My week as a mermaid continues: My young human friend and I surfaced and sat on a rock, where we could talk without having to use her underwater message pad. I was hoping she might start making sense now, but Valerie's strange stories were growing progressively stranger: Reagan and Kennedy on Mount Rushmore... A transsexual woman giving birth... Peace in Iraq but a war in Antarctica...

I might have decided that she just had a wild imagination, except she also had all this impossible hardware---like the artificial gill she'd been breathing underwater with---which had me wondering if I'd somehow wandered into an alternate universe. Given the kind of week I'd been having this didn't seem like such a crazy notion, but these mysteries had a different explanation that I would eventually discover. It was just a matter of time...

OFF THE DEEP END ~ CHAPTER 8
THE LITTLE HUMAN Part 2:
Girl Out Of Time
Laika Pupkino ~ 2016