Mermaid on a Motorcycle

Have you ever seen a mermaid ride a motorcycle? – Neither did I. Until yesterday, that is.

You will, of course, reasonably object that this is all made up, just a stupid joke. Because no one can ride a motorcycle with one limb, pardon me one tail, as the motorcycle requires the balance of two equally weighted legs. And I would have fully agreed with you. Again, only before yesterday, when I saw it with my own eyes. But let me tell you everything from the beginning.

Last night, I was making a late pizza delivery run on my super-fast electric bike. Coming out of a high-rise building with a large tip in my pocket and a happy smile on my face, I saw a tall handsome young guy in what seemed like a Russian or some other Eastern European princely garb standing on the sidewalk. He was animatedly arguing with an old woman. She looked like she was battered by life itself, hunchbacked and limping, dressed in grayish black rags and sporting unkempt gray hair and a patch on her left eye.

“You cannot do this to me anymore, lady Yaga!” the man pleaded. He looked both desperate and exasperated. “Why don’t you just leave me alone? Aren’t you tired of your own shenanigans, chasing after me like this, and chasing away the women I fall in love with?”

“If only you said you loved me and agreed to marry me, this all would be over!” The old woman’s face was red with rage.

I froze. The chutzpah on that ugly old woman, demanding love from a dreamy guy like that! I would have laughed out loud had I not been completely dumbfounded.

“But I DON’T love you. Never did, never will!” the man tried to suppress his visible frustration.

“Well, then we will have to continue with these shenanigans, won’t we?” the old woman said. “Because you know there’s no other way, until you meet someone who will truly love you.”

“You’ve made sure that never happens,” the man said, deflated. He plopped on the curb, dropped his head into his hands and moaned, swaying back and forth, “What do I have to do? I can’t go on like this! Five hundred years, isn’t that enough?” he raised his pleading eyes at her. I caught a glimpse of tears in his eyes.

“Just say you love me and mean it, and it all will be over in a second,” the woman said again, but more gently, tenderly striking his head.

“I said I will never! I cannot lie, it will make me sick!” the man sobbed.

“Well, then I have no other way…” the woman pulled out of her rags a twig (or a magic wand?) and started to wave it, chanting something sounding like a spell.

The man’s legs started to turn into a fish tail. I loudly gasped. Startled, the woman finally saw me, abruptly stopped chanting, picked up her long rags of a dress, and started to run.

“Stop!” the man yelled, trying to grab her by her foot. She escaped. He looked around, registered me, and smiled politely as if saying “See what I have to deal with?” He then flipped and wormed his tail to the motorcycle parked nearby. In a matter of seconds, he shed all his clothing, mounted the motorbike, started it, and took off, quickly flipping his tail from one side of the bike to the other trying to keep the balance. He gave chase to the woman, who seemingly had no chance against the bike, with her limp and advanced old age.

“Was this supposed to be a fish?” he boomed off the motorbike.

“A mermaid!” Like an owl, the woman turned her head around without turning her body and gave out a sinister chuckle.

“Whyyyy??? It’s not even an animal!” the man yelled.

“I try to be creative!” the woman giggled, turned her head straight and added a little speed.

Coming out of my stupor, I jumped on my electric bike and followed them. How could I not? Curiosity in me was stronger than fear. I caught up with the man relatively quickly (my great electric bike needed no time to gain 40m/h) and started riding along. The man registered my presence with his peripheral vision, still fixing his gaze on the woman trotting along the sidewalk. She in fact moved faster than it seemed. So absurd, how can she run so fast, I thought, as the chase went on for several minutes.

The man didn't seem to mind me, focused on the chase of the veering old woman. He even smiled, threw a look at me and said, “Can you believe it, she gave me boobs?”

“They look nice, though, firm and round,” I replied, admiring both boobs and him, completely fascinated by how quickly he flipped his tail side to side to keep riding.

“You think so?” the man looked down, touched his ever-enlarging breasts and said, “You are right, and they feel nice too.” I noticed that the man’s face was also transforming, getting softer feminine features. The lumber jack beard was hard to shake off, though.

Meanwhile, the old witch reached some dense brush and disappeared behind it from my line of vision. Instead of her, an old shabby limping cat ran out on the other side.

“Not this again!” the man-mermaid yelled and throttled his bike. The cat was faster than the old woman, but still not as fast as our bikes. The man finally caught up with the cat. In a desperate attempt to grab her, he threw himself off the bike and over another large dense bush coming up in the cat’s path. “Like a beautiful, boobed dolphin jumping high out of the ocean,” I made a mental note to myself.

I heard thumping, grunting and commotion behind the bush but couldn’t see what was going on there. I got to the man’s bike, lying on its side abandoned and still running. I dismounted mine, killed the motorbike’s engine and parked it near the curb. After a short whimper and a slurping thump behind the bush, it finally became quiet in the street. It was dark and foggy, with sparse dim yellow streetlights grabbing round patches of ground from the night’s pitch black. I went around the bush and saw the cat running away in the other direction. The mermaid man was nowhere to be found. But there was a big hedgehog sitting on the ground. I swear to you it winked at me before it hastily retreated into the bush.

I looked at my iWatch. It was 12:55 am on December 22, the night of the winter solstice, when the vail between the natural and supernatural becomes so thin that anything can happen.

And that, my friends, is the true story of a mermaid riding a motorcycle.