Lamia

April showers bring May flowers and funerals, or so it seems.

Winter might be the season of death, but here at Thyme Funeral Home, our busy season is in the spring. I have no idea why, and my father has never ventured a guess. No matter how slow business is at the start of April, Daddy hires seasonal employees, because without failure by the end of April, death marches through our doors.

Every year, for nearly a decade now, the same woman has worked the morgue on weekends. Daddy didn’t even call this year; the woman just showed up the first Saturday of April. She plans to stay on through June like every year.

I call this woman, Lamia.

She isn’t particularly pretty, and doesn’t smile all that often, but she’s nice enough. She paints a corpse like painting a canvas, beautiful and creepy, and she’s licensed for embalming, too. Daddy claims he likes her for her dependability. I can’t argue that. Hell, she even hangs out when there isn’t much to do. I believe Daddy prefers her expertise in the matters of their kind.

She’s one of them. Sort of like a vampire, fangs included. She despises being called a vampire, but doesn’t seem to mind, Lamia. I had forgotten her name years ago, and started calling her by the latin word for vampire. She never complained, so that’s what I call her to this day.

Whenever an unexpected guest of their kind arrives, Lamia knows just what to do. She quietly consoles ignorant friends of the lost one, and convinces them that cremation is best. Never a casket for them, always the furnace.

Lamia seems to enjoy burning her own kind, and that’s what I like best about Lamia.