Looking down at himself, he couldn’t help feeling that life had not turned out exactly as he had imagined it would.
Things never seemed to go quite right for Tim. He always had a good plan, a careful scheme, each step mapped out precisely. And at the beginning everything motored along smoothly, but somewhere between the middle and the end, a quirky sort of disaster was always waiting. It was never something truly horrific. No bloody death, no painful dismemberments, no embarrassing social suicide. Not a step behind or ahead of where he meant to be, but a step sideways.
Take his head.
It had seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time. There were literary examples of sea creatures who enjoyed remarkable lives in the Upworld. Seals who became beautiful wives to hard working fisherfolk. Crabs who helped mermaids get their legs – admittedly things hadn’t worked out so charmingly for the little mermaid, but the crab was a household name for generations! He did his part splendidly. So when Tim got the idea that he’d like to take a stroll for once in his life instead of a swim, he didn’t see what could possibly go wrong.
And Upworld was everything he had imagined it would be and more. The grass was greener; and when the sun set it lit the sky with more colours than a coral reef on a good day. Wind against his skin was a magic unlike the shifting tides that were the closest he had known to such a thing. And the strength in his lean, muscular body! He was a perfect human specimen. An Adonis, a Hercules. The ladies would have exclaimed at his musculature, swooned over his perfect, flat abs.
Except, of course, if he had gotten close enough to women for any swooning to occur, they would have been highly distracted by the matter of his head.
His large fish head.
He was going to have some words with that witch.
Art by Kieran Macanulty
Heh. Very funny sting.