Mermaid Pirate Dispatch

Another wave of aches spreads out from my hip bones. I try shifting my weight but it only makes the pain spread to my thighs and ribs and I end up wedged between cushions on the couch. I sigh.

“Dad?” My daughter calls out from the kitchen. “Have you been cooking for yourself again?” She pokes out from behind the wall separating the kitchen from the living room and scowls at me. “I thought we talked about this already. You can’t be cooking for yourself. I’m already giving you all the meals you need. Everything you cook is going to waste.”

“No it’s not,” I say gruffly. I give her a cold side eye. “It’s not a waste if it helps keep me sane.”

She slides around the couch and sits by my side holding a plate of my best cheese ravioli. “I know how much it means to you,” she says softly. “All those years running your own restaurant, I’m sure it’s killing you to stay off your feet, but the doctor said…”

“Hmph.” I bark. “I’m dying anyway.”

“Well,” she says, “at least it’s not all going to waste. I see you’ve been nibbling on this one.” She has pulled back a bit of the plastic film wrap and is pointing at one of the pasta squares.

I peer down at where she’s pointing. The ravioli square looks like it’s had a corner cut off, exposing some of the cheese inside. “Wasn’t me,” I mumble.

My daughter gasps and struggles out of the couch to get back to the kitchen. “Don’t tell me you’ve got rats too.” She throws the fridge open and I hear the clink of jars and plates as she shuffles around inside.

“I don’t have rats,” I growl. “Rats would have chewed the plastic away.”

“Well if you didn’t take a bite of the pasta, who did?”

She can’t see me shrugging. “An elf,” I huff.

My daughter pokes her head out again. “I think it’s time we start talking about getting you into an assisted living unit.”

I’ve had enough. My knees shake as I lean forward and flex against the pain. “Over my dead body,” I growl, reaching for my cane and leaning onto it for support. I can’t quite get fully upright, but it’s close enough. I hobble into the kitchen. “Go,” I say. “I’ll clean up your mess. I’ll see you tomorrow for dinner.”

“What will you have tonight?” she asks. “I haven’t made anything yet.”

“Ravioli,” I say, grabbing the plate off the counter by the fridge. “And I’m cooking dinner tomorrow too.”

My daughter laughs. “Fine, and I’m bringing papers for the Sunset Heights home.” She grabs her purse off the kitchen table and stomps to the door. “At least keep your phone in your pocket so you can call me if you fall again.”

“Right,” I say. “Get going then. And bring your husband when you come for dinner tomorrow.” I scoff and glare at Carol, my youngest daughter, and my leathery heart sinks.

Her eyes are shimmering and her lower lip quivers. She sniffles and turns to go.

I turn away. Maybe I went too far. Her cheating husband only left her last year.

I hear the door close and the key scraping in and out as she clicks the lock closed. I lean on the counter, huffing and wincing. My head is throbbing and my hips probably need replacement surgery. At least one of the disks in my back has worn out and every moment my spine spends resisting gravity is a symphony of aches and shooting pains. I’m short of breath, and despite a little growling in my stomach, I don’t feel like eating.

I pull the fridge open, toss the plate of ravioli on top of a tub of clam chowder I made last week, and stagger back to the couch. As soon as I drop into the comfort of the soft cushions, I realize that the television remote is out of reach and let loose a profane bit of poetry that pulls inspiration from the emotional void in my life and the frustrations of watching life crumble in old age.

I stare down at the wrinkly, speckled skin on the backs of my hands, sighing. Some of the spots look like they could be constellations. Just as my eye is tracing out a spatula and a sauce pan, I hear the seal on the refrigerator door peel open slowly, and something patters to the floor. The fans in the fridge spin up and I groan. Better go close it. I take a deep breath and reach for my cane, but before I lean to pull myself out of the couch I hear the fridge door shut again, muffling the sound of the fan inside.

“Carol?” I call out, frozen in place, leaning forward a little but not ready to get up. My chest is tight and I can hear my tired heartbeat trying to prepare for a fight or flight response. I hear a little scuffle but see no movement coming from the direction of the kitchen.

After a moment I lean back and set my cane aside. The fridge sounds closed. It might have popped open and blown closed again. Maybe there was a tremor I couldn’t feel in the floor. When my feet aren’t hurting, they are numb.

Just then I spot movement on the coffee table in front of me. My eye catches a glimpse of something scurrying toward me along the oak finish. My heart jumps and I recoil, launching a hand out to grab my cane and pulling a muscle in my shoulder. I howl in pain and grip the cane, lifting it high over my head ready to bring it down on the rat or critter or whatever it was. My eyes can’t focus as I scan the top of the table, a throbbing headache is blurring my vision. I squint and watch for any signs of movement.

A tiny voice cries out. “Stop! Please! I won’t hurt you Mr. Russo, just please… put down the cane!” It is a high pitched voice, like a little girl with a lung full of helium.

I grip the cane tight, still holding it over my head, and I lean forward. “Who said that?”

“Me,” the voice says and finally I catch a bit of movement.

I wind up to bring the cane down.

“Wait!” the voice shrieks. “Please, I can help you! We need each other!”

I lower the cane and rub my eyes against my forearm, blinking and squinting down at the source of the movement. I finally get a good look at… well it’s a tiny woman, perhaps a few inches tall, holding her arms over her head and cowering. She’s shaking and her face is hiding behind long black hair that hangs down from under her protective posture.

“Well I’ll be…” I begin, setting the cane down on the couch beside me and leaning forward to get even closer.

She slowly lowers her arms and I can finally get a peek at her face as she peers up at me, still shaking. “Thank you,” she says, her voice quivering. She adjusts her hair, pulling it back behind her and shaking her head. She takes a deep breath and flattens out the front of the little black dress she’s wearing. Her skin is pale, her eyes bright, and her features perfectly proportional to a full sized human, but small enough to take a bath in a mug.

I stare at her, my jaw slack.

“I’m Fangelina,” she says, smiling and waving up at me.

“Fanga who?” I say, wrinkling my bushy brow.

She laughs at me. “I’m a mosquito vampire,” she says with a little curtsy.

“A vampire?” I repeat. I lean back in the couch and sigh. “I’m losing my mind. First I lose my balance, then I lose my muscles, then I lose my restaurant, and now I’m losing my mind.”

I feel a tiny thwack on my knee and look down to see that Fangelina has leaped across the gap and landed on me. She’s struggling to her feet and catching her balance. She looks up at me. “I’ve been living in your fridge for a long time,” she says. “Mosquito vampires only need human blood once every hundred years or so, but the rest of the time we need other things for sustenance. The leftovers you put in that refrigerator are divine.” She says it the way a lover speaks of a particularly spicy rendezvous and her eyes roll into the back of her tiny skull for a moment while she smiles. She blinks and continues. “We’ve had a pretty good thing going and now if I understand the situation properly, you’ll be leaving me and I won’t get any more of your amazing food.”

I purse my lips and stare at her, moving my jaw back and forth while I think. None of it makes any sense at all, but she seems to be presenting a problem. “So?” I say. “I’m getting old. Things change. I’ll die eventually.”

“Will you?” She asks the question while prancing up my thigh like a runway model, deliberately and seductively. “What if you didn’t have to die? What if you could be young and strong again?”

I squint at her and take a deep, whistling breath through my hairy nostrils. Finally I laugh. “Yeah, and I could open my restaurant again. And while we’re at it, let’s bring my dear Sophia back from the dead.” I shake my head. “Things change, it’s inevitable. I’ll be gone and you’ll deal with it.” She probably isn’t real anyway.

The tiny woman huffs and looks down at the shirt button on my belly, then begins climbing up the buttons until she’s got her little face right between my eyeballs, a foot halfway in my mouth, and her hands grabbing clumps of my nose hairs. “Look here,” she says assertively. “I’ve been alive for close to three thousand years and I’ve never had food as good as yours. I’m offering you a gift, the chance to be immortal, and you’re treating me like some kind of fever dream. You want to cook, I want you to cook for me. I fail to see how this is so difficult for you to grasp. All you have to do is let me bite you, and you won’t have to go live in that awful home, you won’t have to deal with a decaying body, and you can do all the cooking you want. Forever.”

Her little chest is rising and falling fast against my nose and her little eyes are flaring up with a brilliant red. With one final huff, she drops back onto my chest and tumbles into my lap. She struggles back onto her feet on my left thigh and marches back to my knee before hurling herself back over to the coffee table. Finally she turns around, stares at me, and folds her arms.

“So why didn’t you bite me just then? You could have.” I fold my arms as well and glare at her.

“I need your permission,” she says. “Without your permission I can drink your blood, but it won’t convert you. For the conversion to work, you need to give permission.” She picks up her folded arms and drops them back down with a nod.

“I see,” I say, not seeing at all. “And when you say it will convert me, you mean I’ll become a vampire?”

She sighs. “Yes. Of course that’s what it means.”

“A pigmy vampire, or whatever you are?”

She scowls at me. “Of course not, dummy. You’re a full sized human. You won’t shrink.” She says it with disdain and shakes her head.

“So why are you so small?” I ask.

“It’s a long story,” she says. “But I used to be a fairy, OK? Now are we doing this or not?”

“I want to hear the story,” I say.

She sighs and half a smile cracks on her face. “Tell you what. Let me convert you and we’ll have all the time in the world for stories.” She looks up at me and grins. Something in her eye sparkles.

I take a deep breath and let it out. I uncross my arms and lean forward. “Will it hurt?” I ask.

She grins. “Not any worse than you’re already hurting. Just give me your finger.” She reaches her arms up and beckons me to reach out to her.

I shake my head and laugh. “Either this is a hallucination and I’ll wake up hurting, or this is real and I’ll wake up immortal. What have I got to lose?” I extend a finger and reach down.

I feel her tiny, cool hands on my warm, tough finger. Then she pressed her face into me, pulling the flesh in with her fingers, and there is a hot sting accompanied by a lighting bolt of pain shooting up through my nerves. Soon I’m feeling dizzy.

“Goodnight Mr. Russo,” I hear her saying, her voice fading away. “See you in the morning.”

[Reddit Post]