Who is the Mississippi Mermaid?
Her decision to go public follows a rash of calls to the Driskill Mountain Wildlife & Oddities Department.
“We’ve had no fewer than 47 calls this summer alone,” said department director Earl P. Boudreaux. “Most of them go something like, ‘There’s a woman with a fish tail in my pond, please remove."
The following was transcribed from her first public statement, delivered outside the local Piggly Wiggly on a stationary shopping cart.
A heart that broke too early,
and a soul that never fit the family picture
"Welp, mama dreamed in dollar signs, while daddy wore blue - and they both fell in love with little thin white lines. Big time. So what's a little guppy to do?
I learned the blues, and I learned to rhyme.
My earliest memories involved a circus of family court, domestic house calls, and so much screaming - it left me unable to speak, and fearful of most adults. But at least I had a big brother, and we had music.
At the age of 6, my brother and I were separated. We were forced to grow up in different homes across the country. The day I was picked up by my grandparents at the police station, no one told me it would be the last time I would see him. Life became very quiet. Answers did not come. The grown folks around me? They said I was just a kid, and I would soon forget. But I kept singing, and I kept writing to remember.
I made up a game called window wishing - I wrote letters, stories, and songs - wishing for a new world of my own.
One afternoon during my routine window wishing, a tree told me I would be a writer. Yes, a tree. That same tree also said, I would grow up to become a voice for kids like me. And as for the weight of my own heartache? The tree told me to times what I feel by infinite three. The tree warned there were many, many, many buried in the snow, like me. Today, I only take my advice from trees.
I am the daughter of addicts and a product of an environment that was meant to destroy, but in that darkness my spirit found its brightest light through music, stories, and magic. Now I am paying the life vest forward, to teens and the young-at-heart, to help you find your place through unkind waters, too.
I am still here. My brother is not. He lost the fight, but I will win the war.
Once upon a time, I was told what happened to me didn't matter. My heartache lit a fire so ferocious I will devote the rest of my life repeating until my face turns blue - what happened to you mattered. Your truth matters, and no one can tell it for you.
The only way to break cycles and to heal the hurt is to feel it.
So I wrote a survival guide - a collection of silly poems, silly truths, and torn apart patchwork pieces of a girl simply trying to stitch herself back together.
I quickly learned no matter how hard I tried - I could never stitch myself back to the girl I used to be. The woman I am today carries scars, grit, and grace - so I became a mermaid.
My life today is still a circus of house calls, but of a different kind. Not just for birthday parties or festivals, but the kind when a child needs a reason to keep swimming - a friend to help them make sense of our world's strange waters, that's been through it, too. Bullies, broken homes, loss - this is how a mermaid collects her scales! I'll teach you how.
Take it from a mermaid who almost drowned, but didn't. I'm Dakota. I'm a professional mermaid, and a tender-hearted tornado.
I am here to help you keep swimming."
- Female entity with anomalous tail identified as Dakota Driskill, formerly known as a human girl named Laura, sometimes go by the alias Caesar Augustus, will also answer to Nina Tootenbacher of the Tootenbacher Popcorn fame.
Field notes: Entity speaks three languages, and trained in aquatic jiu jitsu. Entity considered feral and dangerous, no civilians were harmed or slimed during this official public statement but many left with an inexplicable urge to be silly. Entity has now been sent back to testing facilities for weapons of psychic warfare.
