NEW FICTION

(c/o Disney)

And decided she’d been wrong to give up life underwater for some rando prince and a pair of legs. However she no longer cared about having no voice, because nowadays people just text. 

Well she divorced the dude, and moved out the next day. She packed her bags, rented a U-Haul, and paid first, last and a damage deposit on a one-bedroom oceanside condo about forty minutes outside the city. 

All of which, up to this point, sounds great. Very radical, very female empowerment or whatever. Except that part of the reason she hated her legs is because they’d developed cellulite. And her feet were now crisscrossed with blue veins. And her toenails, underneath the polish, were thick and yellowed.

Also, no one ever said being a middle-aged divorced former mermaid is easy. Like so many of us, she’s struggling. We’re talking about a woman who holed up in the palace playing sexdoll to the prince for decades. She has no GED, no work history, and very few marketable skills. Personal references are out of date and extremely difficult for potential employers to contact. Not to mention, despite the prevalence of texting, sometimes humans really do need old school verbal communication skills.  

And it’s not like the palace pays alimony. Ha ha. Yeah right. As if.

So, with federal minimum wage a miserly seven point two five bucks per hour, with the price of oceanfront condos upward of three grand a month, with grocery store sticker shock… You get it.  

These days, ironically, she plays a mermaid downtown, in the central tank at the aquarium, which helps. Government assistance covers the rest. But she’s struggling.

The truth is, I need to stop clicking on little human interest stories such as this. Because when I find a story I loved so much as a kid turned out not so happily-ever-after in the long run, I start dwelling on it. Then I get sad.

Alice Kinerk spends her free time attempting to make complicated desserts, most of which are tasty failures, such as the time she tried to make a croquembouche.  She’s published dozens of stories. Read more at alicekinerk.com.