xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx had written a coherent story entirely through Twitter
over the course of 7 months. I don't generally think of people named
xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx as having that kind of attention span. I was actually
even impressed by the content of the story. But what really piqued my
interest were the things the story didn't say, the gaps in between the
tweets.
So I'll spare you the juicy details (you can go read them for yourself
if you want. This is the internet, after all) and say that it was a
fairly straightforward first-encounter-to-culminating-sex-scene romance
between a man and a mermaid. The man's boat had been smashed apart on
the rocks near the Orkney Islands and left him stranded. As he's sitting
on the rock at sunrise, head in his hands going over his miseries and
wondering what can he possibly do next, he hears the mermaid, who
happens to be sitting on the same rock behind him, playing a harp.
The next tweet is what caught my eye and got me to actually keep
reading. It read simply "she was playing good day sunshine". Then the
story moves on, no further comment. That's a Beatles song. It's not some
eerie mermaid tune. But if you think about it, if mermaids actually
exist, and if they can have harps and play music, it's not any harder to
believe that they can play Beatles songs. So I was impressed that
xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx trusted her audience to realize and accept this fact
with no further explanation. This story was meant as a mutual exercise
between author and reader.
The story allots 23 tweets to describing the man. xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx
tells us every detail of the man's physical characteristics. And he is
beautiful. The mermaid gets only one tweet: "she was blond". Since this
is fiction, the man could have had this romantic story with any woman on
earth. xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx chose to involve a mermaid, a creature known
for its beauty, and then make no use of it. From this I can only
conclude that xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx saw herself as the mermaid, but why that
would be so, and even then why she would give herself no defining traits
beyond hair color, is still to me a mystery.
The next couple of months aren't as good. So far xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx had
given the narrative a sort of melancholy bite that made it sound like
she was two weeks away from suicide. The enigmatic "she was blond"
preceded a two week pause during which xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx apparently
cheered up quite a bit, and it just wasn't the same. It didn't get good
again until the scene with the kiss.
The kiss itself warrants no more words than "he kissed her", but it's a
really big deal for the mermaid. The man sees she's so pleased and
surprised that he asks her if she's ever kissed before. "You mean it has
a name?" she asks, presumably shocked. She decides it must be "some
silly ritual from New Jersey" (which is where the man is from). She's
quite hurt, because she thought it was something new and special the man
had made up, and it's just part of some game they play back home.
The rest of the story isn't interesting until the end. Specifically, how
abruptly it ends, just at the close of the first and only sex scene. The
man's still stuck there on the rock. He has no food or fresh water, no
phone, no clothes at this point, no transportation. xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx
has been with this man in fiction for 7 months now, and she leaves him
there. Leaves him either to die there, as things are set to happen, or
be rescued in a plot the reader must dream up.
Rereading the story before I wrote these comments I noticed that the sex
scene itself is a bit rushed, like she's trying to get it over with real
fast. I suspect the motivation to ditch the fictional man existed long
before the story actually ended. But then in Twitter everything seems a
bit rushed, and I might be imagining it.
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