Saturday, October 14, 2006

Cooperative Story a'la Oceangram: Is this the Best One Yet?

This story was written, as all Oceangrams are, by many different contributing Oceangrammers. The "bottle" containing the story was found on a virtual beach by Kayla Shay, and posted in theOceangram Stories Group.

See if you think it's the best cooperative story Oceangram you have read.

The story is "unfinished." Feel free to add your own endings to the comment section of this blog. If you are tracking this Oceangram and would like to contribute "the rest of the story," please email me.

Enjoy!

~Sera Kate
Oceangram Stories




Once upon a time there was:

---
a little boy standing on the beach...
---








He watched as the dolphins play, away off in the
distance, and wished he could be swimming among them.
---



Then all of a sudden, he saw this bottle come floating
by. He said look, it has a message inside
---
He picked up the bottle, pulled out the cork, took the
paper out and unrolled it. The message read:
















Just then out of the
corner of his eye, the boy saw something mesmerising.
unbelievably it was a...
mermaid. Always thought to be fiction...there she
was, her tail glistening in the water as she jumped up
and dove in the water. Then....
---
The child wished to become a merman and "POOF" the
genie in the bottle made it happen. The child so
happily jumped in the water and swam after the
mermaid. Then...
---
----
He realised that he no longer had his two legs, that
they had been replaced by a single tail. In his panic
he....
---
swam in frantic circles trying to figure out what to
do....
---
eat for lunch as all this swimming was making him
hungry. So he decided........
---
..to go to his favorite burger stand on the beach..
but wait.. he couldn't walk.. Was he never to taste
another juicy burger?? Was this what he wanted??
Would he ever see his family again??
---
Then suddenly he remembered the mermaids and his
hunger changed into something else...
CUF
---
juicy mermaids he thought and swam out to find them.
the mermaids will cook me a feed sure as eggs he
thought. just when he had almost reached the
mermaids....
---
a fishing vessel spread its large net and he was
caught along with other


---
merpeople! No no, they all cried. Except it turns
out that they spoke merspeach, so it came out sounding
a bit like a bunch of seals. The fishermen said - OH
NO, NOT MERMAIDS AGAIN!
---

So that their haul wasn't a complete waste, they took
all the mermaids and merman to the circus in town,
where ...
---
they were sold to the circus to be put on display. But
to their amazement,
---
the circus wasn't doing very well and soon closed.
Luckily the kindly owner....
---
was filthy rich so he built an aquarium for all the
merpeople. they weren't very happy put on display like
that, so they...
---
decided to do something about it. One night when the
circus owner was putting food in the aquarium they
swam up and asked him if they could please go free.
The man saw the error of his ways and decided that
even though they were very beautiful merpeople, and
looked great in an aquarium, they would be much
happier back in the ocean. No sooner as the man had
agreed on this, a...
---
bullet hit him in the back and he died instantly. The
wealthy dead mans servants decided to cash in on the
unusual inhabitants of the pool and put them all in a
hot tub and transported them to another circus where
they were put on show and were very unhappy so they
all killed themselvs.
The end
---
one was the little boy though, and just before he died
he called out his wish for them all to be
reincarnated, and as there was still a wish
remaining...
---
he brought all the other merpersons back and they all
were transfered to regular people. The realized they
had a great sound so became the new group, Water
people. after the 1st 12 # 1 hits....
---
their lives fell into the inevitable downward spiral
of booze, drugs, and fast women. Their spirit.......
---
Their spirits suffered terribly as they forgot who
they were and where they had come from while under the
haze of a drug-induced fog. But the human spirit, in
some, cannot be extinguished that easily. The boy
always lived inside the grown merman, and fought to
remind him of the day he stood on the seashore
watching the dolphins play...
---


and he wondered "what happened to my mother?" After
his stint on stage that night he left the theater and
headed home to the last place he remembered his mother
living. When he arrived he saw.............
---
a ramshackle cottage sitting in a yard of overgrown
grass and weeds. Yet there was a dim light...
---
He struggled through the neglected garden reached the
frount door.Before he knocked he peeped in at the
window and saw....
---
an elderly man sitting in front of a dwindling fire.
He had a long beard, a blue captain’s overcoat and an
ancient pipe was perched between his cracked lips.
There was an eye patch over one eye and a wooden peg
protruding from his left pants leg. As if sensing the
boy was there, the wizened man turn toward the window
and said, “Hello son.”

It was then that the boy remembered what that long
letter in a bottle had said, “Do not be sad child,
your father was an ancient mariner beloved by all
things aquatic, your salty tears bond you to him
eternally."

He felt a drop of water run down is face from his eye
and it landed on his lips. Unconsciously, he licked
his lips and realized his tears tasted of salt, just
like the ocean, just like the note had said. He looked
sharply at the man in the cottage and said,

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Daddy I am home! I got your message on a bottle and the mermaids help me find the way to you! The boy felt another salty tear in his face and looking up realized it was his father's. They embraced and lived happily every after.

Anonymous said...

But suddenly the boy woke up and realized it was all a dream and time to go to school

Anonymous said...

what happen to your eye and leg and Where's mom?