The May Queen
© 2007 Michelle Tocher, used by permission
[Images: Thumbelina by Mabel Lucy Atwell from Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, 1914
Thumbelina's Mother and the Fairy and Thumbelina's Abduction by Charles Robinson, 1911
Thumbelina, the Fairy Child, and Thumbelina Carried Off by a Frog by W. Heath Robinson, 1913]

PART I
Fairy Child

I sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake,
If you do not call me loud when the day begins to break;
But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay,
For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The May Queen"

Molly

Tuesday, April 12

She has spent all her life keeping secrets. In fact, you might say that my Auntie May is the warden of secrets. She goes after them, incarcerates them, and holds them in her cells. She is very friendly and social on the outside, and willowy — loves to dress for the occasion, and always wears hats — usually vintage hats wrapped in feathers and veils, and cocked at jaunty angles. When Auntie May saunters into the room, my Dad's brothers swarm to her like flies to stink. And there is all sorts of raucous laughter because Auntie May can party like a fiend, and drink grown men under tables.

But that's just a big cover up — her own secret, you might say. I suspect that Auntie May is shy and suffers the affliction of not belonging. She is what my mother might call a spinster — though not a typical one and I bet she's had lots of affairs (and maybe not even all with men.) She is the sort of person strangers will confide in, depositing their secrets in her vault for security purposes. She's always on the hunt for good secrets. She came after me just last Saturday.

I had gone over to my Aunt Dee's place for what she had billed as a "pink tea" to celebrate the birth of my cousin's seventh child, baby girl. I was standing in the living room holding a glass of blush wine and pushing my back into the wall. I wasn't feeling particularly social that day. I have a new relationship on the brew, and I didn't want anybody poking their nose into it, least of all Auntie May.

But I knew it was coming the moment she put her beams on me from the other side of the room. She said, "'Scuse me," pushed the men folk away and launched herself in my direction with one eyebrow raised over a smoky eye that flashed like quartz crystal.

"What's up, Molly-Mole?" She sidled up to the wall and thrust one of her generous hips in my direction. I was cornered.

I shrugged. "Oh, nuthin'. Nuthin' much."

"Hhhmmmphh." She leaned into the wall, sipped her pink champagne, and inhaled, widening her nostrils like a smoker, or a movie star. "I'm smelling something. It's not a fish. It's not a rat. It's something more, ah, delicate-perfume, perhaps? Hhhmn... no, musk. I'm getting the distinct smell of musk. A man's musk."

"You know, May, you haven't got it right this time," I said, backing into the chesterfield. I wasn't about to tell her anything, and, besides, I didn't know anything. He and I had been conversing for six months on the computer. I haven't seen him yet. He hasn't seen me. We decided not to exchange pictures. We are aiming for pure love, and in five weeks we will meet for the very first time. But I wasn't — repeat, wasn't — about to tell Auntie May that.

She was very disappointed in me. She heaved a huge, lung collapsing sigh.

"I hate baby showers," she said, moving away. "They're so boring. Come and see me some time." She swished away into the crowd, her pink silk skirt fluttering around her calves.

Before she got out of earshot, I said, "Why don't you tell me one of your own secrets, Auntie May?"

She spun round, tossing that gleaming salt-and-pepper mane. "I never give my secrets away," she said. "But I might consider an exchange."

I froze on the spot.

No way.

Saturday, April 16

Like Auntie May, I live alone. Unlike Auntie May, who flies all over the world, I stay pretty close to home. My parents live two and a half blocks away in an area near the Beaches of east Toronto.

I would like to be studying exotic places and traveling the globe, but I've got this weird thing going on in my heart. I'm beginning to think that what we refer to as the "heart" is not actually something that is there — it's something that is not there. It's an absence in the region of the chest. I'm a lock looking for a key, and I've got to find him before I can open up the next chapter of my life. I know. So boring. So cliché. I'd love to be whisking around the world, improvising my life, being the sort of person that I imagine Auntie May is; not this sort of person who has already staked out a house in suburbia, complete with a man, and babies, and possibly cats.

Unfortunately, my appearance belies my true character because I look like something out of a Victorian fairy book. Confronting my image in the mirror is like opening some big old storybook to lay eyes on a tiny, brown-eyed flower fairy with a puff of chocolate curls that are absolutely uncontrollable at any length. "Oh, she's so sweet!" you might exclaim, noticing the pin curls around my forehead that refuse to bend any other way, insisting on their clockwise spirals and pretty coils. I stopped growing before I reached five feet. I've got a small cherry mouth, straight white teeth, and skin that positively gleams. Modeling agency directors stop me on the street. People suspect that my ears are pointed, and I swear I've seen them glance over my shoulders to check for wings. Laugh if you will, but I'm not kidding.

"Molly Mole" is what May calls me because I like to stay unseen, clinging to the shadowy side of the wall. She has thumbed me as Thumbelina, straight out of the fairy tale. And Thumbelina, half the size of a thumb, spends a good deal of her time underground with the mice and the moles.

"Molly, listen up, because THIS is the story of your life," she said when she gave me the Thumbelina picture book on Christmas Eve, the year I turned six. "One day you're going to tell me what it's like down there with the mice and the moles!"

I curled into her on the couch like she was a big exotic calla lily.

"Oh, for God's sake, May," said my mother, "you'll give her nightmares talking to her like that." Mom was setting the dining room table with her best gold-rimmed china plates. The tree was dressed in colorful lights that blinked on and off and made the tinfoil wings of the angels wink and glimmer, an effect heightened by our tabby tomcat George rummaging around in the presents underneath.

"Tell me the story, Auntie May," I said excitedly, turning the magical leaves of the book. I saw Thumbelina being pulled downstream by a white butterfly, and I wondered if that would happen to me. Would I shrink into something tiny as I grew up? Or would butterflies grow bigger? Would I have to leave my parent's house to sail downstream? I wasn't sure that I wanted that life. But I looked up to Auntie May, and I couldn't rub the stars out of my eyes. She blinded me with her twenty-something glamour, her tawny, silken legs running the length of the couch.

"Am I going to meet a butterfly?" I asked.

"Well, yes, you will, and a swallow too, when you're finished with those toads and moles!"

I frowned.

"Don't worry, Molly Mite. It will all work out, you'll see!"

And so the story began... Auntie May had more magic in one manicured nail than Santa had in his whole big fat belly. I nestled into her white cashmere sweater that smelled of smoke and scotch and jasmine. My mother might have given birth to me, but Auntie May dreamed me up.

I listened to that story. I slept on it. I pored over the book. It pored over me. It oozed into my cells, solidified, lodged in my bones. It's about a tiny girl, born in a flower. Her mother puts her in a walnut cradle and leaves her to sleep by the window. But then a toad comes along, snatches her, takes her to the marsh and plunks her on a lily pad. The toad wants the pretty little fairy child to marry her ugly son. Thumbelina, or Tiny, as she is known, is freed by the fishes who nibble away at the lily's roots. She goes floating downstream, only to be snatched up by other creatures — insects and mice— who also want her to marry one of their own. Everybody's got an agenda for Tiny, and she very nearly ends up locked underground and married to a blind mole. That's as much as I'll say for now. More will come later, no doubt. I can't avoid telling her story, any more than I can hold in the air I breathe. But if my narrative gets too slow, or you want to get the whole picture, you can always look me up. I'm in the book. Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales. You see, I may appear to live in the Beaches of east Toronto, but my real location, at least according to Auntie May, is in a fairy tale.

Underground.

With the moles and mice, to be exact.

Thursday, April 21

Everything is ticking. Yes, I promise I'll move the story forward, but I have to tell you, everything is ticking. I've got exactly one month to figure out if I really want to meet this man, Eric, who appears to possess the key to my heart. I'm 33, for God's sake. The chimes on my biological clock are clanging, announcing every quarter of the year, driving me cuckoo.

I'm not Auntie May. I'll never be Auntie May. At 33, she never heard any ticking — she never had a clock. She's never been on a deadline. She's heard lots of lines, I'm sure, but no man has ever caught her. She's no spider's fly, no fisherman's flounder. Yet, at 56, she remains a real catch.

You might think I'm romanticizing her, but I'm not. It would be truer to say that she is romanticizing me, and I can't live up to it. I don't have that sunny, adventuresome disposition she suspects is hiding in me. I know she'd like me to share my secrets with her — she'd probably tell me a lot more about herself if I were willing to be honest about me. Maybe I don't want to know about her.

Maybe I don't want to know about me.

See, it's not little secrets she's interested in, little tattle tales about somebody's latest affair, or illicit purchase in the Florida Keys. She's after what people most strenuously hide — their vulnerabilities and fears. That's how she sniffed me out at my cousin's baby shower. She tuned her senses to the fact that my pelvis was melting into my knees because I had just sent an email promising myself, body and soul, to a man in a computer; a man I had never met. My wishful nature had conspired with my biological clock and I had, for all intents and purposes, become engaged.

I'm meeting him on Saturday, the 21st of May. I've got thirty days to figure this out. Thirty days to get a handle on Molly Mole and her Thumbelina future. Where am I going? Am I headed into sunny skies, or down into the underground life of mice and moles? There are two stories here, you see. My story is that I've come up from underground, and I'm about to be flown to a sunnier place where my love waits for me. But May has me pegged as a creature who, above all, loves safety, and is shutting herself in to be wed to a mole. The question is, who 's right?

Saturday, April 23

I suppose if I'm going to tell my story I ought to provide an overview, but I don't know how deft I would be at threading in my history, so I'll just do a quick fly-by. My mother and father are both still alive and they live in the Beaches, in a cottage that is three doors from the end of the street and a dash to the lake. Even though Dad is a general contractor, my folks have done very few renovations over the years. My mother refuses to get new windows, and only once allowed the house to be re-shingled on the condition that Dad put in cedar shingles like the originals. I suspect that Dad married Mom because he knew she would never want a bigger house, or bother him about doing renovations. When Dad comes home, he likes to putter, as he calls it, which includes neither handiwork nor golf. He carves walking sticks in his workshop downstairs, or builds bird houses, or goes outside and sits under the birch tree for hours on end to watch the ways of birds.

At 68, Mom is ash blond, buxom and wide hipped. She loves to garden, cook, and write children's books. Only, unlike her younger sister May, she's into realism. "Children should be prepared to face reality," she would pontificate when May brought me yet another fairy book. Mom specializes in adolescent whodunits that generally involve some sort of mystery in the house or neighborhood that gets solved in a very practical way. Ghosts are found out to be sleepwalking uncles, UFOs are hot air balloons made by kids as a prank, that sort of thing. She enjoys reconfiguring the family situation too, creating families with three dads or two moms. The main thing, for Mom, is that the plot must be plausible.

Not like Thumbelina. Not like her own fairy child, who would probably be less inclined to tell secrets to her mother than she would to her Auntie May.

But we're off on a tangent. I meant to be brief. So, here it is, quick and simple. Our family tree. All girls on Mom's side, all boys on Dad's. (Mom would never allow it as a plot). At 70, Dee is Mom's eldest sister, followed by Cora (that's Mom), and trailed (twelve years later) by May. There was another girl born after Cora — Mabel — but she died when she was seven months old. May was born one year after Mabel died, to the day, on the 17th of May. Her mother called her May-fly, maybe because she expected her to fly away, and didn't want to get too attached. My Aunt Dee had seven children — more than enough for everyone. Her eldest daughter just had her seventh child (hence the pink shower). Mom wasn't nearly so prolific. She tried unsuccessfully for thirteen years, and was probably ready to throw in the towel when I showed up.

That Christmas Eve, lo so many years ago, Auntie May opened the glossy Thumbelina picture book. "Did you know that your mother wished on every first star for you for thirteen years? Well, here's a mother just like yours. She also wished for a child — only, unlike your mother, she couldn't have one."

She turned the page to a picture of a beautiful blond lady who sat by a window and looked sadly out at the night sky. A single star floated in a sea of blue above a crescent moon that rocked underneath it like a boat.

Auntie May began to read in her husky voice.

There was once a woman who wished very much to have a little child, but she could not obtain her wish. At last she went to a fairy, and said, "I should so very much like to have a little child; can you tell me where I can find one?"

The fairy wasn't any sort of fairy I recognized. She was a wrinkled old woman with bandy legs, a kerchief and a broom that swept the floor by itself.

"A little child? Oh, that can be easily managed," said the fairy.

In the picture, the fairy woman held a green glass bottle that she had taken from a shelf of jars containing various types of seeds.

"Here is a barleycorn of a different kind to those which grow in the farmer's fields, and which the chickens eat. Put it into a flower-pot, and see what will happen."

The beautiful lady paid the fairy twelve shillings, and the lady went home and planted the seed in a flower pot.

Auntie May turned the page and we saw that a thick stalk had grown from the seed in the pot. It had a bulb at the top, like an amaryllis, and the petals were tightly closed.

"Do you know what was in there?" asked Auntie May. "Well, the flower didn't want to give up her secret, not to anyone. But then the lady kissed the golden bud, and the flower could not resist the kiss. She opened into a gorgeous red bloom."

And there, upon the green velvet stamens, sat a very delicate and graceful little maiden. She was scarcely half as long as a thumb, and they gave her the name of "Thumbelina," or Tiny, because she was so small.

"I wasn't that small when I was born, was I?" I asked.

"You were that small when you started out, to be sure," said Auntie May.

"But I didn't come from a flower," I stated with authority, noting that my mother was now standing by the table with her arms crossed over her red Christmas apron and giving her sister a positively evil eye.

"Isn't your mother a flower?" Auntie May whispered, and we giggled at Mom who, in that moment, did actually look like the flower bud all closed up.

"Go and wash your hands," Mom said.

Saturday, April 30

I like my cozy life. I've made a very comfortable niche for myself on the planet. I work for a major hospital, and I write their quarterly magazine for patients, donors, and staff. As long as I make my deadlines, Sharon Shifter, my communications director, pretty much leaves me alone. One editorial meeting four times a year, and a lot of visits to doctors are the meetings that pull me out of my garret.

The rest of the time I spend in my one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old house, where I reside alone with a feline named Pansy who is a total fraidy cat. If I merely walk across the living room to answer the phone she runs for cover under the skirt of the leaf patterned sofa. She can be persuaded to come out from under the "bushes" by canned liver, catnip or tears. "There's a big world out there, Pansy," I told her this morning, lifting her up to see the magnolia tree outside the bay window. She moaned and gazed at me darkly with her green Abyssinian eyes as if to say, "You know full well I don't do windows." Nothing will entice her to bask in the sun that filters through the crown of that magnificent tree. I've even put a flat Indian cotton pillow on the sill, and rubbed catnip under its folds. But she's a no-go.

It's not lost on me that Auntie May may be seeing me the way I see Pansy, but let's just not go there. The thought is too depressing. Frankly, I'm not sure exactly how May views me because I'm afraid to ask her. I'd rather live in the mirrored jewel-box of my own perceptions.

She called me this morning to say that she had an "opening" Wednesday at four o'clock, and she'd love to have a walk along the boardwalk. Was I willing? I said I'd think about it and call her back. It's Day 21 on my ticker, and I'm getting emails from my mystery man, Eric, who has gone from sending me Rainer Maria Rilke poems to the erotic poems of D.H. Lawrence, like "The Elephant is Slow to Mate."

The elephant, the huge old beast.
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse...
and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.
So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire...

Why did he send me that poem? I wonder. I know what my friend Sandra would say: "How is he like an elephant? Is he very well hung?"

May

Saturday, April 30

It's time I admitted it: I'm entirely made up. A fictional character in the drama of life. I knew from the time I was a child, born in the petals of a dying flower, that I would leave my mother's folded-up world and live a big, theatrical life. I would be the leading lady in a play of my own making. I had star power, and never shirked it. But I had no ambitions to be in the limelight. For one thing, I am hopeless at learning lines. I prefer to improvise. I did ads for TV, lots of voice work, and modeling. I've flitted around all my life, lighting on whatever interests me, and avoiding, at all costs, the tethering experience of love and marriage. I never had any wish whatsoever to settle down, to land, or even to know who I am. I find seekers annoying. "Who am I? Where am I going? Where have I been?" It's all so tiresome. But now, standing here on my condo balcony overlooking Queen's Quay and watching the freshly scrubbed sailboats wing by on their first tours of the season, I'm feeling more than a little wistful.

I'd like to walk down that boardwalk with Molly and tell her a few things, but I don't seem to be able to find the occasion. She's the only person on the planet I truly need to confide in, but I have failed to win her trust. Instead, I swap intimacies with strangers — a man on a train, a woman on the steps of Machu Picchu, a gorgeous Spaniard on a Portugal beach. I'm the world's best pen pal, constantly attuned to others like those huge SETI satellite receivers, listening for messages from extraterrestrials. Mostly, I just hear noise from outer space, white noise, the noise of a universe that hasn't acquired much coherence over the billions of years it's been around.

Molly. Ah, well, she's another story. Little mole, hugging the shadows. She burrowed into my heart from the moment she made her first appearance in this world. Though Cora wouldn't let me hold her, not until she was almost four.

"You don't know how to hold babies."

"What do you think — I'm going to drop her?" I snapped. But I didn't reach for the baby. Though I ached to cradle her in my arms, I wouldn't take her. Maybe I would drop her. Maybe I would break her. Behind the curtain of my resistance to the question Who am I? is the fear that I am not myself, nor any self at all. I stole my sister Mabel's body and came back in without a soul. I could dazzle and glitter. I could have the sensation of life but not the experience of it. I don't like the question Who am I? because I already know. I'm not an I, not even a little i, just a little something that takes up space — an o.

The air is fresh today. Doesn't carry the usual stink of harbor fish, oil, and exhaust fumes. It's a blousy day, good for sailing, and hanging up freshly bleached sheets — the sort of day that would ordinarily get me flipping through travel magazines to arrange a new adventure. But I'm grounded, I'm afraid. My plans have changed. I've got to see Molly, if only she'd see me.

Monday, May 1

Clearly, Molly is not going to call.

And I am not going to be able to tell her the big secret I've been hiding. I've left it too long. I'm catching a plane in 21 days. I'm flying to Hawaii to see a kahuna who, I hope, will give me my final boarding pass. I'm dying, you see. My latest chemo didn't work. No one in the immediate family knows that I've been fighting a lymphoma for the last four years, but now I'm starting to show. My oncologist has informed me that I have less than a year, nine months if I'm lucky. It feels like nine days to me. The tumor in my belly has the weight of a stone, and it's growing fast. I'm pregnant with death. I can't face it. I'm going to disappear to have my baby. And then, just disappear.

All this, and more, Molly must know.

Molly

Wednesday, May 4

"I know you've got the scent of something," I tell May as we stroll along the boardwalk by the lake. "But I'm not ready to let you in on it, if that's okay with you."

We pause and watch a line of partygoers board a dinner boat. They're already half squiffed. I can see roast beef dinners being hurled over board into the harbor swill...

May is holding onto her straw hat. The wind is slapping the soft brim back to reveal the full beauty of her Hepburn bones, whipping her ivory linen skirt against her still-perfect legs. But her eyes are lined. She's got crows' feet. Too much squinting in the limelight, I guess.

She shoots me a half-smirk. "That's fine, Molly Mole. You don't like to give your secrets away any more than I do. Maybe we're more alike than you know."

We walk again, now that the party animals have boarded the ark.

"If we're so much alike, why do you call me Molly Mole?"

"I'm not saying you're a mole. Wanna get out of the wind?" She slides her hand under my arm and steers me in the direction of the building at York Quay. "Let's go watch them blow glass. Then we can go get a beer."

It feels good to have the wind at our back, to be heading for shelter, but her strong arm tells me she's got an agenda. I never know what is going on in her mind. That's what makes me anxious around her. Everything has to be high drama. There's no hanging out with Auntie May, just shooting the breeze, or sitting in silence. You think you know what she's after, but then she'll deek around and shock you with some comment that will get you spilling your beans like there's no tomorrow.

But today I'm going to challenge her. I want an answer. Why does she insist on calling me Molly Mole? It's a label. It's put me in a jar, and I don't like it.

We open the building door and head down the corridor that leads to a low balcony overlooking the area where ceramics and glass are being made. A glassmaker turns her fiery creation around in the kiln like a marshmallow on a stick.

May leans against the railing and winces. Her short black gloves match the band on her straw hat and the flecks in the pattern of her loosely woven linen blouse. Nobody wears gloves anymore.

"Molly Mole. You know why I call you that," she says. "It goes way back."

"I know, to Thumbelina. You think I'm going to end up living underground with the moles." I roll my eyes, glancing sideways to make sure that nobody can hear us.

"Well, are you?"

"No! And that's not my story, damn it!" My eyes sting with sudden tears. "Where in hell do you get the right to tell me what my story is, anyway? Who says I'm going to marry a mole?"

"That's not where the story ends," she mutters, dropping her head. Then she looks me in the eye. "But you're right. I had no right." Her eyes are cinder grey, un-twinkling, not a sparkle of humor. No flash of blue, no splash of green, no playful aquamarine.

"It was a way of reaching you. No, I'll go further than that." She plays with the fingers of her gloves. "It was a way of warning you..."

"About what? Do you know moles? Do you possess a crystal ball?"

"...about the possible current of your life, Molly, the current that might well lead you downriver to be earmarked, well, you remember, first as the bride of a toad — "

She sees my expression is accusing.

"Like your mother's life, if you must know. All plain and practical. There isn't enough magic in this world. I know you don't want to hear this, my darling, but you're a fairy child if ever there was one. And people want fairy children — they want to bottle their light and use it for their own purposes. Or put it out altogether!"

I'm aghast. I've never heard May speak to me this way. But now it hits me. Thumbelina is about her. She's the fairy child! I feel as though I'm glimpsing something — light from under a door I never knew was there, a door that I can open if I dare. Oh, crap. What do I care how May sees me? All I want to do is meet Eric. Something is going to be freed when I meet him. He'll fly me out of this stupid story I keep telling myself. We'll go somewhere exotic, find the elephants. Watch them mate.

"Come on," says May, grabbing my arm. "It's time for that beer."

She hardly says a word through the first half of our lagers. I sit across from her in the booth, and watch the golden liquid drain out of her glass and down her queenly throat. What is it they say in the fairy tales? "A throat as white as milk in a silver pail..." She's drinking faster than I am, drinking in silence. Highly unusual. She isn't entertaining me, distracting me with amusing stories. I've offended her. But I told the truth. Can't she handle that? Maybe I should apologize. But she won't respect me for that. I know what she'd say: "What's there to be sorry for?" I'm not even sure May experiences guilt. It would tie her down.

"I'm sorry," she says abruptly, which causes me to jump.

"What I said about your mother. I don't mean to judge. We're different, that's all. She is... Well, I'm just going to wade right in..."

Oh yes, you are probably. She's taken her gloves off, they're sitting beside her hat on the table.

"Your mother wouldn't be happy with me sitting here with you, drinking beer, that's for sure! Filling your head with a whole lot of nonsense and criticizing her to boot. There was too damn much competition between your mother and me, and our physical differences didn't help."

I take it she means that Mom is plain, which she is — she's broad, squish-nosed and earthy, like a cabbage.

She raises a finger to signal the waiter, a darkly handsome guy with a five o'clock shadow, who's been hovering around the table. I catch myself thinking I hope Eric looks like that.

"Could you bring us a couple of water glasses?" she asks. "Don't fill them. Just bring the glasses."

He grins. "Are you a magician or something?" He's got stars in his eyes, like all the rest of us.

"No, just a plain old witch," she says.

He laughs and returns with two juice glasses. He places them on the table and leaves reluctantly because he wants to see the show.

May slides the glasses to the middle of the table and turns one upside down. "Okay, Molly, this is your mother, and this is me. One of us landed in the world right side up, and the other landed upside down. Guess which one is which."

I stare at the glasses. "Obviously, Mom landed right side up." You're upside down, I thought. Doesn't take a magician to see that.

"Right," she says. "Only Nature is trickier than that. Nature makes things appear one way, but in fact, the opposite is true. Your mother is upside down, and I'm right side up."

She shifts the glasses around.

I don't get it. "What are you telling me, May?"

"A secret," she says, hunched over the glasses like a spider over her web.

"What secret?"

"You figure it out." She throws herself back on the banquette.

"No, I'm not going to play your game! Tell me what you're trying to tell me!"

"I'm not trying to tell you anything. Certain things need to be figured out. You're all locked up in your safe little world, Molly. Open the door. Figure it out."

"I don't know anything about you and my mom. Why don't you tell me?"

She presses her thumb against the base of the turned-up glass. She pushes it upward so it looks like something growing. Then she says it: "I'm your Mom."

My stomach cramps, twists. I'm going to barf. I lurch up from the table, knocking over the glass. She has to be kidding. I never trusted her. Never ever ever ever. I always knew she'd hurt me. I always knew it. But this is cruel. Really, really cruel.

"What's your game, May?" I say.

"Sit down, please, honey," she begs me. "There's no right way to tell you — "

Her face looks old. She's isn't beautiful, not in the least. She looks like a transsexual— hideous! I even think she's wearing a wig!

"I was never supposed to tell you," she says, tears swimming in her pleading eyes. "I was sworn to secrecy. And I've just broken my vow, and I've done it very, very badly... I don't seem to be able to help myself."

"You swore to my mom?" I demand, steadying myself by the table.

"Yes. I did."

Her cheeks are on fire. It's not blush. It's blood.

I can't even begin to figure out how I am supposed to grab hold of the line and pull myself back up onto solid ground. Nothing is as I thought it was, nor would it ever be. How did it happen that I got raised by Cora and not May? And who was my father?

"So what's the story?" I duck back into the shadows of the booth. "I suppose after getting pregnant you wanted somebody more practical to take care of your responsibility."

She winces like she's taken a shot to the eye. "You might think so, but that's not what happened, Moll. I wanted you more than you will ever know. But I had to give you up. Don't you see?"

"No."

She looks down at the glass. Her hands enclose it, like butterfly wings. "How did Thumbelina come into the world?"

Thumbelina. Her mother couldn't have a child. She wished.

"I granted your mother's wish," she whispers into the glass.

"You were her surrogate?"

"That was the role she asked me to play."

"So who is my father?"

She looks at me. "Your father is your father."

I don't even want to ask how they did it. But I have to. "Was it clinical?"

"Yes," she says. "And no — I don't mean to play games with you ..."

"I get it. I need to go."

"Okay, we'll go." May waves the waiter down for the bill.

"No, I need to go somewhere where you're not."

I leave her to pay the bill.

Clean up her mess.

I run through the parking lot and out onto the street. I flag down the first cab that cruises by, and ride with him for two blocks before I tell him I have to get out. "You've got the worst body odor I've ever smelled," I tell him as I peel off a fiver. Very uncharacteristic of me to say what I think. I would normally just hold my nose and suffer. He leaves me at Front and Jarvis. I stumble into a coffee shop and sit on a high stool, staring out at the passers-by pulling their coats around them in the snapping wind.

Thumbelina. God, that story! All my life, May has been trying to tell me the truth in the form of a fairy tale. Why? Because she was hushed? Because she couldn't tell me the truth? Why couldn't she tell me the truth? I stare into my latte. I can't drink it. I can't swallow anything. Thumbelina was given to a mother who couldn't conceive a child. She was born in a flower. Her mother cherished her, and wanted to keep her safe inside the house. She placed her in a walnut shell for a cradle, and gave her a plate of water to paddle around in during the day.

But her mother couldn't keep her safe.

One night, while Tiny lay in her pretty bed, a large, ugly, wet toad crept through a broken pane of glass in the window, and leaped right up on the table where she lay sleeping under her rose-leaf quilt.

The toad carried her out to the marsh, May's kingdom, where toads speak, streams are enchanted, and woods are wild. "Nothing will ever be the same again," I mutter as I pick up my latte, sobbing in full view of the street. A little grey-haired woman stops in front of the window. She's pulling a carry-on bag, wearing knee socks with Birkenstocks, and she's got a pink kerchief tied round her neck. She sees me weeping, and hails me, raising one palm upward, like I'm the Queen. Or a monument to someone great — who has died.

Read On...
Chapter 2

Michelle Tocher has been described as "an enchanting storyteller" with a deep understanding of fairy tales and their relevance to everyday life. Her books include How to Ride a Dragon: Women with Breast Cancer Tell Their Stories (Key Porter Books, 2002), and Brave Work: A Guide to the Hero's Journey at Work, which she co-wrote with Anna Simon. Formerly President of a Toronto communications company, she has spent nearly twenty years spinning yarns that demonstrate the power of the mythic imagination.. She recently finished her first novel, The May Queen. You can read more about Michelle Tocher at her website michelletocher.com