Evan should have been dead, or at least missing, but by the time he dragged himself back to land, he was trending. #RealMermaid, #OceanAuthentic, and #AquaLureLives had flooded social media. The clips were everywhere: shaky phone footage of his half-human, half-tail form on the beach, saltwater glittering under sunlight. In every thumbnail, he looked like the perfect viral product shot.
Miranda greeted him at the beach with an army of marketing executives before he had even found dry clothes. “Darling, what a miracle!” she gushed. “You’ve transcended branding. You are the brand.” And that’s how Evan found himself back on an AquaLure set—this time not as the designer but as the object. Within a week, “Eva the Mermaid” was fronting a global campaign. There were billboards, interviews, photoshoots. He hadn’t agreed to any of it—but he also hadn’t said no, mostly because every time he tried to explain he used to be a man, people nodded sympathetically and said, “That’s so brave of you to share your journey.”
The first commercial shoot was at a private beach. Drones buzzed, makeup artists fussed, and Miranda circled like a shark in designer heels. “Darling, you glow,” she beamed. “The ocean has claimed you! You are AquaLure.”
Evan just stood there frozen in the surf wearing a magnificent sequinned dress that had been engineered to break away as he entered the water and his tail revealed itself. It was too much – the drones continued the hum as if inside his head, the excited chattering that surrounded him, dozens of expectant eyes, all on him... He raised his hands to his temples to clamp his growing headache. Everywhere he looked, there were versions of himself—billboards, mock-ups, even a foam cutout of his silhouette with a “SCAN FOR 10% OFF” QR code where his face should be...where her face should be. Miranda and AquaLure had seen him as nothing more than a tool to get what they wanted for years, and now that everything had changed, nothing had changed at all...
“I need a break!” He declared to an open-mouthed Miranda and glided away before she could point out they hadn't even started. He sat on a rock and wondered if it was the same one he'd sat on that fateful night he'd been washed out to sea. The sun reflected on the perfect skin of his arms as he tried to steady his breathing. The past few weeks had been a blur, but actually being 'Eva' had been the least of it. Being a mermaid was one thing, but being 'their' mermaid was another thing entirely. He had always been 'theirs', been Miranda's, but now she acted like she owned him.
Behind him he heard Miranda excitedly giving an interview. “She represents the power of nature and femininity,” Miranda purred. “Of course, she’s entirely real.”
'Entirely real,' Evan thought bitterly. No mention of how I created her...and then became her... It was then that Evan decided to show everyone just how real mermaids really were.
No comments:
Post a Comment