Helen, the Mermaid and Her Dentures

I used a story generator to give me the following ingredients for a story:

• Main character is a female security guard
• Her nemesis is a mermaid
• A key object or symbol in the story is a set of dentures
• It is set in the time of the Great Depression
• It is a story about rejection

Here’s how it turned out:

Helen set her flashlight on the dusty floor. It was break time, she hadn’t eaten in days. Between the debilitating economy and her own lack of teeth, eating was a luxury she could hardly afford. This morning Harry, her unemployed tobacco farmer husband, had mashed up a bowl of grapes of wrath for her and strained them through a beat-up second-hand seive. Times were hard, but the grapes were soft between her cheek and gums. She enjoyed the rare moment, in her security job at the Post Office, when there was nothing to do but chew – or gum, in her case. She gummed passionately, methodically, she gummed like she’d never see tomorrow, all the while keeping her eye on that sticky P.O. Box.

Just then a miniature orange mermaid crawled out of a loose envelope on the floor.

“Hello,” the mermaid said without expression, brushing her scales off.

Helen was speechless. Not only did she have loose bits of grape floating free in her mouth, she had no teeth and was self-conscious about the way she prounounced certain letters.

“Hey, I’m talking to you!” The mermaid said, her voice gruff and mean, and a bit too manly for Helen’s taste.

Helen nodded and smiled.

“This job bites,” the mermaid grumbled. “Listen, I just lifted some fake teeth off the guy passed out on the bench,” she jerked her tail toward a rusted iron bench outside the window. “I thought I might get a dime for ‘em, but no one wants teeth that been sucked on. I’m givin’ ‘em away for a song. So, hey. you want ‘em?”

Helen smiled and nodded again. The mermaid’s bad fake-mob accent unsettled her. She thought about how badly she’d wanted teeth, and whether it was ultimately worth an entire song, and what evil this way comes with the strange mermaid. She decided if nothing else, it would make a nice story for Harry, bored out of his smaller than average cranium at home, combing the cat, telling the shoe-fly “don’t bother me.”

“Oay,” said Helen. Then she cleared her throat and began.

“Winkle, winkle, li-el ar,
ow I wonner airoo ar
uh au-uh uh urr oh I
ike a imom i-ya uh eye”

“All right, all right! Enough already, you’re killin’ me! You can have the teeth for crying out loud.” The mermaid pulled a set of charred and splintered teeth out of the same envelope she had crawled from and tossed them to Helen. It was clear they were enemies.

“Have a good life, Helen,” she winked. And after a brief rejection, was gone.

Helen looked at the teeth. There were bits of food stuck between, which she hadn’t counted on – a blessing in these times. She put them in her pocket. It was almost 8:00. She clicked off her flashlight and sat for a moment in the dark. She felt good. Safe. Every little thing, was gonna be all right.

Other Make-out Ideas for Awards Shows:

Grammys
Santana / Keith Richards
Aretha Franklin / Barbara Streisand
Snoop Dog / Keith Richards

Emmys
Susan Lucci / Star Jones
The Guy Who Plays Victor on Y&R / Pat Sajak
Rob Lowe / The Mom on Everybody Loves Raymond
Phoebe from Friends / the Chick Who Played Her Twin Sister on Mad About You

Oscars
Kevin Costner / Charlton Heston
Ellen / Lauren Bacall
Kathy Bates / Lara Flynn Boyle
Bennifer / Babe the Pig
Julia Roberts / Keifer Sutherland

Ode to Oscar

Graceful scaly neck
You held it elegantly
You died in your shell

I had that dream again, about Oscar …
– Um-hm .. go onI don’t know … it was just, weird
– [...]

Are you listening?
–Yes. I am. How was it “weird”?

It just, it wasn’t like him, you know? It didn’t like, it wasn’t true to the Oscar I knew … it wasn’t … oh, forget it.
–How do you mean? In what way, exactly, wasn’t it “true”?

In this dream … he’s always running, and he was never like that …
–Running?

Yeah, well, not like you know, balls of your feet running, I mean, obviously he was limited, but he was very fast. That part is pretty accurate ..
–I see.

It’s not that, not the running, he just .. I don’t like to really describe it because then I have that image, you know, and it … haunts me. I mean I’m in Mcdonald’s the other day and I’m ordering. I’m up at the register and all of a sudden I can’t see anything .. I just have this image from the dream … I didn’t even take my food. I couldn’t at that point.
–Um-hmmm.

He was always very open with me. Always stretching out, ate right in front of me, as soon as I put down his food … I mean he wouldn’t run away, he might run toward me .. like if I had walked across the room or something …
–I don’t understand.

In the dream. He’s running … away, running and running, and then he stops. He stops and before you can even blink — blip — everything inside … arms, legs, head … completely. He completely withdraws. Just an empty shell. Then I wake up.
–That’s very interesting.

1. Swear that they’re real 
2. Refute allegations
3. Refuse to testify
4. Press charges
5. Drop charges
6. Sue for my nude pictures back
7. Be taken out of context
8. Be misquoted
9. Not Write That Blog!
10. Fire my publicist
11. Tell all
12. Decline to comment 
13. Threaten action
14. Resign amid controversy
15. Arouse suspicion
16. Have my reality show cancelled
17. Deny my eating disorder 
18. Stand behind my earlier statement

Augusto Monterroso was a Guatamalan writer, known among other things, for the world’s shortest story of one sentence:

“When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”
(The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso, tr. From the original Spanish)

Today, for lack of something better to do, I’ve assembled a one-sentence story collection of my own, from anonymous authors translated from their native Congi, Korean, Afrikaans, Latin, Czech, Russian and Lithuanian tongues. (I.e., I made them all up.)

“Abruptly, the thunder ceased to exist.”

“The orange alert ended”

“No one knew, and so the secret remained.”

“Toads wore the pants, and frightened, they lived their lives.”

“The dog, worn and wrinkled, stopped digging for the bone.”

“The dictator, to the delight of the crowd, followed his heart.”

“A man touched by the sun, made dinner for his wife.”

“The caterpillar, traumatized, lay motionless in his cocoon.”

“A chair in the room was all that remained.”

Tomorrow: Two-word poems