her head against the window and quietly cried. “I’m just so different from them.”

#

We spent a few more weeks together but she remained distant. She didn’t stay over and I didn’t ask why. I knew her unhappiness wasn’t directed toward me and kept hoping it would pass. June rolled around and she was gone again, a note stuck to my fridge, the writing curved and flowery. I’m sorry.

I crumpled it into a ball and tossed it across the counter, wishing I had done more.

#

Around December, work brought me to the Arctic Circle. A research vessel ran aground and the crew was filled with people who had spent their lives fighting for the beauty of this world. Documenting what their kind were doing to it and how, if they stuck together and altered course, it wouldn’t be too late. I figured they should see something beautiful before they died, know their fight was worth it, so I called in a favour and waited. Midnight clouds disappeared as the aurora erupted across the sky, reflecting off the ice in a brilliant display of green and purple. As the last researcher quietly succumbed to hypothermia, I hung around, staring at this otherworldly miracle and, for the first time in my existence, feeling alone.

I thought of Dante. What he did for Beatrice and how it captivated me when I first watched him stumble toward the river. On my way home, I made a stop in Northern Sweden. Hung around the edge of a river snapping my fingers and waiting for a teenager with a stolen flower crown to rise from sleep, drawn to the waking world by a sound I was making just for her.

“You…You’re May’s friend,” her cousin said. I smiled. “Yeah.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Wanted to come say hi.” I smiled. “Thought you could show me around the valley a bit.”

The girl took a cautious look over her shoulder before wandering over, clearly happy I was there looking for her and no longer with her older cousin.

#

A few days later, May found me in our corner booth talking to a man I hadn’t seen since Pompeii. Her hair was nearly black and cut along her jaw line. I had never seen it that short.

“Where is it?” The blue in her eyes was gone, replaced by fire.

I expected anger but not rage. I nodded to my friend and he acquiesced, slid from the booth and lifted his drink in casual surrender. I caught a waiter’s attention and raised my chin but she was suddenly in my line of sight. “I don’t want a drink. I want to know where it is. Now.”

“It’s at my place,” I said.

She insisted on driving herself. On storming through the door once I had it open. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get the last hints of blood from the petals. She ripped it from the hanger above the sink.

I winced. “Careful.”

“Careful?” She tossed the floral crown into the sink. “Are you fucking kidding me? What gave you the right?”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Help? By killing her? My family is mourning and I’m not even there; I’m here because you stole what was on her bloody head!”

“You were miserable,” I said too loudly. “I saw the way you acted while we were there. I could feel what I was seeing on your face.”

“Don’t give me that.”

“You cried the entire way home!”

She stalked toward me, put both hands on my chest and shoved me backward. “So what? I showed emotions—I know that’s a foreign concept to you but they aren’t exactly the vile things you make them out to be.”

“You didn’t even like her,” I countered. “She was family!”

“That. You. Didn’t. Even. Like. That you were different from.”

She ran a shaking hand through her hair and stared at me. “There is so much that you don’t—no—you know what? You don’t get the privilege of an explanation.” She snatched the crown from the sink and held it inches from my face. “I have never ever brought someone there before. I trusted you.” Her lip trembled. “You have no idea how badly I wanted to love you.”

She slammed the door shut behind her.

#

It took me two weeks to go back to the bar. She wasn’t there and I wasn’t surprised. It’s funny, that pivot point when stoic sadness is replaced by hatred. You think you’d know when it was coming, feel the shifting tide as it approached, but no. It happens like a rogue wave smashing against an island. Then everything around you has to either drown or burn. Luckily for me, those happened to be two things I was very, very good at.

I gave everyone who worked for me the week off. Then the month. And the next. I buried myself in tragedy. Put my arm around every person who was questioning whether or not to jump and pushed. Trains crashed and planes fell from the sky. Riots. Protests and

counter-demonstrations. Military coups and natural disasters. By February, my employees were wondering if they still had a job. When March rolled around, they assumed they didn’t. I sat in my apartment each night, balancing the tasks that came in and carving my own. I did the universe’s bidding and when I had time to spare, I spun a globe with my eyes closed and a dart in my hand. Where it landed was where I went the following day.

Near the middle of spring, I was on fire. Literally. Climate change gave me an edge and I fanned the flames. I was only sleeping a few hours a night, never able to fully pull myself from the calls and emails. The jobs that were waiting. On April 30^th my phone chimed and I looked at the queue. At the very top was another wildfire, sparked by stray flames and wind.

I froze when I saw where.

At first, I told myself I misread the notification but I know I didn’t. All that did was buy me an extra four seconds to try and comprehend what I was supposed to do: show up in Northern Sweden as the flames tore through the valley and the turbid smoke choked off any exit routes.

Fuck.

I tossed my phone aside and pulled a bottle of whiskey from the liquor cabinet. I stared at the door as I drank and wished more than anything that she’d knock or just walk in. My phone buzzed. I picked it up and looked at the growing queue. Questions were coming in. Was I able to take the assignment? Did I need to bring a team in? A representative? Was I sick? I started typing a response then stopped.

I stared into my unlit living room, traced the backside of my couch where we pressed our heads together that night and probably should have known what was going to happen. The inevitableness of it all. With a deep breath, I turned my phone off and slid it across the counter.

#

The knocking came the next morning. I pulled myself from bed and donned a thin black robe—hood up to combat the sunlight. I opened my door and there she was, standing on the other side with singed hair and a dress stained black by smoke and ash. Soot covered her cheek, was smeared around her dirty hands and forearms.

She didn’t look up when she spoke. “We were able to hide in the river bed. It was like the fire just rolled over us. There was nothing—it left nothing.”

“Except you and your family,” I said quietly. She nodded. “Except us.”

I stepped away from the doorway and waited for her to come inside.

“What happened?” She asked. “I decided to play hooky.”

The fire in her eyes was gone. In its place, the deepest blue I had ever seen. She cleaned the soot and ash from her clothes and skin while I poured two drinks and opened the balcony door. When she stepped out to join me, we both smiled shyly at one another and then the ground. She lifted her drink and held the glass between us.

“Thank you.”

“Always.” I touched my glass to hers. The breeze blew and she closed her eyes. I watched, the smell of fields and flowers in the air, as her hair rode the soft wind like ribbons around the maypole.

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