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Larissa and the Mermaids.

August 29, 2012 by Exangel

by Teresa Milbrodt.

I spent four summers with the mermaids, seven of them with gray curls and glistening green tails who sat at the city pool and played in the shallow end with little kids, yelling at them not to run too fast along the pool’s edge, applauding them when they did underwater handstands, and making the littlest ones keep their water wings on because someones they wanted to slip them off and pretend to be taller than they were.

It started when my aunt and her friends formed their mermaid club, an idea she got from her cousin in Arizona who knew a gaggle of older ladies with not much to do but hang out poolside, so they made mermaid tails and shiny green bathing suit tops and became honorary lifeguards.  My aunt wanted to do the same thing, and I’d flat-out refused a summer babysitting job for two little brats, so I took up mermaid-sitting instead, bringing the middle-aged merladies bottles of water and popsicles when they took breaks, because it was hard to hop around in those green tails, but I liked watching them in the pool, approachable meraunts with soft, slightly sunburned arms, ones who you could imagine made cookies shaped like starfish and shells.

I didn’t go into the water because I hated pools, or pools hated me, or really they hated my hair and turned it into a snarled green mess not unlike seaweed, but as chief mermaid assistant I got blue raspberry slushies, more than I could drink.  When the merladies asked me to get something for them from the snack bar they gave me extra money to buy a treat for myself—Get an ice cream bar, honey, you’re thin as a twig—but I liked the slushies because they turned my tongue blue as lagoon water.

The ladies kept their summer mermaid stint for years until they moved down to Florida and relocated the club, so our city pool is still waiting for replacements, more women with green gossamer tails, but who’s to say other mermaids don’t exist?  My philosopher boyfriend says there are a lot of sea creatures that seem like they should be mythical—seahorses and octopi and color-changing cuttlefish–all too fantastic to be real, so when people go to aquariums the first time, he’s surprised they don’t pass out from amazement.

Sailors on Spanish and English and Portuguese galleons saw mermaids for years, and though most of those turned out to be manatees there probably were a few authentic merpeople among them, arms crossed as they evaluated humanity and decided further study was needed, but after all those centuries of observation they probably decided it was best to go the way of the Loch Ness Monster and stay hidden, and sometimes I think this is not a bad idea, but there must be merpeople out there conducting ongoing surveys, taking copious notes, writing research papers on the development and decline of the human species, and perhaps monitoring the activities of middle-aged ladies in city pools who happen to have tails and play with children, obviously the most sensible creatures around.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Fall 2012: Mermaids and Other Tales

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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