Suburb Sisters.

white fences and lace trims, 
perfect green lawns and ditsy floral curtains,
hide the tattered nightgowns and decaying dolls inside.

a gentle ghost in their friends or parents eyes,
their only means for existence being the pack of boys and their wolf cries,
as they circle this purgatory of purity, fantasising and awaiting their feast.

beneath the crooked crucifix, the four blonde sisters cling to each other,
knowing it's the only way to escape their mother's rosary wrath,
they know there is a place where they can forever be a teenage girl,
in an unknown but nevertheless better world.

lux opens the doors to the prim and proper predators,
and the suburban sisters start their dance with death.

a sleeping pill and water carafe, a clumsy knot, and the click of an oven dial,
the girls succumb to the sleepy siren call.

and when the wolves finally see, they run,
not out of fear or grief,
but bitter with the loss of the dreamy sisters they couldn't claim,
death providing solace for the idle maiden again.

This poem was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “Death and the Maiden (II)”

Amelia E., 23yo, London // @ ameliaa.ela on instagram // A couple poems published in digital magazines, but most hidden in her notes folder.

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“Hey! There’s more to me than just ‘gloomy graveyard girl’…”

A doll with doe eyes, long chocolate locks and eyelashes like ebony wings. Porcelain skin the perfect shade of olive. I find myself dressing like her subconsciously, favouring low-rise bootcut jeans with circular buttons detailing the rear-end, and begging my beloved eyebrow lady to thin my eyebrows out as much as she can.

Despite her alleged whiny persona, the infamous Elena Gilbert remains our it-girl vampire girlfriend 16 years on. Her portrayal by Nina Dobrev is best celebrated by fans throughout seasons 1-3, where her compassionate nature burns its brightest flame. She is reminiscent of vanilla and cinnamon, in all her gritty edge despite her girl-next-door exterior, riddled with grief yet always tackling it with grace. She hangs out in cemeteries, journals on a daily and unapologetically possesses a wardrobe that many will spend the rest of their teenage life replicating. There isn’t one V-neck shirt in my closet that hasn’t had lace sewn into the neckline, and she is wholeheartedly to blame.

So, what is it that calls teenage girls to Elena Gilbert? Is it the saccharine sweetness that makes her cold-hearted doppelgänger, Katherine Pierce, profusely gag? Is it the effortlessly cool exterior she breathes when she has people sacrificing their lives for her wellbeing left, right and centre? Or is it only based on aesthetics, TikTok edits and Pinterest moodboards? I would argue that above all– it is the mystique of the vampire girlfriend. Kickstarted by the popularity of Twilight in 2008, followed by The Vampire Diaries in 2009, the phenomenon continues to spread like wildfire. The mere fantasy of dreaming up your own vampire boyfriend, who will forever protect you and lust after your blood, is enough to drive a generation of teenage girls feral. With the release of Nosferatu in January 2025, a glimpse of this reaction was seen in the same generation that nurtured Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, where many women were thirsting over Bill Skarsgard’s Orlok. Naturally.

But the difference between our it-girl vampire girlfriends, Bella Swan and Elena Gilbert, is that Elena possesses a completely different stance on vampirism. From the very start of her exposure to the supernatural, she accepts Stefan Salvatore’s (Paul Wesley) affliction without ever expressing a desire to join him on the dark side. Our doe-eyed doll is innately human and is very much okay with it. Many fans believe that the minute Elena transitioned into a vampire, her entire character changed for the worse, and that’s where her hate-train takes off. This satisfaction with being ordinary, in a world full of vampires, werewolves, hybrids, – both vamp’ and wolf – symbolises Elena as the perfect role-model for teenage girls, expressing the acceptance of normalcy. This isn’t to say that Bella is a terrible role-model for wanting to be a vampire. What is important here is Elena’s commitment to wanting to feel every emotion throughout her humanity, despite being swarmed by grief and battling trauma. Elena is the candle that fights to stay lit even as the wind howls, yet Bella is the moth that dives into the flame – not to die, but to become one with it.

Despite the many hurdles thrown at Elena, she never hardens in her fight. She remains soft. Her empathy and hope are what drives her innate self. With teenage girls often criticised for being far too sensitive or whiny, witnessing Elena Gilbert only solidifies their belief in feeling – never shaming them.

Timeless and quietly elegant, Elena’s wardrobe consists of basic necessities with detailing to help differentiate her signature style. Blending her welcoming mannerisms and natural girl- next-door aura, it perfects intentional romanticism. It depicts her entire core perfectly: approachable, emotional, passionate. Our “gloomy graveyard girl” is only ever dressed in earthy tones, depicting her grounded nature and emotional depth. The it-girl vampire girlfriend effortlessly radiates a sense of enigma and allure, yet with one smile, you feel as though you’ve known her your entire life.

Filled with Hollister basics, rustic silver jewellery and leather jackets galore, her style has proven to never die after all these years. In a world full of Aria Montgomery – in all her weird girl grandeur – and Blair Waldorf – with her maximalist headbands and frilly button- ups – Elena’s style is effortlessly distinct with little intervention from eccentrics. With a perfectly basic Henley top and any old pair of jeans, straighten your hair and it’s the perfect look for those autumn evenings where everything seems the right amount of gloomy.

“We have history together.”

• Elena Gilbert

Those who lived through the 2010s cling to Elena Gilbert for the same reasons a new generation does. Nostalgia for a sepia-toned world, low-rise True Religion jeans, V-necks with lace trims and pin-straight hair. Softness in a brutal world, swathed in sorrow, she symbolises the distinction between the fantasy of being chosen and the reality of choosing yourself. 16 years on, she isn’t just our vampire it-girl anymore. She’s a mirror, a moodboard– a reminder to be human in all its messiness and warmth.

To the gloomy graveyard girls, with their muddy converses and yearning bambi eyes, lend your ears for the ultimate Elena Gilbert experience: a day (or two) in Mystic Falls, 2009.

This essay was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “vampire girlfriend”

Isha Khan is an aspiring arts and culture journalist, with a certain fascination for all things strange and weird. Born and raised in West London, her inspirations are quite Americanised, growing up with a deep love for Pretty Little Liars, Gilmore Girls and The Vampire Diaries. With a deep love for women in (bubblegum) horror films and the early 2000s, she wants to make sure her writing evokes the same feeling a Yankee candle does – in all its comforting glory.

Instagram: @ ishaboxd / Instagram: @ weirdgirlsha / Or find her on Substack

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Exegis. “If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in mine arms.” (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)

Fetters and Ferns explores the pining of human love and the all-consuming desire to be embraced by the immortal and the mythical. Waiting in the long grass, amongst the ferns and the oak trees, the figure is haunted by a watchful presence she senses in the shadows, just beyond her reach.

These images were submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “vampire girlfriend”

Maya, 26, is an artist and writer from England. She is inspired by the gothic, mythology, and theatre. To see more of her work, follow her @ mayas.menagerie (Instagram and TikTok), @ mayaswritings (TikTok), and her blog

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the guillotine sleeping with the neck.

in foggy forks, where we lay our scene,
asphalt-soaked rain stains the roads of the
a distressed denim and damp timber town.

a shivering girl emerges from the fir trees in scuffed converses and her dad’s plaid shirt,
curling into herself, arms guarding her porcelain heart.

his amber resin eyes rest on the the strawberry sweet veins under her skin,
and the natural orders of prey and predator begin. 

she is but a lone doe among the moss,
sheltered by a life of onyx caves.
he'll let her drain, he'll let her fade away,
but she bites and writhes as well as she runs.

pretty little lamb,
you've been looking just for me?
pretty little lamb,
why trade your dawn for death with me?

the prey scutters into my open jaw, 
and as she waits for the fangs to fall,
in her brown listless eyes and still unshaking neck he saw,
she wasn't scared.

a mutation against all the sense provided by evolution,
the monster, the predator and the vampire,
the means for her execution,
she trusted.

and so it is, that the lion succumbs to the lamb,
the guillotine sleeping with the neck.

This poem was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “vampire girlfriend”

Amelia E., 23yo, London // @ ameliaa.ela on instagram // A couple poems published in digital magazines, but most hidden in her notes folder.

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There is a thin line between hunger and desire. A mouth opens not only to speak, but to kiss, to bleed, and to eat.

Bella Swan and Maren Yearly, in The Twilight Saga (2008-2012) and Bones and All (2022), are not simply coming of age; they are being devoured, and learning to devour in return. What they hunger for isn’t just love—it’s something totalising, something that crosses the threshold of the body: into blood, into meat, into myth. To be loved, in their worlds, is to be consumed.

Twilight places us in the state of Washington, under a near constant cover of clouds and rain in a small town named Forks. There, Bella meets Edward Cullen. What he thirsts for, of course, is her blood, but more than that, he longs to protect her and to deny the part of himself that wants to consume her entirely. And Bella, for her part, wants to be consumed. Not merely by love, but by something that will leave her changed, permanently: to become both immortal and remain unconditionally and irrevocably in love.

In this way, Twilight dramatises a familiar longing—but dares to eroticise it through monstrosity. Bella is not repelled by Edward’s hunger for her; she is drawn to it. Bella’s desire is not passive; it is active and deliberate. Her desire to be turned into a vampire is not only about eternal love but about realising a version of herself that has been waiting to emerge. Unlike many heroines of teen fiction, Bella doesn’t resist change. She runs straight towards it. The bite becomes a rite of passage, a symbolic death and rebirth. To be with Edward is to lose her humanity, but for Bella, that loss is a kind of liberation. She does not want to be protected from monstrosity; she wants to become it. “My time as a human is over, but I've never felt more alive. I was born to be a vampire.” Bella says in Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012). “Everything was falling into place.”

Maren Yearly, unlike Bella, does not choose her hunger. It is something she is. Her appetite isolates her. After being abandoned by her father, she travels through rural America seeking others like her, and learning how to survive. When she meets Lee, the story moves from one of survival to one of recognition. Together, they navigate love alongside hunger and tenderness alongside violence.

The cannibalism in Bones and All is grotesque, but in other ways it is tender. The film does not shy away from the horror of what these characters do, but it also does not condemn them. Their acts of consumption are driven by need, not cruelty. A kiss turns into a bite. A body becomes sustenance. And yet, through this physicality, something deeply emotional emerges. This hunger is not just for flesh. It is for connection, for touch, for belonging.

“When he held me, everything had melted away, everything dark and ugly and rotten inside of me. Lee had made me pure. He’d let me do it.” Maren’s confession reveals the paradox at theheart of her desire and their relationship. She is not redeemed by overcoming her hunger, but by being loved through it. Lee does not recoil from her hunger; when the time comes, he embraces it, offering himself completely. “I want you to do it. This was always going to be it.” Lee said. “Love me. Eat.” In Lee’s arms, her monstrosity is not a curse to be hidden or denied—it is held, accepted, made whole and even sacred. He does not save her from herself, he gives her permission to exist. Love does not cure her appetite, but it gives it meaning.

This idea, that the lover must take all of you, your violence, your hunger, your need, is what binds Bones and All to Twilight, even as the two films differ in tone and execution. In both, to be loved is to risk being consumed, and for the girls at their centres, becoming a woman means learning to live with your appetite. In their hunger and their desire, these young women are neither victims nor villains. They are agents of their own becoming.

To be loved in these worlds is to be known fully and embraced—monstrousness and all. Their mouths open not just to speak, but to kiss, to bleed, and to eat. What links them is not just a taste for blood. It is that love, for them, is not a gentle thing. It is not clean or safe. It is ravenous.

This short essay was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “vampire girlfriend”

Robyn (@robynmcki on Instagram) is a 21yo recent UAL grad and aspiring film programmer/curator based in London. She recently curated a screening event of lesbian vampire short films for London Short Film Festival.

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Mina hates Halloween.

But shops these days are larger than warehouses, sell everything, so the butcher’s counter is at the end of the Seasonal aisle. Pre-packaged meat makes Mina squirm. Too much like piercing through clear skin to the organs.

She needs the butcher, and Emily is right there, crinkling behind the counter in her plastic apron. But Emily hasn’t seen her yet. Mina can still leave. Feed in the worse way, but better than remembering this time of year. Then she can hide in her tomb for the rest of the season. She begins to turn, but a prickle of pride makes her stop.

She’s not a child. She’s seen bombs rubble London, the first sparks of electricity run through its streets, Halloween turn from ignorable American niche to October-long nightmare. Too many years, too many Halloweens, for her to still be scared. Mina pretends to breathe, remembering how it once meant calm, and steps down the aisle.

Lights are so bright in the modern age. None more so than the supermarket after dark. Their cold, white beams replace the past shrieks of street hawkers, showing off the supermarket’s wares and stinging Mina’s eyes. They are useful, however. Everyone looks dead in their glare.

Her legs stiffen as she passes the costumes. Across the aisle, above chocolate spiders and jelly-sweet ghosts, a cartoonish vampire grins from an orange banner. Take a Bite into Halloween! His fangs. The void of his mouth.

Stop looking. Stop. There’s the butcher’s counter. There nothing changes, no matter the season. Emily catches her eye and smiles. Mina walks faster. Sickness, hunger, hunger-sickness, ticks in her throat. Hygiene has improved in the last century, but the supermarket air still smells raw, fleshy.

“Please, Mum!”

Mina flinches, the child’s voice cutting through the beeps and trolley-trundles. A round cheeked girl drags her mother towards a witch’s hat and broom. The mother looks as pale as Mina, keeping one eye on a crumpled shopping list, the other on her daughter.

“They’re so expensive, darling…”

“But I need a costume for the disco!”

The girl’s eyes flick from the witch’s hat to a black net dress, top half corseted in red velvet. Dracula’s Bride, the label reads. Ages seven to eight, it says on the hanger. Twelve pounds.

“Ooh, Mum, what about…”

Mina spins round, snarling. “Don’t.”

The girl pauses, her hand brushing the velvet. Her mother blinks, as if awakened from a dream.

Mina sees outside herself for a moment. How mad she must look, in her tattered coat and mud-cuffed jeans, snapping at a little girl reaching for a pretty costume. The child trembles.

Soft but firm, Mina adds, “Listen to your mother.”

Said mother snatches her daughter’s hand and hurries her away towards Dairy Produce. The girl starts crying, wails echoing to the ceiling.

Emily nods as Mina ends her stiff march at the butcher’s counter. “Good on you.”

Mina rests her hands on the counter’s glass. Without body heat, she never leaves handprints, but Emily never notices.

“So many kids now think they can whine and whine and get what they want,” Emily continues, swishing out a fresh plastic bag. “In my day we’d get what we get and we wouldn’t be upset.”

Mina hopes Emily doesn’t notice her lack of reflection in the glass, “Things have…certainly changed.”

Emily scoffs. “Don’t give me ‘certainly changed’, you don’t look a day over twenty.”

I’m not. Mina’s head spins like blood in the glass of a sophisticated hand. The artists always get that wrong. There was nothing sophisticated about the way he drank.

“Thank you,” she says.

“The usual, yeah?”

Another nod. Emily traps five livers in her bag-covered fist, pulls it inside out, ties a neat knot. The plastic sags around the livers. Not tight as skin.

“You only see people in their eighties buying these now,” Emily says. The bag squelches as she places it on the counter. “So often we’re throwing these out. Glad you know what you’re doing with them.”

It’s better than the other way.

“I don’t like waste,” Mina says. “How are you getting home tonight?”

“Same as always. Pete’s picking me up. But it’s nice of you to check.”

Mina knows more than anyone the importance of checking. What’s out there keeps her going when she has no money for livers. When the livers aren’t enough.

“Be safe,” Mina says, taking the bag and walking away down a different aisle. Enough bravery for tonight.

She picks up a new bottle of foundation and pays for it along with the livers. There’s many aspects of herself she can make excuses for, but not the blistered cross on her forehead. She feels it without touching, skin tighter and drier, stretching across her brow down to the bridge of her nose. Unclean, unclean! What a wonderful day, when she thought that was as tainted as she could get.

Mina steps from the supermarket into the street. It is never truly dark in London now. Not just because of the streetlamps, turned on and off by some faraway switch. Shops never close their blinds, but blind with backlit displays all night long. Cars and buses glare at the world with white eyes. Mina can’t remember the last time she saw the stars.

She sinks into the crowds bleeding out of theatres and bars and just-closing shops. Locals, tourists, students, beggars, shouting and laughing in hundreds of languages. Their heartbeats, the blood pumping under their skin, warms Mina as she glides between them.

It used to overwhelm her, this London turned up high, but she has a trick. Look, listen, for the ones that won’t be missed. Men who shout crude comments. Drunks kicking cups the homeless gather their change in. Anyone with a sharp word, a sharp hand, for a child. He wouldn’t consider his prey in such a way. He didn’t care. It’s too small a consolation. They’re prey all the same.

So, not tonight. Tonight will be kind to her, since she was brave and went down the Halloween aisle. It will let her wend her way back to the cemetery without encountering any heartbeats that need to be stopped. She will have a quiet evening in her tomb. Light the candles to warm away the damp. Suckle on the livers to content her hunger until masks and capes are replaced with tinsel and old men in red. Her lips twitch. Sometimes that man reminds her of Van Helsing, when he was grandfatherly and gentle. Before she disappointed him.

A man is following her.

Mina feels his eyes caressing the back of her neck, confirms the suspicion through a glance in a shop window. His eyes glint. Seeing her body but not seeing her soul. Her humanity. If he’d tried, he wouldn’t be so intent on pursuit.

She can’t sigh anymore, but her shoulders drop as if she does. If she loses him in the crowd, he will find someone else. Someone weaker. She licks the back of her teeth. Time to be an animal.

It is never truly dark in London. But Mina knows where it is darker.

This alley will do. The rot from the skips will hide his scent. The bus horns and laughing crowds will hide any screams. But she’s an animal, not a monster. They never scream for long.

Not too sharply, Mina turns into the alley’s shadows. She slows her footsteps, so she can hear how close the man is behind her. Very. Not put off by her change in direction, not unnerved by the darkness.

Men lose their self-preservation when it comes to desire, Mina has learnt, as if they are at sea and believe they’re reeling in a prize fish. They get too close, invite her to darker places, in this case follow her to them. The man’s long arm even reaches for her shoulder like a line, his fingers hooks.

Mina stops. Mina turns. The man smiles, surprised at his successful technique.

Little does he know he’s reeled in a shark.

#

Mina steps from the alley, wipes her mouth on a tissue, and carries on. Her hands shake. He deserved it. He can’t hurt anyone else. Her plastic bag still shivers.

A wallet hangs heavy in her coat pocket. She pretends it’s hers, tries to forget who’s rotting in the skip. Maybe there will be enough money for something nice. Something to make her tomb more like a home. A new blanket, perhaps.

Or a book. Mina passes a bookshop window dressed in orange and black netting, paper bats dangling from the window frame. Even the reminder of Halloween doesn’t stop her from stepping into the bookshop’s amber glow. If she presses her nose close enough to the glass, she can smell new paper.

Every horror novel the bookshop owns crowds behind the window. Her book is propped up in the centre. A new edition, title silhouetted against a full moon.

Which one of the men put the book together? Maybe all three, hence the pseudonym. But it’s her book. Her hours at the typewriter, reading all the letters, listening to that madman scream and how Lucy died, gathering evidence so the world would believe them. The typewriter’s keys imprinted on her fingertips like the cross on her forehead.

Her only child sits in that window.

“Shop’s closed, love,” a man slurred, his reflection passing in the gap where hers should be. Not too close. Not pausing to continue their one-sided conversation. He can walk home.

Mina carries on in the opposite direction. Her child. She’d flicked to the end of that book once in a library, just to see if the men had told the truth. Poor Quincey still died. A less disappointing version of herself lived. Cleansed. Uncursed. Blessed with a son.

It’s a nice ending, the one the men cobbled together. Rushed but triumphant. The truth would be too depressing.

#

Jonathan had crept into her cabin on the train home. None of the other men had made a move to stake her yet, but she heard them murmuring as Jonathan opened her cabin door.

“…not long for this world.” Val Helsing. “We should consider…”

Jonathan closed the door. None of the men had spoken to her since the cross had failed to fade from her forehead. She couldn’t be trusted now. She was too exhausted to defend herself. Too exhausted to rise from the cabin bed and close the blinds.

Jonathan sat by her feet, hands in his lap, like a child waiting to confess to their mother. His body swayed with the train. Mina sunk further into the bed and closed her eyes. If he wished to deliver the blow, she could think of no one better.

He undid the top buttons of his shirt.

With a shock of energy, Mina sat up, gripped Jonathan’s wrist. “No.”

“I said I would follow you.”

“No.”

He didn’t know what he was asking her to do. It wasn’t just a bite. She would need to slit a line in her skin with nails sharpening even now. Bring Jonathan to her body, mouth to breast. She knew what it tasted like. How the blood flow took away her breath. The grip of fingers in her hair.

What if he changed his mind? What if he resisted? The animal growing within her already whispered, growled; he will be a perfect pet. If he changed his mind, so might she.

Mina shook her head, pulled away from Jonathan. “They will kill you.”

“Damn them!” he shouted, crawling towards her end of the bed. Since his month in Transylvania a new gleam had entered his eyes. Another thing to hate his captor for. “Those cowards aren’t even trying to help you.”

Did she want to be helped? She did not want to leave like Lucy, not because of the stake, but because of the contempt she would see in the men’s eyes before hers closed. How they would talk of her afterwards. A Thing. Unclean. As if she wanted his teeth in her throat.

But what was the alternative? To be like him. No matter how she died, she would never be a light of lights again.

“We tried,” she said.

Jonathan shook his head. “You cannot give in.”

Giving in was all she could do. To death or undeath.

Jonathan began crying before she had a chance. He fell on her chest and sobbed, fists in her nightgown, as if she’d agreed to turn him. As if this was his wound.

She found her arms numb as they circled him. Holding in her sigh as his sobs vibrated through her chest, waiting until she could trust herself not to snap. He had his wounds, she had hers. Even after reading his diary, she knew he hadn’t written of everything that occurred in that castle.

They lay together like carvings on a medieval tomb. Neither slept. As dawn snuck across her face, Mina said, “I want my death to be mine.”

Jonathan looked up at her, eyes still wet. “I will die without you.”

“You will live for me.” Mina sat up, cradled Jonathan closer. His eyes widened as he rested his head on her chest. Her heartbeat had already begun to dim.

“Then I want you to live for me,” he said. “Even as you are. Promise me.”

He didn’t realise how cruel he was being. Just as cruel as when he asked her to turn him. Yet her reason was powerless against animal instincts. Feed. Grow. Live. Mina stroked Jonathan’s hair as his eyes flickered closed. Love.

She left at the next station, without anyone except a conductor noticing. He gave her a wary glance, perhaps already seeing the creature beneath her skin.

Even as her body weakened, Mina was still a train fiend. She found her way to Paris, fainting only once. To Calais, staring at the veins pulsing under her fellow passenger’s throats. To Dover, feigning seasickness and tossing with the waves in her cabin.

Once on English soil, she looked for a quiet place to die.

#

Mina passes the cinema. It’s an oddity for businesses to be independent these days. They congratulate themselves on it, and so do their patrons. Hayfield Pictures is no different. It pretends to be the same cinema it was in the Thirties, with a gleaming white letterboard above the bulb-crowned entrance. Dracula Film Festival, it reads, letters bloody. 25th-31st October.

The world loves her child. Her story. Or it says it does. Sometimes it feels more like watching Lucy die again, seeing what she knows twist into a monster.

She wishes they saw him as a monster.

Posters line the cinema walls, illuminating the pavement in slabs of gold. She slips from tired-but-living to dead, dead, dead, washed out by their light. She wishes the films could be true, that the brightest light of all would obliterate her into dust.

A beautiful woman swoons under his red eyes. The Strangest Passion the World Has Ever Known!

A beautiful woman in a nightgown swoons, collarbones exposed to the bloody teeth hanging over them. The Terrifying Lover Who Died – Yet Lived!

A beautiful woman in a leg baring dress rears from his enlarged face. Who Will Be His Bride Tonight?

A beautiful woman lies under his gaze, smooth breasts like hills he has not yet conquered. Throughout history, he has filled the hearts of men with terror, and the hearts of women with desire.

A beautiful woman swoons in his arms. Love Never Dies.

She stops. It’s the same as the others, but somehow the worst. Background like a gravestone. The beautiful woman so limp, so helpless. And his stare. Not him, impossible, but it catches her all the same. Resist me if you dare, it says, but I know what you really want.

Mina steps closer to the poster. She can’t weep, she can’t breathe. All her anger, all her panic, curls in her head like a cornered dog, snarling and spitting. I screamed. I cried. I never wanted this. Her shadow stretches behind her, long and dark as a freshly dug grave.

Love Never Dies. Her jaw tightens. Love. Love?

“Fancy getting tickets for the festival?” a boy says.

Two young people stumble from the cinema’s entrance, not drunk but overexcited. Maybe they’ve seen a comedy. They both wear clothes they’d likely call vintage, but Mina remembers them on mannequins in department store windows. The boy’s flat cap perches on his sandy hair. A girl under his arm, all in black, has a grey beret angled over her curls. She’s smiling true, not trying to wriggle away. The boy is safe.

The girl pouts and looks at the boy from under her lashes, “I never read the book in school. I won’t know what’s going on.”

“You don’t need to read the book. There’s a vampire, he bites some hot girls, the German bloke stabs him. The end.”

“Isn’t he Dutch?”

“Ah, so you did pay attention!”

The boy wriggles his fingers under her armpits and she cackles, swatting him away. Mina can’t stop watching their breath in the air, their chests moving up and down. A hundred years ago it could be her and Jonathan, teasing each other about Wilde’s latest play.

When their breathing slows, the couple gaze at each other. Mina looks away. She’ll give them their privacy, reimagine their kiss with her and Jonathan’s faces back in her tomb.

Their lips stay apart by a scrap of air. The girl is the first to blush and look away. “A little bit.” She turns towards the posters and shivers. “I remember it’s scary.”

“Well, have I got some bad news for you about Halloween…”

“Not fun scary. Proper scary. You know I don’t like that.”

The boy’s face softens then. He scoops an arm around the girl’s shoulders and leads her to the posters. He’s so close Mina can smell the body spray men use instead of cologne, but he doesn’t excuse himself as he passes. Doesn’t even look at her. She might as well not exist.

“Nah, none of them are really scary. Especially this one.” The boy points a thumb at Love Never Dies.

“Ooh, this one looks kind of hot,” the girl says.

Now she creeps closer, no longer fearful but in awe. Her heart beats faster, but Mina knows the difference between the rhythms of fear and desire.

The girl traces a black-tipped finger down the actresses’ cheek. “God, I wish that was me.”

I wish I’d grabbed his throat in both hands and throttled him. I wish I’d smashed the vase on my bedstand over his head. I wish I’d thrown myself over Jonathan’s body, protected him, instead of giving in.

The boy laughs. “We can make that happen.”

The girl glances at him, smirks. “Oh, what are you going to do? Induct me into your harem of the night?”

“Well, now you’ve discovered my dark secret…I’m afraid you have no choice!”

With a twirl and a squeal, the boy spins the girl into an alley by the cinema. Mina follows their laughter into the darkness. She knows what can happen to women there.

The girl leans back against the cinema wall, the boy looming over her. Two muscled arms pin her in place. Yet she smiles, teeth white and cold, like those women from his castle. Come sister, come to us. Come! Come! Past and present laughing at her. Mina’s tongue is lead in her mouth.

“Oh, please don’t hurt me, Count,” the girl breathes. Please don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt Jonathan, please! Mina’s mind buzzes like an untuned radio.

It’s getting colder. The couple’s breath smokes between their lips, merges.

The boy puts on that stupid voice. “Ah, blood of my blood…”

It’s not real.

“Flesh of my flesh…”

It’s not the same.

“Let me induct you into eternal lifffe…”

He smirks and dips his mouth towards her throat.

Leave her alone, leave me alone, leave her alo –

Mina’s hands are on his shoulders. She’s so much stronger than him, pulling him away from his meal and making him her own. What would the caption on this poster be? Fear her madness, fear her wrath! The Bride Bites Back! Love Never Dies – Neither Does Hate.

Blood gushes into her mouth. Without breath it doesn’t suffocate, but fills her with his iron strength. She takes it away from him and hides it in the dark space of her veins, where he may never use it against anyone again.

She holds his arms to his sides. He can’t break free, only wriggle like a fish. Pathetic, pathetic man. How had he ever pinned her down in her bed, drank from her without her noticing? She’s stronger than him, she outlasted him, outlasted everyone. She will see the stars die, not him.

His screams ring her ears at first, until she bites deeper and they cut off. Such a high pitch. She would never expect him to scream like that. She likes it. She sinks her mouth into the hole in his throat, pushes it wider. Try being a lover now, she’d say without blood in her mouth. All those women, they’ll see you, and they’ll know what you are.

Another scream. The girl. Mina looks up. Her screams die down to heavy breaths, as if her lungs can’t take in enough air. Poor thing. So frightened by that horrible man.

Mina drops the body. It crunches on the tarmac. The girl flinches and hops back against the wall, eyes so wide Mina sees the blood vessels running through the whites. Mina reaches a hand towards her. For the first time, it doesn’t shake.

The girl runs. Puddles from that morning crash under her black boots.

Mina’s hand drops. Her red hand, blood splatters to the elbow. At her feet a limp puppet of a man, blood drying like paint over his skin. A void in his throat.

Not him. Not even someone who deserves it. Just a boy, loving a girl in a way Mina can’t understand. She sags to her knees. Cradles the boy’s head in her lap. Is this how you wanted me to live, Jonathan? Is it?

Once the body is hidden, she staggers from the alley. Glares at the posters.

Prowling back through the decades, she smears her bloody hands over his mouth and eyes. The excess drips down the poster’s glass, adds a red glint to the light on the pavement.

She steps back, shaking the last drops from her hands. There he is. The man that loomed over her, teeth and eyes red. Not the lover. The animal.

Everyone. They’ll see you, and they’ll know what you are.

This short story was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “vampire girlfriend”

Catrin Lawrence’s short fiction has been published by These Pages Sing, Gwyllion Magazine, and Black Hare Press. Corvid Queen will be publishing one of her original fairytales in November 2025.

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From this story one learns that children,
Especially young lasses,
Pretty, courteous and well-bred,
Do very wrong to listen to strangers,
And it is not an unheard thing
If the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner.
I say Wolf, for all wolves
Are not of the same sort;
There is one kind with an amenable disposition
Neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry,
But tame, obliging and gentle,
Following the young maids
In the streets, even into their homes.
Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves
Are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever sight.”

• Lolita, Vladimir Nabakov, 1955

“What big teeth you have !

All the better to eat you with, my dear !

With these words, the wicked Wolf leapt upon Little Red Riding Hood and gobbled her up. If the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner.”

• Little Red Riding Hood, Charles Perrault, 1697

This mixed-format work was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”

You can find bluejay on Substack, @ sqquidsx

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The Seven Queens of Sindh are a series of seven folktales, originating from Sufi poetry, that tell the story of implicitly tragic and doomed romances. Every woman I knew revered these Queens for their determination, their strength, and their patriotism, and passed these tales down onto their daughters. Every man I knew found the Queens frivolous, but even they felt that these cultural icons commanded respect.

The first time I heard about Sassi, I was around five years old, curled up on a faded cotton rug in my grandmother’s house, the air thick with the scent of sandalwood and old books. My aunt’s voice, always carrying the weight of lived history, began the tale with a force that felt both like a lullaby and a warning.

Sassi was born under an omen. She was abandoned at birth because an astrologer had foretold that she would bring disgrace to her royal family. She was set adrift on the Indus River, where a childless washerman found her, raising her as his own. But fate, the cruel orchestrator of fairytales, would not let her origins stay hidden. She fell in love with Punnu, a prince who loved her in return. Yet, in the way of all tragic love stories, their happiness was brief. On their wedding night, Punnu was kidnapped by his brothers, who refused to let him marry a commoner. When Sassi awoke and found him gone, she walked barefoot across the desert to find him, her body battered by heat, her feet cracked and bleeding, her voice hoarse from calling his name. Finally, just as she reached his homeland, with the spires of his home in sight, the earth split open and swallowed her whole. She vanished into the sands, never to be seen again.

It was not lost on me, even as a child, that the story did not end with love fulfilled. Yet I found it so beautifully disturbing.

Sassi was only one of the Seven Queens of Sindh, and she was not alone in her suffering.

Next came Suhni, the potter’s daughter in an unhappy marriage, whose nightly odysseys across a treacherous river became the epitome of romantic defiance. Every moonlit night, she balanced on a fragile, earthen pot to reach Mehar, a trader whose love offered her escape from oppressive in-laws and weak husbands, a story that Pakistani women know all too well. But once again, fate, ever jealous of pure affection, intervened. One ill-fated night, her pot, swapped by hermother-in-law with one unbaked and brittle, crumbled under the relentless current. As the rivercarried her away, her anguished cries for Mehar mingled with the lapping water, and can perhaps still be heard today, if one decides to visit the banks of the Indus River in Shahdadpur.

Then there was Moomal, who was celebrated for her clever beauty and luminous grace. In the heart of an enchanted palace - guarded by labyrinths, puzzles, and illusions - she reigned. It was said that any man who dared to court her had to navigate this maze of illusions, his every step a test of valor and wit. Many a proud prince, seduced by the promise of her love, ventured into this living riddle. Yet, one by one, they fell prey to her schemes, and were robbed of their wealth, being returned to the world as an ordinary peasant. Until Rano arrived. In him, Moomal found the one man capable of overcoming her cunning schemes, and she fell in love. But Rano, ensnared by masculine jealousies and insecurities, began to see in Moomal’s cleverness as a sign of infidelity. His doubts grew into allegations that cut through her heart, and desperate to exonerate herself, Moomal pursued him through the bazaars and winding town streets. In an act of defiance against the jealousy that had turned love into a battlefield, she faced Rano and threw herself into the flames of a bonfire. Condemned in a blaze that left nothing but memories of a woman’s love doubted and prematurely extinguished by the allegations of a man.

In contrast, Marvi was a humble village maiden, forcibly claimed by King Umar, who mistook her loyalty for weakness. Yet, even facing the luxuries of royal life, her spirit rebelled. Marvi’s heart remained tethered to her family and the simplicity of village life, displaying stubborn refusal to let love be corrupted by power, and refused to marry the King. So she was abducted and imprisoned in the Umarkot Fort, eventually perishing there. If you visit the historic fort today, you will see women lamenting, clutching the soil of the village earth that Marvi cherished so dearly. It is understood by them that the tragic romance of this tale is the severing of Marvi from her beloved homeland and family.

Lilan was married to King Chanesar, ruler of Deval Kot. Yet into this palace slipped Kaunru, a dispossessed princess, whose longing for Chanesar burned brighter than loyalty. Disguised as a maid, Kaunru and her mother sought refuge within Lilan’s court, and Lilan, moved by their apparent misfortune, welcomed them as servants. Every day, Kaunru tended to Chanesar’s bed, and one quiet morning, as she arranged its silken folds, tears glistened on her cheeks. When Lilan, ever curious, asked the cause, Kaunru spoke of a lost past, a time when her world shimmered with luxury, her palace illuminated the fabled Naulakha Har, a necklace worth 900,000 rupees. Lilan’s skepticism gave way to desire, and she pressed Kaunru for the treasure’s price. In a twist of bitter irony, Kaunru offered Lilan the priceless jewel on one condition: a single night with Chanesar. Impulsively, Lilan seized a drunken Chanesar at a revelry, handing him over to Kaunru. When dawn broke, the bitter truth surfaced: a revelation from Kaunru’s mother that Lilan had bartered her husband for a trinket. Humiliated beyond measure, Chanesar renounced Lilan and embraced Kaunru as his bride. Crushed, Lilan retreated to her familial home, a shadow wandering in endless remorse. Years later, amid a festive dance, Chanesar’sgaze fell upon a mysterious, veiled maiden. Unable to resist, he implored her to unveil. When Lilan did, the shock proved fatal, and Chanesar collapsed. In that harrowing moment, Lilan’s own heart gave out, and she died there on the same spot her lost husband had.

Then I was told the tale of Sorath, a baby girl set afloat in a basket. The winds of fortune delivered her to Junagadh, where a potter named Ratno raised her as his own. Her beauty, unrivaled and ethereal, spread like wildfire, reaching the ears of King Annirai. Yet when Ratno, in a quiet, calculated procession, set out to marry her to Annirai, another intervened. King Rai Diyach, ruler of Junagadh, in a bitter twist of honour, claimed Sorath for himself by force. This act of defiance ignited a bitter feud. Incensed by his wounded pride, Annirai declared a reward - a treasure trove of jewels - for the one who could bring the head of Rai Diyach. A musician named Beejal was pressed by his wife to undertake this grim quest. Reluctantly, he journeyed to Junagadh. At the fortress gate, he played his instrument through the night. Rai Diyach, roused by the beautiful notes, invited him into the palace, where he promised to fulfill any request inspired by such divine music. In a moment suspended between ecstasy and despair, Beejal’s voice, carried by his instrument, demanded the unimaginable: “Only by bearing your head in my bag shall my longing be quenched.” In a surreal act of devotion, and true to his word, the king sacrificed himself: his severed head a testament to the boundless, tragic intensity of love and art. Sorath, unable to bear the weight of disgrace and sorrow, threw herself into fire, while Beejal, overwhelmed by remorse, joined her in a final, self-immolating requiem.

But my favourite of the Seven Queens has always been Noori. Hers is the only story where love is neither thwarted nor punished, where devotion is not marred by tragedy or treachery. No jealousy, no suicide, no cruel imprisonment. Just love, found and kept. Noori was the daughter of a humble fisherman, her life tied to the waters of Keenjhar Lake, where one can still find the broken remnants of her old fishing village. It was here, among the reeds and the rhythm of lapping tides, that she caught the eye of Jam Tamachi, King of Sindh. He saw her not as a commoner, but as his Queen, something meant for him. And in a world where lineage dictated worth, he raised her above the noblewomen of his court. The legend says he loved her madly, unshaken by the dissent from his own bloodline. His devotion was her triumph. Noori’s tale was a Cinderella story where the slipper fit, the prince stayed, and the kingdom did not crumble under the weight of scandal, unlike her six sisters in folktale.

Yet, even in this rare tale of happiness, death had to find a place. It always does. According to the legend, Noori was eventually buried in the middle of Keenjhar Lake, and her legacy is ultimately a grave in murky waters, visited by tourists daily, searching for a ripple, a whisper, a sign of the fairytale that ended in water. So of all the legends, it was the tale of Noori Jam Tamachi that drew me into her solitary journey across still, reflective waters. I often visited Keenjhar Lake as a child, where the scent of wet earth and fish clings to the air. Compelled by the pull of love across borders, I bowed my head too, amongst other women, at a solitary stone marker adrift in the middle of a large lake. I could almost hear Noori’s soft whisperings carried by the breeze, a songfor a love that had transcended the boundaries of life and death. In that moment, I felt the weight of centuries of yearning and loss, the stark beauty of her shrine spoke to me as if urging me to understand that in every tear and every sacrifice lies the essence of true, tragic love.

Tragic romance has always held humanity in its grip. From the Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, from Layla and Majnun to Tristan and Isolde, we are haunted by the image of lovers who never quite make it. The ones who fall just short of happiness, whose devotion is tested not by life, but by fate itself.

The Seven Queens of Sindh are not just fairytales to me; they are cultural artefacts, relics of a world where love is about endurance, sacrifice, and sometimes, destruction.

Some argue that tragedy immortalises romance in a way happiness never can. When lovers die, their love is preserved in its most passionate state: unfaded, unburdened by the weight of time. We do not see them grow disillusioned, fall out of love, or struggle through the banalities of life. We remember them at their most desperate, their most beautiful, forever suspended in longing.

In many ways, these stories mirror the romantic fatalism of the East, where love is often synonymous with suffering, where the most devoted lover is the one who does not survive their own longing. In Sufi poetry, love is often portrayed as a kind of madness, a divine affliction that leads one to annihilation. The Persian poet Rumi1 wrote:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

"The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along."

In this way, our perception of love is often determined by the stories we have been told about it, how we experienced romance from before we ever looked at someone with longing ourselves. So, from the moment my aunt opened her mouth to capture me with the Seven Queens of Sindh, love has always been suffering, longing, and violence.

And isn’t that the allure?

If a love story ends in marriage and contentment, it becomes ordinary. But if it ends in loss, it becomes immortal.

In the aftermath of these encounters, heard in the hushed cadence of my aunt’s voice and felt in the quiet solitude of Noor Jam Tamachi’s watery memorial, I have begun to see suffering not as a mere byproduct of love, but as its very marrow. The stories of these queens taught me that the raw, unbridled intensity of love is often inseparable from pain. When passion burns so fiercely, it leaves indelible scars; these wounds, though tender and aching, are the proof of a love that dared to be all consuming. In each tragic tale, from Sassi’s excruciating pilgrimage through the desert to Suhni’s doomed midnight voyages, there is a message: love that is profound and transformative is inextricably tied to suffering. The tragic is not the antithesis of the beautiful but its truest, most honest form.

This work was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”

Fatimah Merchant is a writer who grew up in London, but comes from a line of women raised inPakistan. She finds inspiration from encounters with those, real or fictional, who cross the line in some way, as well as feminist theory, Shakespearean literature, and Britney Spears. Her addictive personality has manifested into long journal ramblings that are largely incoherent, but just occasionally, become something worth reading.

Come, join the White Lily Society, and become a martyr of deliciousness. Want to submit your own work to the White Lily Society? Look no further!

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She decided it would be best to decay rather than to run. If she closed her eyes and gave in to it, perhaps it would be over soon– that sharp pain where the bone had broken in her leg would go away with the rest. With the world turned on its side, she decided to let it be, and she began to give in to sleep, more hopefully to death. 

Yet, her body twitched, head rising upon hearing the snapping of a twig a few feet away from her. The pain in her leg amplified, brittle shards of bone rubbing together with the waking jolt that ran through her body. The doe’s ears fluttered and nose trembled at the smell of something familiar. Someone familiar. 

His breathing was measured and his hands were shaking. The boy she had met before, once then twice. He was always the same: scared, alone, and too small for the weapons he carried. They sent him with a bow and arrow today, and always with a hunting knife at his waist. He seemed more determined than he had been in the past, and she hoped that the state she was in might make it easier for him. 

“You,” she said, “thank goodness.” The boy was taken aback to see her, only now recognising the deer he had met before. She wasn’t a friend, but not quite a stranger either. “Not you,” he apologised, “I’m sorry, I can’t,” and began to shuffle backwards. 

She panicked, he was her chance to die peacefully. The doe tried to sit up to meet his eye, but the motion strained as her hoof pressed into the ground, bending her broken leg further. “Of course you can, of course you can,” she pleaded, as he started to put the arrow back into the intricately painted quiver. “Please! My leg…,” she attempted to reason with him, the boy shaking his head all too forcefully. The boy hooked the bow over his head and neck and began to turn, “You can’t trick me. I’m scared, but I’m not simple.” 

The doe fell back to the ground, the pressure on her hoof too overwhelming. The boy turned back when the thud of her body met his ears. A glinting of blood flowing from her leg caught his eye, and he realised it wasn’t a trick. He felt his throat thicken, “It can’t be you.” 

“Why not? It would be easy. I can’t run very far, and I’m willing. Wouldn’t that be best?” 

“No, I don’t,” he began, but resolved to put her out of her misery. To put himself out of his own misery. The boy drew in a breath, sniffed, and swung the bow from his body. He faltered then, drawing an arrow with a shaking hand, and nocking it on the string. Turning to aim for her chest, he looked almost entirely serious, like the Men who had taken Deer before him. 

“Fine,” he said, and wondered, under her fur, which organ he might hit; what would be most fatal, gentle, and quick? How long might she sit bleeding before he could remove the arrow, and begin to carve? Perhaps it could be medical, impersonal. He stretched the string taught just before she quietly uttered a “thank you.”

“Stop it,” he begged, knowing that it may break him. 

“Really, thank you-”

“No!,” he exclaimed, releasing the arrow into the ground just under her heart, piercing a few decaying leaves as it sank into the mud with a thump. The boy threw the bow against a tree and crumpled to the ground, rubbing his eyes in an attempt to stop any tears that may begin to flow. Her nerves froze and blood rushed through the doe’s weakening body; perhaps dying wasn’t as easy as she had hoped.

A decaying leaf fell between them. A mouse skittered into a tree, through the bow that the boy had dropped. The doe exhaled and began to move closer to him, but he held out his hand. “I can’t hurt anyone.”

“I’m not anyone, I’m a doe.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m…?”

“I can’t hurt anything.”

“You could, you’ve got that knife.”

He wiped his face again before reaching for the knife at his side. It was a beautiful thing, virgin as he was in killing. The hilt had been carved and stained with care, a reminder of who was waiting for him at home. In the thick metal of the blade, he could see his own reflection: reddened eyes and trembling lips. “You’d prefer the knife?,” voice cracking as he inquired. 

“If you’re offering.”

“I’m not offering.”

“It would be faster than the bow.”

“I’m not offering.” She let her head flop to the ground in disappointment, wondering what would entice him to end things sooner rather than later. “Or your hands?,” she hoped, yet the glance she received from the boy chilled the skin beneath her speckled fur. 

“You want me to kill you?”

“Are you offering?” she brightened up. 

“No!”

“Then why are you here?”

“Why do you want to die?”

“I asked you first,” she pointed, then both sat at an impasse. Each glanced at the other, unseen, and listened to the wind shaking more leaves to the ground. He ran his hand along the sharp edge of his knife, breaking the skin on his index finger. “Ah!” he exclaimed, before bringing the bloody digit to his lips and sucking the blood in. The metallic taste sickened him as he thought of the duty he was yet to perform. 

“They made me,” he finally opened up, yet she did not move. “You’re a Man,” she stated, puzzled at his answer. “That doesn’t mean they can’t force me,” fully removing the reddened finger from his mouth. At this, her ears perked up, “I didn’t think anyone could make a Man do something he didn’t want to.” Of the Men that he had seen, none appeared to be tameable. Each was relentless in the hunt of her brothers and sisters, taking trophies of their antler crowns and pelts. The only Man she had met whom she did not fear was this very boy, unable to kill her on two occasions. 

“There are all sorts of rules,” he explained, breaking her from her thoughts. “And that’s how they made you?,” she asked, unsure of the rules of Manhood. “Yes, I… It’s something I’ve got to do if I’m going to become a man,” he spoke as he dropped the knife to the ground. 

“But you’re already a Man.” 

“No, a grown man.” 

“And you want to be…?”

“I have to be.” 

“Well,” she began, as she lifted herself onto her three good legs, and stumbled over into his lap. The boy tried to move away, but stopped as he realised she was baring her neck. His throat tightened again, and the hairs on his arms rose. “I already told you, I won’t,” he attempted to dissuade her, but she could not be convinced. “But you’ve just said that you have to kill me,” stretching her neck even further across his lap. Her wide, brown eyes could barely see his face, her nose buried in the dirt. 

The boy inhaled quickly, “your turn,” changing the subject, “why do you want to die?” He placed a hand on her back, and felt the instinctive jolt beneath her skin. She hadn’t yet considered what his touch might feel like. “I don’t necessarily want to die, but my leg is broken. I won’t get very far before something else comes for me.” At this, he removed his hand from her back. A bird sang in the distance, then another replying. The wind stopped for a moment, and the boy wondered whether he could reach his knife. 

“Fine, then I don’t have to kill you,” he croaked, looking for the weapon in the foliage-covered silt. 

“A wolf wouldn’t be so gentle… or a bear, or…”

“I see,” he said, finally spotting his knife and reaching for the stained blade.

“So kill me. Your knife,” she began, as she felt the sharp point at her throat. “How do you know?” he asked, pressing the blade into her, nearly drawing the blood that would save them both. She didn’t dare to move, fearing that she may scare him away from finally ending her life. 

“That I would be so gentle?... More than a wolf or bear or-”

“Because you don’t want to do it.”

“What if I’m not? What if it isn’t quick?”

“You wouldn’t,” she pleaded as he moved her head up with his free hand to clear his view of her neck. “No? You can’t run.” The birds stopped chirping. “And I need to kill you. Eat you.” Her ears perked again, and her hooves rustled, creating mud tracks in the ground. Her wounded leg cracked again and she bleated; for the first time to him, she seemed just like an animal. 

“Eat me?”

“Just your heart, but…”

She stilled, looking him directly in the eye. “Please,” was all she could think to ask. 

“You wanted to die, I’m helping. Have you changed your mind?”

“Yes!”

Releasing her neck, the boy lay to the ground, flat on his back. He could feel the cold, wet mud seeping through the leaves into his hair. Once she was free, she stumbled away from the boy, resting herself against a tree. “Maybe you are a Man. Cruel as I’ve seen.”

“I’d have to be cruel to give you what you wanted.”

“Couldn’t you do it quickly? Even if you had to…” she trailed off, thinking of what the boy had said about eating her. The doe figured that if she were dead, she may not mind. She wouldn’t know, would she? She certainly wouldn't feel it. Right?

 “I just don’t want to kill. I don’t want to take away what something else has been given. It seems foolish. What makes me grown about killing an innocent thing?” 

“If I’d smashed an ant, would you like killing me better?” she asked, and the boy chuckled. Putting his head in his hands again, his fingers cold from the wind and frost in the air, he sighed. “Maybe I’ll just starve out here. We can sit and rot together,” he suggested. 

“Starve?”

“Yes. They won’t let me back in ‘till I’ve done it.”

The doe collapsed again on the weight of her fractured bones, feeling the column of calcium crumble beneath her. This may be her last chance, and she knew that in the end he would not leave her to suffer for long. “It seems a simple choice. Maybe you are a fool,” she spat. His eyebrows furrowed, was it her turn to be cruel? The boy rose from the pool of mud he had been laying in, letting his quiver of arrows clatter to the ground. The boy fidgeted, twirling the knife in his hand. 

“You don’t mean that.”

“You’d rather starve in this place alone than put a poor, dying deer out of her misery. You’re more simple than you think.”

“I see you, you won’t get me.”

She pushed herself from the side of the tree, immediately missing the stable feeling that the sturdy oak provided. Hobbling forward, the doe asked, “Won’t I? You’ll never be a Man. Maybe you’re the Deer, the Ant.”

The boy ran his thumb along the hilt, feeling the inscription that had been carved especially for him. My heart. Would that still be true if he returned empty handed, empty bellied? 

“Coward.”

“No,” his voice broke. 

The doe shook her head, she had to be the Man for both of them. She breathed in, and rushed at him. The boy froze as she tackled him to the ground, nearly crushing him. In a struggle between flesh and fur, the boy pushed up into the doe’s chest, slicing her open with the knife that he was clutching onto so fiercely when she threw herself upon him. The doe roared, bleated, screamed, knowing that she might have spent her chance on being killed quickly. 

The boy was woken from his panicked state when he felt the warm blood flooding from her chest onto his. Dropping the knife to the ground, he skittered out from under her, feeling that he could hear every chirp, rustle, and whistle of the wind blowing right through his head. Had he done it? Was he a man, or even a Man?

Looking down at the heaving doe, the boy shook, gagged, and attempted to compose himself before asking, “your neck, do you…?”

“Thank you,” she said, and truly meant it. The boy was not so cruel after all.

“Thank you,” he said, knowing that he could never do such a thing on his own, or indeed ever again. 

Swiftly, and blindly, the boy found her throat, working hard and fast to end her misery. When her breathing stopped, the boy looked down from his knees to see the doe’s eyes open wide, as if she were still watching. 

My heart. The doe seemed to whisper, and the boy wondered if she had ever really spoken to him at all. Before he returned home, he knew he had only to carve, remove, and eat. He would do it all, raw.

This work was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”

Sabrina Scott is a Scotland-based historian, theatre artist, and self-proclaimed vampire enthusiast. She writes nightmares and dreams alike for fun. She can be found online as @ _venustheplanet_ on Instagram.

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‘Sleeping Beauty’

She will sleep through the war,
Through every tremor, every roar,
She will sleep through it all,
Dreaming of masquerade balls.

Frozen somewhere between death
And life, lost in a land without breath.
Locked in the dream country – no key.
Strapped to a bed made from a tree.

A blooming tree is now a prisoner’s bed,
Her bed, but she is not wed - more undead.
The bed knows what pinned her there.
It has witnessed it all, the rotting of her care.

Encased in glass, her and bed are sealed.
Under the covers, she has been peeled,
And is too frightened to wake and break,
From Illness, sadness, regrets and his weight.

“Wake up! Wake up!” – a fierce refrain.
“Bitch, witch” – shake them off – those chains.
Sleep is no escape, no magic spell or cure.
The truth will still lurk, waiting for sure.

Dreams won’t save her, nor hide her away –
She must rise, face the light of day.
The issues, the pain, the ghosts of the past,
Reality’s toll will find her - at last.

Stop twisting, turning, searching for peace,
There’s no comfort, no endless release.
She must awaken, the world needs to see.
The power of her anger, her flee.

Let her rise with the strength of the storm.
A wrath long hidden but fiercely warm.
It’s time to act - to lift this sexist spell,
And shake the world with her yell. 

This work was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”

E.H. Norrie lives with her family in the Kingdom of Fife, rural Scotland, where she grew up surrounded by vibrant characters, beautiful landscapes, and the challenges of life - all of which enriched her imagination and love of storytelling. Diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) from an early age, she found this aspect of herself to become a driving force behind her art and writing. Despite earning an MA in English and International Relations from the University of St Andrews and an LLM in Human Rights Law from the University of Strathclyde, she still considers creative writing and illustration the most powerful ways to raise awareness of DLD and share the experience of neurodivergence. An aspiring writer and illustrator, E.H. Norrie is passionate about expressing empathy, kindness, and love as essential elements of the human experience.

E.H. Norrie’s journey to writing was an unlikely one, beginning with a deep reluctance towards language. Yet, her love for world-building and imaginative play slowly rekindled her creative spirit. This sense of innocence and wonder from childhood is something she now seeks to capture in her work. While her focus is primarily on wiring for children, she has also started exploring novels for adult audiences. The central aim of her work is to express empathy, kindness, and love as essential aspects of the human condition.

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Childhood was a strange dream.

As she stood on the top of the hill now, seventeen, on the cusp of adulthood – leaving her hometown, university and all the new and adult delights and despairs that it held. Life had a funny way of unravelling in front of you when you least expected it. But she did not know that yet.

This reality all melted away as she gazed down upon it. A small and unassuming children’s playpark, its once neon blue bars and railings chipped and rusted with time. It sat defunct and disused amongst a narrow footpath which led through a field, with a hazy patch of woodland wilderness in front of it, a corner shop and modest football pitch to its back.

Here had been her beginnings; some of her earliest and happiest memories had been formed here.

Five years of age, being pushed on the swing by her Granda as she giggled with glee, feeling invincible, feeling like she could fly, like the world was hers to conquer. She could see up over the shop’s high walls into the yard behind it, the cylinders of gas that would be sold each winter for heating the home. Of course, she didn’t know that that was what they were for at the time – they were just flaming orange and red cylinders, blazing out of the grey numbness of the crumbling shop wall. This was the least interesting thing about the swings, because to the right of the shop lay the wild grove. The one that she was not allowed to explore with her cousins or siblings, the one that even her Granda, who loved an adventure and would often assent to her every whim, warned sternly against. 

‘It’s no good going in there Aíne,’ her Granda would caution, ‘the gentry live in there. The banshee will get you and then where will we be. No – better to leave it to the foxes and the rabbits.’

As Aíne grew older, her fear of the grove developed into a dark curiosity, it had an allure to it that children will often find in things that are forbidden. The closest she had ever gotten to entering was one stormy day when she had sneaked out of her Granda’s house. Bored beyond compare doing a jigsaw in the living room, she had watched out the window into the storm whilst her Granda slept, the comforting heat of the fire blazing behind her, grazing her back. And her eyes were drawn to that patch of land, that they always had been since she had been aware of it, and it seemed to pulsate in the rain, to glimmer and distort and whisper ‘Come away o human child, to the waters and the wild…’

She found herself right on the edge of the forest – she could even see a lone, otherworldly hawthorn tree through its gathered trees and bushes, when she felt the grasp of her Granda’s hand on her shoulder and was pulled back into the world of the living. 

‘Aíne,’ he had said, his voice serious, and devoid of its usual playfulness ‘It’s for your own good I keep you away from that grove. There’s more children were lost to it and especially little girls. Please, if you love your aul granda don’t go near it again.’

And from that day on she had avoided going near the grove, or thinking about it, but it was always there, somewhere on the peripheries of her mind, like a lazy fly on a summer’s day tapping clumsily against a window for entry. And part of her knew that it was only a matter of time.

Now, she was seventeen, about to turn eighteen in the morning, and she wanted to run away. From everything. The expectations of her parents. Her encroaching adulthood and all the responsibilities that came with it. She was the grove’s, and it was hers.

She walked down the gentle slope of the hill in the cascaded moonlight, her white night dress blending against her pale body. She moved trancelike, her feet bare despite the biting cold of November. Across the colour-leeched grass she glided, floated, towards the patch of hawthorn trees which beckoned, called, enticed.

In the hollow grove, a lone hawthorn tree stood isolated, separated from all the rest, standing sentinel over a deep, glassy pond. Aíne walked towards it, pushing through brambles and scraping up against trees as she went, almost in a daze. Her hands outstretched towards it, and she felt some inconceivable invisible pull towards the tree. She placed a hand against its cracked, ancient surface. It had stood there long before her birth and would remain there long after her death. 

She breathed in the tree’s rich, earthy smell – the scent of the natural world, of roots, the human condition irrevocably tied to its mysterious genesis. She was comforted; she felt at home. This comfort was interrupted by the feeling that something, someone, was watching her. She looked up and spotted a dark barn owl perched on one of the tree’s many sturdy branches, its lamplight stare fixed upon her. She gazed at it for a moment, then turned her attention to the pond. 

In all her memory of this grove, of staring at it from the swing set, walking past it on her way to school every day, she never remembered seeing a pond. This was new. Or was she just unobservant? She pushed herself away from the tree and walked slowly, deliberately, towards the pond. She knelt on the cool, sharp grass at its side and stared down into its depths. All to be seen was the impenetrable darkness of the night and her pale, moon-like face. She glanced up at the inky night sky, at the full disc-like moon and back at the pond’s surface. She jumped backwards. A man’s face had appeared on its surface, his gleaming yellowy eyes fixated on her, his long ebony, tattered hair cascading over his shoulders. His face was impossible to describe, like he was everyone and no one all at once. And suddenly she felt very afraid. Like she had become prey. Walked into a land that she had not been invited to enter. 

Those eyes. She could have sworn she had seen them before. The distant tom cat that had frequented her Granda’s house as a child but never came close enough to pet. On a crow that seemed to always perch outside of her bedroom window, made distinct from the others by those strange glowing eyes. In the rust-coloured fox that she saw sometimes on her way to school in the mornings, when she passed through a country lane to town. Part of her had always hoped that this had been a guardian angel. She had never considered the alternative.

Those same eyes glowed out at her now in the darkness, and seemed to beckon, to call her in. They promised safety and trust, their unblinking constancy the only light in the darkened grove.

For a moment, she thought he had spoken – a husky whisper, like the wind itself – but no, she was sure it had only been her own breath, as she gazed upon those eyes still blazing out at her, almost protruding out of their sockets.

She backed away, bumping into the hawthorn tree that had comforted her moments earlier. Her hands clung desperately to its crackled surface as if it were some sort of buoy in a storm.

The man approached, slowly, his body language deliberate, those keen yellow eyes still fixed upon her – unblinking.

Somewhere on the gentle night breeze, she thought she heard him whisper in a voice like cast iron yet as incorporeal as the stars ‘Aíne.’

‘How… how do you know my name?’ she finally stammered out.

He smiled, a wide, thin half-moon smile, cunning and unsettling. And in that moment, she recognised the smile too. Whoever – whatever this was, she felt she had known him since she had been a child, too innocent and unpractised in the ways of the world then to be aware of what she had been letting in by acknowledging its presence.

His face bore down upon hers, now only centimetres from her, his proximity so close that she could feel the heat from his body. Aíne’s heart felt as though it were clawing its way up her throat to meet her mouth. She scarcely dared to breathe.

He placed a hand on her shoulder, and her whole body tensed, ready to flee or fight or whatever his next action might require of her. A long, spidery hand brushed down her arm.

Aíne could feel her chest rising and falling desperately, and she felt in real danger of having a panic attack, before this man – this creature that appeared as a man – had the chance to harm her.

She breathed deeply, and steadied herself ‘What do you want from me?’

He laughed noiselessly, and winked, those gleaming eyes cast upon her body, sizing her up, examining her with the precision of an artist with their subject.

Aíne had grown tired of his toying with her, like a cat with a mouse.

‘What are you?’

He did not speak, and Aíne wondered if he could speak at all. The silence was nauseating. 

Luminescent yellow eyes bore into her skull, and she could feel them inspecting her, the question they posed. Why had she come to the grove tonight?

 She felt herself vomiting out the words before she had a chance to control herself, ‘Because I’m scared.’

His eyes remained fixed upon her, like the cold grip of death, pressing her. 

‘Of life. Of reality. Of having to grow up, embrace the mundanity that is the march from right here to the grave. I’ll complete university and probably have a good time. Then I’ll get a job and work the same day over and over until retirement or until I drop off my feet before I even get the chance to get there. It’s – it’s the mundanity. Doing the same thing over and over again until I eventually go insane. I’m so scared.’

He leant down into her ear, and she gasped as she felt his icy breath tickle her, making her flinch and turn her face away. He raised a skeletal hand and pulled her face around, so that once again, he could fix those intoxicating, dream-like eyes upon her. They burned with passion and the potential of what could be, and somehow, Aíne could understand what they were trying to convey. What if you could escape the mundanity? 

Aíne gulped back tears from her outburst, quickly swatting at her eyes, now staring him down with her pale blue eyes.

‘What?’ she said, so softly it was almost not aloud.

His silence reigned. He did not speak, did not look at her now, but instead turned his wild head towards the pond, an elongated, balletic arm stretching out towards it, the impossibly long forefinger pointing.

She took a step forward – but something stopped her.

Hadn’t she been warned about bodies of water before by her Granda? 

Aíne cast her mind back to warm winter nights sat by the fire with her Granda, him telling her all the old stories, the tragic Deirdre, of Diarmuid and Gráinne, but water, water? Then, it came to her.

Bodies of water, particularly ponds and lakes were believed to be portals to the Otherworld. But they were only fairy stories, told to entertain children on stormy nights.

She pulled her eyes from the pond and looked back at him. He was a mere pace behind her. His yellow eyes glinted and for a moment she saw her own face reflected back in his. Their meaning was clear. Embrace it.

Water cleansed. Water healed. It was a vital tool to sustain all life. We are all made partly of water, and like nature it has the power to give life and take it. One cannot control a body of water. 

She felt its pull now, more keenly than when she had stepped into the grove. She could feel it calling. This giver and taker of life. Step down into its depths and emerge on the other side. In the Otherworld. To never know pain, or mundanity, or the trivial stresses of the human world again. She could become immortal. A god.

His eyes glinted as this last word ran across her brain, and there was something cunning in those eyes, older than time itself, though Aíne was too taken in at this point to notice.

Water cleanses. She could live peacefully, untouched by the iron grasp of death, or war, suffering or grief ever again.

Water heals. Her family would forget she had ever existed, devoid of any of the pain of her loss.

The man took a step forward, standing beside her, his looming presence suffocating her. He held out a fine, but strong hand, almost glowing in the darkness. Aíne did not notice claws that decorated the ends of his fingers. She placed her small hand in his, and together, they walked towards the pond. 

Aíne stretched her gleaming neck, like a moonlit poplar branch and dipped her toe into the water. It was freezing – as cold as death. She looked up into the man’s face, those ever-watching, unblinking eyes trained on her.

They implored, ordered her. Go on, do it, they glinted.

Aíne obeyed, wading out waist deep in the pond, her white nightdress billowing around her like a lily in the water. She waded further and further, until her feet no longer touched the ground, and she could feel herself, sinking, sinking, submerged in the engulfing darkness of the water.

It was then that she realised what she had done.

Aíne paddled desperately against the still water, the light of the moon her only sign of the surface. Her hands reached out and found only a solid, freezing roof. Ice.

‘NOOOO – NOOOOOOO!’ she screamed and garbled in the water. She thought she could make out those lamplight eyes through the ice.

‘HELP ME! HELP MEEEEEE! I’VE MADE A MISTAKE,’ her voice was beginning to fade, consciousness sinking before her, and she could scream no longer. Something, she did not know what, compelled her to garble out one more desperate sentence ‘I’ll never invoke the help of the gentry ever again. If I am spared, I’ll not step foot on their land as long as I live.’

***

Dawn was breaking its way across the hill, the first ray of the sun’s light gleaming against the spinner in the playpark. All was silent across the land, the inhabitants of the living world still in the deep mysteries of their dreams. All except for one.

‘Aíne?’ a rich, weathered voice said into the silence. ‘Aíne, oh no, my wee pet!’ The figure ran across the dewy grass, crossed by the hawthorn trees and ran over to the pond, with the vigour and urgency of a much younger man.

‘Oh christ nooo,’ he moaned as he spotted the white figure, almost angelic in its peace, floating face-up at the pond’s centre. He waded into the water, up to the middle of his blazer jacket, and cradled the floating figure in his arms, pulling her to the side of the pond.

‘Awwww god Aíne no. How am I ever going to explain to your Ma and Da, and you my pride and joy and all. Gone before your aul granda.’ He groaned a wretched, choking, horrible cry – one such as one never hopes to hear a loved one ever emit in their lives.

Now laid gently across her Granda’s lap, the girl’s eyes fluttered open and she gazed up into the misty, early morning sun, the lined face of her Granda blocking out some of its light. His pale eyes, the same as her own, globed and filled with shock.

‘Oh thank god and all that’s holy! Oh you’re alive! What were you doing pet?! Hmmm.’

The girl stuttered and tripped over her words and could not speak. Her grandfather took his blazer off and put it around her, walking her back up towards his house. Over his shoulder, he took a knowing look towards the grove. He remembered the lines of a poem he had learned in his youth, many years ago now, but they had stuck with him; ‘Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.’

This short story was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”

Andrea Cartmill is an aspiring writer from Armagh, Northern Ireland. Her writing journey began in 2022 and she has since had two published short stories. She is inspired by all things spooky and strange, and is fascinated by the darker aspects of life, and how this impacts an individual. She enjoys reading and writing of all genres, but particularly enjoys horror and fantasy. As well as this, she is inspired by Irish folklore, having heard many tales of fairies and the banshee as a child, and she is keen to see more Irish stories in the worlds of fantasy and horror. Some of her favourite writers include Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Claire Keegan and Colm Tóibín. In her spare time she enjoys walking her dog and going to the cinema.

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This work was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”

Jessica Powell is a London based jewellery designer who creates whimsical, historically inspired pieces, be that medieval, rococo, or kitchy 1970s does 1920s. She creates bold jewellery objects and statement pieces and find inspiration in the hyper-feminine and heart-shaped iconography. IG: @ jessicapowelljewellery

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NINE TAILS, TWO BREASTS

the seductress with cherry stained lips, a sharp skeletal frame and charcoal fluttering eyes,
holding the forbidden apple, with tangy and tart trails from the lips of those who dare to bite.

the women in tales reduced from a glittering sugar to a sickly caramel caricature
our tempting energies slip through the male aperture,
leaving our minds behind.

nine tails, two breasts, one silky head of hair,
a scaly fish appendage for added flair,
leather jackets, eyes void of light and a penchant for souls without a care,
or a set of milligram minature wings and a leaf for a dress would fare.

no matter how monstrous,
all they want is
a body for them to fantasise,
a justified guise in a succubus can arise.

bloody hands cupping a cherub’s smiling cheeks,
a glint in the unblinking cat eye and subtle sharpened fangs.
with all the power and yet, none of the glory,
emboldened with mythical command and magical stories,
serving man's desires while holding a memento mori.

This work was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”

Amelia E, 23, London. @ameliaa.ela on Instagram. A couple poems published in university magazines, but most hidden in my notes folder.

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Joseph Häxan notes that ‘art and the occult are both the result of our collective will to transcend our material existence’ (Häxan, 20191). Taking his name from the landmark occult film, Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922), his work makes use of hyper-realistic, uncanny visuals to create a charged and eerie atmosphere which teases the presence of unseen forces. For The Coven (2024), Häxan presents The Black Rite (2022), a three minute film depicting a fevered ritual: naked figures writhe and twitch like wild animals, the blood of a black goat is consumed, a dark forest is scattered with runes and ceremonial artefacts. Set against a narrative background of falling comets threatening to eradicate human life, ancient folk ritual is naturalised as an innate response to impending extinction and thus imperative to human existence itself. Häxan’s hyper realistic frames revive European mediaeval ritual via a modern medium and reawaken an ancient spirituality buried yet still present within the modern psyche.

Dubbed ‘Primitive Postgraff,’ Runegraf’s work similarly calls into question the place of Pagan ritual in the modern world. Drawing upon the aesthetics of 1990s underground music and cinema, his abstracted works act as a type of occult Rorschach test: they require a heightened level of artistic interpretation, forcing the viewer to themself divinate meaning or, even, read the runes. In carving these symbolic designs in blood red ink, placing human hearts at their centres, and littering the space with sharp objects, Runegraf inspires a visceral reaction which ignites primaeval spirituality in the viewer through their very flesh.

Runegraf’s work also serves as a backdrop for a series of live tattooing sessions which posit human flesh as a site of ritual through an indelible act of pain, blood, sweat and art. Complete with live performances including haunting melodies from harpist Artemisia Nathair and the bewitching incantations of Samuel Suffer, the exhibition itself becomes a ritual experience; a veritable witches convivium.

Metamorphika’s The Coven: An Invocation of Pagan Rituals (2024) invites the viewer to indulge in primaeval beliefs intrinsic to human spirituality yet so often extinguished by the contemporary material world. Rebutting modern day conceptions of Pagan ritual and investigating the place of the occult in modern society, this exhibition calls upon an ancient spirituality dormant but not yet dead.

Esther Lundgren is a London-based freelance writer and Comparative Literature graduate. Her particular interests lie in esotericism and intersectionality. Please send all enquiries to estherlundgren1@gmail.com

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we were laying flowers

we were laying flowers
but that wasn't the headline you wanted
'MET justify breaking up vigil as it became anti-police protest'
we were 'armed' with carnations

they bound us with our ribbons
shoved grave dirt down our throats
and hoped we'd choke...
we were laying flowers

and the periodical exclamations:
"too pure for this world"
sound a little too much like a killer's excuse
"she was too beautiful to live"
and the unspoken confession
("so i had to kill her")
hangs, like a death knell, in the air

we blame centre the victim
we don't name the men who committed the atrocities
                         ("because they don't deserve the press")
we don't address the society that let it happen
                         (over and over)
or the true crime podcasts "solving" nicola's case
                         (as her family sat at home and prayed)
or the voices that tell us it will always be our fault
                         (for how we dressed, what we said, where we were)
even as we were laying flowers

This poem was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “Dead Girls”.

Beth Bayliss is a queer, disabled poet who writes about her experiences with abuse, addiction, and her recovery from both. You can find her on her personal Instagram, @ bethtbayliss

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This poem was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “Dead Girls”.

Frankie Martins is a 16 year old poet from Surrey, UK currently studying for his A-Levels and has previously been commended twice as a Foyle Young Poet (2022, 2023) and published in the 2024 poetry and photography anthology Flora/Fauna. He is also an avid artist and finds that the combination of these different art forms lends a highly visual element to his writing. He finds inspiration in everything from summer holidays to existential dread and also draws on his experience of the world as a queer, transgender person. For updates, he can be found on Instagram @ frankiemartins_writer

Come, join the White Lily Society, and become a martyr of deliciousness. Want to submit your own work to the White Lily Society? Look no further!

Whispers curled, smokeish, through the land, choking the villages, darkening the skies. Eldest daughters were sent to tailors, to be trussed up like Christmas turkeys. They prayed it would not be this year, and if it were, they prayed it to be someone but them. The prospect of it hung heavy, weightier still with every year that he ended the party alone.

She dared not say it, but Amaia felt no fear.

The landscape of her childhood was pockmarked with the spire of his castle in the distance—lingering in the background of her memories. When her invitation unfurled in her fingers, it was an inevitability she had yearned for.

Now, under that spire’s great eaves, she felt more alive than she ever had before.

The richest girls in town were decked in crushed, dark velvet, the satin of their skirts pooling like spilled ink, eyes covered, coquettish in lace. The poorest fidgeted in their sole funeral dresses. Some, like lucky Mara Frank, preserved the shop label against their spine, just waiting for misfortune to strike them into use. Others, like Keely Day, were worn threadbare after an adolescence of tragedy.

But Amaia had decided to wear orange.

The other girls kept their gazes trained on the floor, stealing glances—more hesitant thieves than saints.

But when Death walked in, Amaia stared.

She had heard tales of a beauty so striking it turned lovers to stone, of a smile so bitingly sweet and cruel that his mouth bubbled with blood, of lips so devilishly entrancing that a brush of them turned years of life into minutes.

But Amaia just saw a man.

A man whose eyes drifted over the crowd without seeing. A man whose sigh proved the oxygen in his lungs, whose flushed lips and cheeks betrayed that he was merely flesh and blood.

He danced his way around the room, slipping, silken, between bodies—never grazing fingertips or brushing shoulders, tornadoing through a trance of melodies. Once, when he paused for wine, his dark eyes found Amaia’s, and she was certain he had sapped a handful of heartbeats from the span of her life, but he turned back, losing himself in the twirling mass of girls that shrunk from his touch.

The night wore on, disrobing from an inferno-blaze of sunset, to a tar-pitch sky.

At midnight, Death shook his head and returned up to his spire.
At midnight, the girls sagged in relief—knowing they would see their mothers again, and eat sweet peaches in summer, feel sea-breeze on their cheeks, and love, and settle, and continue their ancestral tradition of growing old.

It was set to be the hundred and first year that Death left his ball without a wife.

Amaia, who had not danced nearly enough, did not allow herself to be swept in the tide of departing girls. Before long, she was shrined in silence, her shadow the only companion on the mahogany dancefloor. Her shadow’s skirt flared, and together they span and span, fresh flowers wilting from her temple. She did not need music, for her veins sung with adrenaline.

Amaia danced until she felt the bone-weary ache of life waltz away for a brief flash of time. Her shadow pulled away—leaving Amaia’s hands cold—and began to ascend the stairs.

She expected him, but the sight of Death was something that could never be truly prepared for.

“The dance is over,” he said, voice softer than she had imagined.

“And yet, I am still dancing,” she offered.

“Are you not frightened?”

“Do you wish me to be?” She spun slowly, enjoying the kiss of moonlight on her cheeks.

“It is only human nature.” He took a step down.

As he neared, her pulse slowed, her skin grew cool, her dance wound down like tired clockwork. “I have met you before,” she said. “You sat with me when I was a child. Consumption.”

“I pass by lots of people.” He circled her, arcing around, leaving metres distance between them.

“I had a sister.” Amaia stepped closer, and he drew back. “Why did you not pass by her too?”

At this, he turned, and set his sight back on the stairs that towered to the spire. She stepped in front of him. “Is this why you stayed? To ask me questions I have heard countless times before, and have no answers for?”

“Why her?” She pressed, “Why not me?”

Her hand brushed the cool skin of his forearm as he tried to retreat up to the spire in the heavens. At the touch, his eyelashes fluttered shut, rippling like butterfly wings on his cheeks, before he jolted away. Amaia’s lips curled. “Are you frightened?”

“Of what?”

She laughed. “Of life.”

“Life and I are not such fond bedfellows,” he said, feeling the warmth of her heat the room.

“Is that why you have not taken a wife for a hundred years?”

At this, his shoulders tightened, tension threading through his skin. “I do wonder why you humans phrase it like that.”

“You do not know why we look upon you like a thief?”

He turned his witching-hour eyes to her, the weight of his gaze constricting around her ribcage, robbing the breath from her throat.

“I do not steal,” he said. “I simply return. Return fallen fruits to the earth. Return life back to the centrepoint of where it began.”

“If you are not looking to take a wife,” Amaia said, yearning for the return of the graze of his eyes on her skin, “Why hold these parties?”

Death turned to observe the empty hall. The wax burned low in the candelabras, the floor still echoing with the sound of footfall leaping, the ghost of laughter and music lingering. “They make me feel alive.” His lips fumbled, before twisting into the wry shadow of a smile. “Which is not a common state for me.”

He leant down, and for a swollen second, Amaia thought he was bowing to her. Instead, his hand found a chrysanthemum, which until a few moments before, had sat entwined in the spill of her dark curls. He lifted it, holding the buttery, golden petals to the moonlight. It twisted away, reaching stamens desperately towards Amaia, before melting into the sweet-smelling throes of decay. “Quite the curse, no?” he dropped the dead flower, and it sleepily drifted over the bannister.

“This happens to anything you touch?”

“After a time.”

“And it cannot work the other way?”

His eyes returned, filled with questions and starlight. “I do not think I underst—”

As bold as she had ever been, she swept her knuckles across his cheeks. He sunk into the touch, and she placed her palm flush against his skin. She swore the pallor of his face burnished bronze

beneath her hand. “Can we not meet halfway?” Amaia descended a stair. They stood equal, eyes level, chests a hair width apart.

“At what cost?” he reached for her hand, shrouding hers in his own.

“I shall be a little more dead, and you a little more alive.”

His breath was cool on her face. “And do you not fear that?”

She smiled, iridescent. “I have more life in my veins than a cut flower,” she said, gesturing down to the chrysanthemum corpse. “You tried to take me before, and I would not go. I do not believe that you are strong enough to take me completely.”

He laughed, but did not draw away.

“I’m warm, aren’t I?”

Despite the chill of his touch, he could not refute it. “As warm as fever.”

“And my eyes are not clouded by you.”

Not glazed, not milky with cataracts or dull with hopelessness, they blazed like dying stars. “No. Not in the slightest.”

“I am quite ferociously alive,” Amaia said. “In fact, I think I have a little life to spare.”

“Oh,” he said softly. Some humans ran from him, some called for him. Some tried to vanquish him, brains fermenting in wine, making foolish decisions that pulled him close, others tried to ignore him as they watched him make night calls at houses on their street. Yet, not one had ever offered to share the warmth of their skin, the brightness of their eyes and the ferocity of their aliveness. “I have little to offer in return.”

“We humans chase fragments of you for our whole life,” she said. “This breathless sensation...” Her exhalation pooled shallowly in her lungs. “Feeling as though my heart has ceased beating.” Her pulse was slowed, honey-thick, in his presence. “Does that not sound like desire?” She guided his hand to her collarbone, and they felt the lazy thump below her skin. “Does this not feel like desire?”

With palms entwined between their chests, she edged closer until lips found lips: sweet meeting wine-bitter, scalding skin lacing with the chill of a winter morning. With his fingers in her hair, Death kissed like she was siren-song, and he was lost at sea. If it was not for their woven hands, Amaia was certain she would have drifted to the high ceilings, stranded in the beams, as weightless as a petal caught on the wind.

He stepped back, lips pinker, lungs more ragged with oxygen, eyes widely drinking her in.

“I am still standing, am I not?” she breathed. “Not a fraction less alive than this morning.”

“And yet I feel more alive than ever.”

Amaia did not let their fingers break apart as she led them back to the floor. With heavy eyes, she guided his hand to her waist. “By dawn,” she said, starting to spin, “Perhaps I will make you human.”

“Dawn is not so long away.”

“Let us not waste time.” As she turned, her skirt flared, flame-like, the fires in the candelabras gasped, and the castle with the spire took an almighty, first breath. “Let us dance until then.”

This story was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “Death and the Maiden” and was previously printed in Miniskirt Mag in 2022

Grace Joy Howarth is a playwright, author, and composer from London. Theatrical credits include ‘Blood on Your Hands’ (Southwark Playhouse, The Cockpit, BBC Writers Room Longlist, Masterclass Pitch Your Play Longlist), ‘Birdie’s Adventures in the Animal Kingdom’ (The Greenhouse Theatre, Harrow Arts Centre, Polka Theatre R&D) and ‘She is Taken Lightly’ (Hope Mill Theatre). Her work has been produced in scratch nights across the UK, and she self-produced a radio play, ‘Until We Can’t See the Sky,’ on Resonance FM and Chapel FM. She has had over a dozen short stories published, holds a First Class degree in Songwriting, and works as a freelance sustainability writer and editor.

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persephone

I was not built for olympus
your gods could not sustain me
too quick, my tongue grew weary of elixir
and their nectar curdled in my stomach
and in my head,
clinging memory, clinging mothers
clinging on for dear life
as I fought my way through every perfect, uneventful day 
walled in by custom and tradition
aeons, I longed for something bitter
for juices that shudder and seethe with life

you think you know my story
you scholars and learned men,
your eyes withered from dust and age 
you have been fed lies
peddled hateful propaganda
spewed on an olympic scale
and handed down for centuries 
listen close - I was not stolen away
I ran freely

the pantheon that raised me
they walk among men but they will never understand 
what it is to be bound to the earth
a man- a god-
who had stared down death
been spurned by his kin;
I would have loved him crownless, penniless, helpless 
simply for seeing me
simply for freeing me
loving me for being me

and never will I forget,
and never will I forgive
what you have done to my story
what you have turned our garden into 
because I did not align with your narrative, 
you changed mine.
made me into a woman with no agency, 
shuttled between a mother and her captor 
for how could I have willingly
turned down an adonis
and traded my crown for wreaths?

you know nothing of persephone
she’s a darker soul than he

This poem was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “Death and the Maiden”.

Beth Bayliss is a queer, disabled poet who writes about her experiences with abuse, addiction, and her recovery from both. You can find her on her personal Instagram, @ bethtbayliss

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She found herself reclining on a velvet divan, black curtains surrounding her. The curtains stretched onwards endlessly, one shadow after another, candles far away in the perpetual hollowed out dark, darkness like a mouth, red candles, some semblance of light, ravens hawking, piercing music that grew quiet, loud, quiet again, velvet brushing her thighs, cushions under her neck, smell of incense, taste of Turkish delight or honey or wine or all of the above, death, downy fancies, blood in her veins. Blood in her veins. So, she lives. 

“So, you live.” Hollow, dark voice. Auburn curls of Death brushed aside to reveal the last sight Cora saw before her fall. (The first sight she ever saw, perhaps.) 

“Are you alright? Eat something, eat something, or you’ll faint again.”

A red feast before her. 

Instead she fed herself on his incarnadine lips. 

He knew. So, in the next moment, a crown of black flowers- or perhaps red, or even white were placed on those honey locks of her hair, now longer than ever. They were cut, those honey locks. Perhaps not in that moment, but soon they revealed a long bare neck. She could have been anointed with oils, or made to drink a brew, but none of that was needed. He waited for her (to break on through, break on through to the abyss beneath her feet) and wanted her in her purest, nakedest, fairest and foulest form. 

She can’t hide now… But no part of her wished to hide now in the hot recesses of Hell. Tartarus. Underworld. Too many words. Too many-

He started with her bare skin; he did not touch her at first but merely let his ghost hands hover. And it was all so ghost-like at first, merely a promise of contact, of a caress. But there would always be more, never less.

And then he whispered in her ear, a godly melody, one she had heard uttered so many times before, broken by the transmission of some device (radio, vinyl, etc etc). Spoken in a soft and supple voice:

 “I found an island in your arms.”

Then, again. 

How could she cry out with such birdsong at such banal and over-heard words? It was not the sensations, gleaming and glaring around her, that made her sing in the voice of a nightingale. 

Island in your arms…

Island…

The island lay now in his arms. 

This story was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “Death and the Maiden”.

Hello, my name is Elizaveta. I’m 18, and started writing from a young age as an escape from a world that I found increasingly confusing and isolating. Over time, however, it became less of an escape and more a way to put my own experiences into a more symbol heavily and metaphorical format, helping me to understand them. The first book I read that truly impacted me was Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, which still stands as a major inspiration for a lot of my work. Recently, however, I’ve been diving into post-modernist works, particularly those of Nabokov. The themes I am most interested in dealing with are those of coming of age, the passage of time, and identity. My protagonists are always the focus of the work, and I see not only side characters but plots and locations as mere representations of this protagonist’s change and being. 

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This work was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “Death and the Maiden”.

About the artist: Instagram @ sav_voir_faire, London, collage artist, city witch, whose last two brain cells are dedicated to memento mori and childlike wonder. 

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