The Trouble With Tales
The place looks abandoned from the road—an artifact: faded signs, smiling mermaids, five acres of asphalt meant for parking, all but empty.
The fountain at the entrance rises twenty feet above your head. Two bare-breasted mermaids posed atop a column. The bottom mermaid stands on one leg, opposite knee forward, arms raised, holding the other above her.
The top mermaid arches backward, arms splayed, tail fin circling behind her.
I look at Keylea, “This’ll either be incredible, or a crime scene.”
She laughs and squeezes my hand. “Lean toward incredible,” she says.
Beyond the fountain, cattle gates funnel us to the cashier booths, through the turnstiles, and into the park.
The place feels frozen in time. Old concrete paths. Painted cinderblock. Mermaid this. Mermaid that.
A high schooler handing out park maps waves us over with a smile. “Here to see the mermaids?” she beams. “You’re just in time. Next show starts in 10 minutes.”
Keylea giggles, takes a park map, and pulls me forward. I put my head down and slink into the theater behind her.
The air is cold and a little damp. Rows of old chairs bolted to the concrete step down toward wide glass windows angled deep into the spring.
Little boys slam their knees into the seats. Parents puncture juice pouches. A few grandmas sit with hands folded neatly in their laps, ready for whatever happens.
I sit low in my chair.
Middle-aged man. Dark room. Here to see young women in skimpy outfits.
I keep both hands visible on my knees.
“Are you okay?” Keylea whispers.
“I’m blending in,” I say.
“You look suspicious,” she smirks.
A girl about five years old sits a few rows down in full mermaid gear. Sequined tail, crown, the whole kit. Her dad tries to adjust her crown. She bats his hand away. Her eyes locked on the curtained glass.
The dim lights fade. A cheerful voice fills the theatre.
“Welcome to Weeki Wachee Springs, home of the world-famous mermaids since 1947…”
The narrator goes on to say the show we’re about to see is based on The Little Mermaid, “a beloved fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen,” she says.
The curtain goes up. The glass floods with light. A mermaid rises from the deep. Hair floating. Aquamarine tail. She lifts an air hose to her mouth and breathes slow bubbles.
Another mermaid appears. Then a third. A fourth.
The little boys in the crowd stop squirming. Grandmas straighten in their seats. Even the moms go still.
The five-year-old in front of us lifts both hands to her face, mouth open wide, eyes glassy in wonder.
Beside me, I feel Keylea smile before I see it. Her eyes shine in waves of blue light. She finds my hand. Our fingers interlace.
She turns to me with a gasp. “auhh!” she whispers. “Real mermaids.”
The music swells, the story unfolds—an underwater opera under glass.
A sailor falls overboard from above—a prince. All the mermaids scatter for cover. All but the littlest mermaid. She dares to get closer, sees he’s in trouble, and saves him from drowning. They fall in love—little mermaid and man—an impossible situation.
The prince must return to land, his kingdom.
The little mermaid is heartbroken. She bargains with the sea witch to get legs, leave the water, and follow her lover. The sea witch agrees, but for a price. The little mermaid must give up her beautiful singing voice.
The show goes on. Bubbles. Songs. Acrobatics. Dance. More bubbles. Ariel and the prince hold hands behind the glass.
She dances for the prince on her new legs. Little girl gets her prince. Happy ending. Music crescendos. The cast of mermaids swim and twirl and take their bows in wild flourishes of rising bubbles.
The little girl three rows down cheers through flowing tears.
When the lights come up, she stands on her chair and waves at the curtained glass. Her father helps her down, pulls her up the aisle by the hand, her little face still turned toward the glass.
Outside, the park feels forgotten.
An outdoor amphitheater stands empty in the sun. Closed cafes with chairs stacked on tables. Funnel cake stands with metal shutters pulled down. A cafeteria with a sign that reads “SEASONAL HOURS ONLY.”
Everything asleep. Everything waiting. Probably busy once. Maybe still, during peak season. Whenever that’s supposed to happen.
We walk to the dock where a pontoon boat is loading. Two park rangers help people aboard. Both young. Khaki shorts, epaulets, official Florida State Parks baseball caps. One of them has a clipboard: the other, an earing and a radio on his belt.
The boat holds maybe thirty people. We sit up front. The engine starts. We putter away from the dock.
The spring run is narrow. Trees crowd both banks. Palms, cypress. The water is clear enough to see the bottom. White sand. Eel grass. Schools of fish holding still in the current.
The radio ranger stands at the front with a microphone. He tells us the headwaters are at least four hundred feet deep, as far as they know. As far as been measured. Nobody’s found the bottom yet.
The water flows up from the center of the earth at one hundred seventeen million gallons a day. Never stops. Never changes temperature. Always seventy-four degrees. When the Gulf of Mexico cools in winter, manatees swim up the spring run to feed in the warm waters.
The boat drifts. Nobody talks much. A young boy asks if there are alligators. The ranger says rarely. But possible. The boy’s mother pulls him closer.
I watch Keylea watch the water. She’s leaned over the edge, hand trailing over the water, not touching. Just close to it.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she smiles. “I’m good.”
On the way back to the dock, I ask her about The Little Mermaid.
“Is that what the Disney movie is like?”
She squints. “You don’t know the real story?”
“I never saw the movie. Never read the book.”
She nods. “The original story is pretty brutal.”
She tells me in Andersen’s version, the sea witch doesn’t just take the mermaid’s voice. She cuts out her tongue.
And sure, the mermaid gets her legs, but every step feels like walking on knives.
“Actual knives,” Keylea says.
The prince never recognizes the little mermaid as the one who saved him. He thinks someone else did it. He marries that other woman.
The little mermaid’s sisters come to her the night before the wedding. They’ve cut off all their beautiful flowing hair. They’ve sacrificed this treasure to the sea witch in exchange for a knife.
Kill the prince before dawn, they tell her. Let his blood drip on your feet. You’ll become a mermaid again. You’ll live.
But the littlest mermaid can’t do it. She loves her prince too much.
At dawn, she throws herself into the sea to be dissolved into foam. She’s gone.
“That’s it?” I ask.
“Not quite,” Keylea says. “The little mermaid is rewarded for her choice. She becomes a daughter of the air. A spirit. If she does good deeds for three hundred years. Then… maybe… maybe she earns a soul. Maybe she gets into heaven.”
“Yeesh. What kind of fairy tale is that?”
Keylea looks into the clear waters for a while. “That’s what love costs,” she says. “You give up everything. You suffer for it. And the person you love might never even know.” She turns to me. “But love is always the right choice,” she smiles.
The boat bumps against the dock. The ranger ties it off. People start gathering their things.
At the gift shop, the little five-year-old examines a rack of plastic tails. Her dad crouches beside her. She runs her fingers over each tail. Tests the fabric. Takes this very seriously.
Keylea picks up a small metal keychain—a tiny mermaid with chipped paint.
“This one,” she says.
“For you?”
She shrugs. “For both of us.”
At the register, the clerk drops the trinket into a wax paper bag and slides it over.
I hand it to Keylea, but she takes the keychain out right away and hooks it to the zipper of her purse.
We drive home on the two-lane road that brought us here. The spring disappears behind us in the rearview.
Keylea reaches over and takes my hand. Her fingers, cool from the air conditioning. She doesn’t say a thing.
You know, when I started writing this story, it was meant to be funny. Awkward.
Middle-aged man goes to a mermaid show at a kids’ amusement park. How awkward is that, right?
But as I reflected on all the tiny moments that day, another image began to surface. And I’m only now beginning to see that image clearly.
The small town where we lived. Where everyone knew everyone. The looks people gave her after I went away.
The whispers in the grocery store. The questions people asked. The questions they didn’t ask.
Our children growing up with a father whose absence everyone knew about, but nobody mentioned directly.
Every step Keylea took after I went away. Every parent-teacher conference. Every school assembly, football game, cheer competition. Every holiday, baby shower, birthday, wedding, and funeral. Every step. Every single day.
Knives.
She could have saved herself. Cut me off. Could have told me not to come back. Could have filed the papers and moved on.
Nobody would have blamed her. Everyone would have understood—even me.
The story Keylea told me that afternoon on the boat.
She wasn’t just explaining a fairy tale.
She was telling an important story.
She was telling me her story.
And I’m the prince who never recognized her sacrifice.