"Running Away To UP"
an excerpt

Running Away To UP

Previously

Flute oo was a bona fide deep blue water undine who had achieved two levels of human being. First, she had fallen in love with a human man who loved her back completely in the allotted time. In fact it had been instantaneous. And he had captured her heart in that same instant too, completely, and had genuinely surrendered his heart over to her with his whole life force, which is important and necessary for holding the love of a mythic being. And, secondly, she had had a child.
Therefore, technically, Flute oo was now an early level undine-human. She could live a human life because her man loved her with a true heart. And because she had given birth to a human, well, sort of, a daughter, yet to prove exactly what species she was planning to become, she now had a soul. But that is another human concoction, as if Undines did not have spirituality in life of their own, but that is the manner of human interpretations, always swinging things their own way. Ahem. Well, that’s how the legend goes in its rewritten, unauthorized version. The truth is a bit different, but Flute oo was working with it or around it as best she could, The Legend.

A road map is a road map. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, it will still get you from here to there. But beware, the road map of a legend might have been written by a lusty drunken fisherman and corrected by his angry fisher wife, then added onto by his drunken best friend, covered up by his mother who didn’t want to listen to such rubbish for the rest of her days, altered by his minister, and dreamed ever differently along the lines of his uncles and sisters and children, depending on what they wanted to prove or believe in,
or how they determined to alter the Legend in their minds to suit their own needs and desires, and so on and so forth.

But legends are always, first, and foremost, born of a truth, so, legends are complex things and there are lots of details and different ways to live them out or unravel them, interpretation, if you will.

For example, Flute oo was born at the bottom of the deep blue water of Lake Michigan,
a fresh water ocean and not the sea. So, how much is that written about in myths? Not much.

Being a fresh water undine didn’t mean she wasn’t related to ocean undines too. Flute oo liked the sea plenty. Especially the Pacific, which she could, in fact visit, from underwater currents and tunnels, some of which many Undines could access for exotic vacations and looking about and family reunions with the shirttail relatives, etc.
But Flute oo was a specific variety of Undine, a more secretive sect. She was a fresh water mermaid, if you will, and these beings have been especially agile at keeping rumors of their kind and legend describing them, under water, please forgive the fun, and out of the minds and imaginations of humans.
Yes they are not so clumsy with contact between their species and humans as the sea mermaid clans, famous for their Undine-Mermaid legends and humans spotting them and spying them out, which has caused all sorts of trouble and stories, the more common ones like the one Hans Christian Anderson spread word of far and wide, that ocean going mermaids were most suspected of.
And yes, Great Lakes Fishermen have their stories too. But fresh water undines have conspired mightily to discredit those fishermen with equal bits of drunken fishermen tales, renowned as irrational and mental, and so who should believe their wild imaginations after all those days and nights alone on a creaking, stinky old fishing boat. And in the worse case scenarios, they could sink the sailors’ boats, or drown the worst of the trouble makers or even take them away to the bottom of the deepest deep water from which they could never return, having seen too much, and make them over into underwater humans, a fate many a Legend bearing single and lonely fisherman both dreaded and desired, crossing over.

Crossovers are rare. But they exist and they can go either way. Usually, and it is advisable to stop there, it is just a curiosity thing. But once a curiosity begins, there is always the possibility of trouble. And then and occasionally, it can be a matter of fate, and in matters of fate, there is always trouble. A Crossover is bound to be inevitable then. And Crossovers are the stuff that legends are made of.

Flute oo was one of those. One day she was combing her auburn hair -well actually is was red, strawberry red, berry red, The Fifth Element red, red, not auburn, isn’t that just so typical of legends, they get it close, but wrong, always check your facts- on a crusty green rock cropping off the coast of Lake Michigan where she had been swimming and sunning. It was the same one day when Fin Christian, a light footed man, who loved to collect rocks in odd places, a man of Norwegian descent, was out and about on an isolated trek about Lake Michigan, surveying the terrain and putting rocks in his sack, when he came around the bend of the shore and discovered Flute oo on her rock, who was, as I said, combing her Fifth Element Red hair and sunning herself.
They both spotted each other at the same time. It was something like spotting a leprechaun, the first to look away sets the other free. But they were both, for each of them, their first sight of each other’s species and they were very interested in looking and very curious as well as surprised, and stunned by this occurrence, neither one of them looked away. Indeed, neither of them could take their eyes off the other. And then it started, trouble. Flute oo couldn’t help herself, and she began to laugh and laugh. Fin started to laugh too. They laughed so hard that Flute oo fell off her rock and Fin stepped out into the water and picked her up in his arms and then, before he knew what he was doing, he reached down and kissed her and her tail, still dripping water, a few inches out of the waves, in his arms, shuddered and turned into legs and feet. So she wrapped her legs around this tall pale man with his golden blonde hair and kissed him back and more. And so Flute oo crossed over and became a human. And nine months later, Cat Canary Fish was born, with lots of room to discover what kind of animal or species she was to grow into too.

Twenty-four years later, Cat Canary Fish was now a punk-rocker with an angsty attitude and a lot of black smudgy eye make-up and who professed to be afflicted with serious issues with her parents, who she felt had been totally irresponsible for bringing her into a world between two worlds. For she was neither identifiable as a human or a nymph. She didn’t like cold water, hard work, or anything much with the one exception of chocolate. And she had the power of song, for she had a voice that comes from the water and the world deep beneath this world, one that has power in the world above, that sounds like a shrill sharp bird screeching and is of siren origin. When she passed through puberty, Cat Canary Fish discovered that she could, by the sound of her harpy voice, control the entire single male population, within a range of five years of her own age, who, at the sound of her shrill or screech, followed her much like a drunken fisherman following an illusive undine.
So she lived in her apartment, and she sang in a punk rock band, played a mean guitar, and ate chocolate and sent boys to the brink of madness by calling them into her net with her punk rock music and her hard heartache shrilling vocals and then setting them adrift outside of her shallow emotional bubble.
Cat Canary Fish had neither friends nor lovers. She was emotionally unavailable to them. Rather, she saved all of her affections for a very large Bulldog named Martha Stewart, who drooled and had the biggest set of teeth that any dog should ever hope to have with a jaw so strong and powerful that it that could break a branch off a tree, and that terribly intimidated the boys, on purpose, and with a terrible low growl that could blast into a bark that could throw a boy back out the door of Cat Canary Fish’s apartment by the sheer force of it, but who curled like a kitten at her mistress’s feet, and who loved her mistress’s 600 thread count sheets and her silk pajamas and had matching black bowls for food and water, quite the fashion, Cat Canary Fish’s anyway, and chic by all standards Goth, and who wore a glittering rhinestone collar with punk spikes and who would NOT leave her Mistress’s side for any occasion other than Cat Canary Fish’s own command to back off or stay put, nor allow for ANY overnight campers of the male persuasion.
She was so large a dog that Cat Canary Fish, a slight and petite thing whose only bigness about her was her bad angry attitude towards life, could ride on her back down the street, eating chocolate and giving the finger to anyone who looked at her funny.

~~

The thing about being human was that Flute oo wasn’t really human either. But she could blend. But blending has its own problematic circumstances.