There once was a man who loved to swim. Whenever he could, he frolicked all day in the waves. When he was working, he pined for the siren song of the sea.

Luckily, the man had a lovely witch of a wife who could help him with his passion. She gave him a spell that granted him gills, with the warning that he must never use it for more than a sun's trek across the sky.

My transformation into a mermaid was two thirds complete. In just 24 more hours the state-of-the-art synthetic mermaid tail I'd GLOO'd myself into would be a permanent part of me + there'd be no going back!

Not that I would ever want to. This had been my deepest desire ever since I was a little boy; and each time my mermaid-worshiping fiance asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with this insane scheme my answer was a resounding “YES!!”

While I realized even the fanciest fake tail wouldn't really turn me into the mythological creature I'd always dreamed of being, I knew I'd be very happy living as the closest thing that reality would allow...

But unbeknownst to me & Greg, impossible changes were occurring within my body that would merge reality with dreams + make our strange fantasies far more real than either of us had dared hope...

Greg looked down at me, love + concern in his serious gray eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“For the 10th time, yes! Are you gonna keep asking me that for the next 3 days?”

“Probably. I feel like it'd be irresponsible of me not to. I mean-”

“I'm sure! Unless you're having doubts about wanting me underfoot all the time.”

“Never! I want this as much as you do. But I'm not the one being permanently modified here. Because once this GLOO! sets there's no going back.”

“And that's what's so exciting! The thought of being like this forever.”

“In a fantasy maybe. But part of my mind is saying we're both crazy for doing this!”

“Of course we're crazy! Nobody normal does a thing like this. But this is who I need to be if I'm ever gonna be happy. You read my stories, you know what I am!”

“Yes. You're my beautiful mermaid,” he said, cupping my ears in his hands + kissing me gently on the lips. And then not so gently...

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...

Today my sister decided to take me landlubbing, which the mermaid equivalent of the human sport of snorkeling- a low tech way to see all the pretty sights of a world that isn't your own. Except that instead of gliding almost effortlessly along through the water, our version has the tortoise-like pace of crawling + squirming over the ground + through the brush, and in some places you're basically rock climbing without feet. It isn't easy. But the little island Anemone had brought me to was so breathtakingly gorgeous it made it all worth it. It had everything you'd hope to find on a tropical isle- from coconut palms to waterfalls. And being uninhabited we could explore it all without running into any humans...

Or so we thought. Until that big white boat pulled into our perfect island's perfect bay, and things got super intense as our pleasant outing turned into a desperate game of hide and seek.