120 Blind Dates... And Other Short Stories

The Twelfth Princess

Who were they? We're they real? Or was all of this a beautiful dream?

Just a second ago, Nate Sullivan had been in his granddaughter's bedroom and had read an old fairy tale, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, to her. It had been her mother's favourite fairy tale when she had been little. But kids were different nowadays than they had been 40 years ago and young Kira had been upset that she would have to listen to a boring old story from a book tonight and couldn't watch Disney's The Little Mermaid on her iPad for the 100th or rather 200th time.

"Why can't it be a story set in an ocean, and the princesses can't be mermaid?" Kira had complained.

"Because that's not how the story goes!" he had said and taken a sip of mineral water from a nearby bottle as his throat had been dry.

"Then the author was stupid. Mermaids are far cooler than ballerinas!" Kira had objected. "If I were to tell their story, they'd be mermaids living in the sea, and their Dad had cursed them because they never did what they were told!"

And then, all of a sudden, the floor beneath him had opened up, and before his mind had even been able to come up with a rational explanation, he had fallen through a blue curtain into an endless ocean of light blue water. He certainly wasn't in his granddaughter's bedroom anymore, and the question was rather where he was and how he could get back home. Obviously, there had to be an exit somewhere. All he had to do was to find it and go home. On the other hand, he had been pulled so deep in the ocean that he couldn't see the surface of the water, and he should certainly not be able to breathe under water. So what kind of an unreal fantasy world had he been pulled into?

One in which he was a merman with a real fishtail apparently. He could hardly believe his eyes when he discovered that his feet were gone. Well, he hoped that this would not be a permanent state and he could get out of this mess soon. At least the fishtail would make swimming easier for him since he was no younger that young and athletic.

But first, he needed to find out more about the eleven dancing creatures in the gazebo in front of them. As he got closer, he realised that they were not real ballerinas, but just dark shadows, and the gazebo wasn't real as well. It would have been against all the laws of physics if they had been real. 

Yet something fishy was definitely going on. The shadows had to come from some sort of source. 

As he swam forward, he would have almost bumped into the little mermaid. She sat on a rock in the middle of what seemed to be a carefully arranged garden of underwater plants and was such a tiny creature that one could have easily missed her.

"Hello there," he asked as he remembered the tales about mermaids he had heard as a kid. Unlike the Disney mermaid Ariel, these were dangerous creatures who could kill people. 

On the other hand, this mermaid seemed too occupied with herself to care about him. There was a general air of sadness and regret about her as she stroked an item in her hand. It turned out to be an old music box which featured eleven minuscule dancers in a gazebo. 

"Hello, can you tell me where I am?" he asked her again when she failed to react.

It was only then that she turned her head, which caused her long blonde hair to fly up and frame her head like a halo. As she looked up at him with her large blue eye, she asked, "Who are you?" His presence surprised her evidently. 

"My name is Nate Sullivan, and I'm not really a merman. I come from a country called the USA, and I don't know how I got here and how I can go back home," he explained.

"Well, you can't. Nobody has left my father's kingdom ever before... At least not alive!" she exclaimed and looked at her music box again with sadness.