The first time, they had almost buried her properly.

Almost, but not quite.

Her daughter had died before she had come into the world—she had felt the babe kicking against the walls of her womb that very morning, and now the babe was inexplicably dead. A shock went through her heart, then, and after that, she felt nothing. That must have been her death.

As they watched, over the course of a day, her nails began to grow long and strong and beautiful, and her hair began to creep ever more certainly towards her ankles. But isn't she dead? they asked one another, the room in which she had been lain growing colder by the moment in spite of the tropical heat outside. They thought they stared at a corpse, but none of them knew quite what to think when her face began to suddenly become beautiful.

She had not been ugly while she lived, but she had been nondescript, her features just like those of any girl you might find in any hut on the island. Looking upon her dead form two days after her death, though, her beauty was near-radiant. None of the house's residents knew what to think, so they called upon the oldest woman in the village to answer their question. What is happening to her? they asked.

The old woman glanced about the group, and asked quietly, How did she die?

She died of shock, her husband finally said, when she heard that our daughter was stillborn.

The old woman threw back her head and laughed. She's becoming a langsuir, she said. Place eggs under her armpits, and beads in her mouth, and needles in the palms of her hands, and bury her. She won't be able to shriek, or fly, and you'll be safe. I take it you've already buried the baby?

The group nodded.

Oh, well, the woman said. I hope you'll survive. Good-night.

So they buried her according to the old woman's instructions—almost, at any rate. Her husband could not bear to drive needles through his wife's skin, and no-one else wanted to risk puncturing her skin and releasing any... juices. So they filled her mouth with beads, placed the eggs under her armpits, and buried her.

Thirty-eight days later, she woke in her coffin, removed the eggs from her armpits and the beads from her mouth, and, once she had counted the beads, she forced her way up through the wood and into the air.

There was a hole in the back of her neck through which she sucked their blood in their sleep. It was only a day before her entire household was drained dry, and her hunger was sated for a week. The village of nearly a thousand was gone by the end of the fourth month, and her island was mysteriously devoid of human life at the end of two years.

Then she spent years flying—there were none on the mainland who knew what she was, and she easily consumed her fill before taking flight again. It did not matter where she went, she supposed—when she had woken again, she had felt nothing but an insatiable hunger, and a desire to see her child again. But the child, she knew, was dead, so she dealt with the more immediately resolved hunger pangs.

One day, though, she flew back to the sea near her home. She sat on the rocks, eating fish and biding her time, when she sensed something behind her.

By this point, it was rather too late—the fisherman had already cut off her hair, and stuffed it into the hole in the back of her neck.

"Hello," he said, brightly if not slightly breathlessly. "And what might I call you?"

"Leila," she replied quietly, wondering what she was doing on a rock in the sea with a fisherman. Glancing down at the dead fish in her hand, she cast it aside before grasping the fisherman's fingers firmly in her own. "And when are we to be married?"

The fisherman laughed. "Tomorrow, I suppose..."

P.S.

I love monsters, don't you? First a vampire, and this one is a Malaysian monster called a langsuir. A woman will become one of these little bundles of joy if she dies from the shock of hearing that her child was stillborn (or dies in the process of bearing a stilborn babe). These women will shriek, and fly off into the night- their hair goes down to their ankles, their nails are long, and they're impossibly beautiful- and they love the colour green. And fish, for some reason. Anyways, they have a hole in the back of their neck for sucking blood. They prefer infants, young virgins are the next best, and then they like couples. In here, though, we're going to say that magical creatures are the tastiest.

And you can make a langsuir revert to plain ol' womanhood if you chop off her hair and stuff it into the hole at the back of her neck. Yumyum.