THE LITTLE MERMAID: PART OF YOUR WORLD

REVELATIONS

"Scuttle!" Ariel called once we reached a small rock on the surface.

What I could see, and Ariel and Flounder too, was indeed a seagull who was mindlessly humming a song.

"WHOA!!! Mermaids off the port bow! Ariel, how ya doin' kid?!" The seagull named Scuttle looked into a telescope backwards, which made me confused, but nevertheless, I trusted Ariel and Flounder's word.

Ariel took the telescope from him, chuckling as she got close.

"Whoa, what a swim!" Scuttle peered down at her and at me. "New merkid?" He ruffled his feathers at me.

"Yeah, relatively new—I'm from a neighboring kingdom. I'm Joshua." I introduced myself.

"A pleasure kid," Scuttle said.

"Scuttle, look what we found!" Ariel brought her satchel to him.

"We were in this sunken ship, and it was really creepy!" Flounder explained.

"Human stuff, huh? K, lemme see!" Scuttle perked up and slid down clumsily from his perch, hitting his head.

I flinched. It looked like it must have hurt him. He quickly recovered, shaking his head and looked inside the satchel. He pulled the fork out first.

"Look at this! Wow, it looks special. This is very very unusual." Scuttle examined the fork.

"What? What is it?" Ariel asked in anticipation.

"It's a dinglehopper!" Scuttle said.

"Wow! What does it do?" I knew what a fork was used for on land, but I was really interested in what Scuttle thought a "dinglehopper" was used for in the sea.

"Humans use these little babies to straighten their hair out." Scuttle gave us an example by taking the fork to the top of his feathered head. "Y'see, just a little twirl here, a yank there and voila!"

His head became a feathered mess. I held back from laughing.

"Ya got an aesthetically-pleasing configuration of hair that humans go nuts over!" Scuttle explained, handing the fork back to Ariel.

"I don't dispute that. We really do go nuts over our hair." I said softly to myself so no one could hear me.

"A dinglehopper," Ariel glanced at it in thought.

"What about that one?" Flounder asked, pointing to the smoking pipe.

"Ah, this I haven't seen in years. This is wonderful—-a banded bulbous Snarfblatt!" Scuttle examined it in excitement.

"Ohh!" Ariel, Flounder and I chorused in unison.

"Now the snarfblatt dates back to prehistorical times when humans used to sit around—" he got close to Ariel, eye to eye—"and stared at each other all day...got very boring."

I stared enraptured by this story. Again, of course I knew what the pipe was used for on land. I was again curious about Scuttle's view and the merworld's view of human stuff.

"So they invented this snarfblatt to make fine music—allow me," Scuttle concluded and blew into it. Right away, a plant came out.

"Music?!" Ariel's expression changed from curiosity to dread, and I wondered why, just as Scuttle was trying to get the "snarfblatt" to work.

"I-it's stuck!" Scuttle said.

"Oh, the concert! Oh my gosh, my father's gonna kill me!" Ariel blurted out as she grabbed the fork and put it back in her satchel.