Ethel Mermaid

They found her off the coast of Rehoboth Beach, tangled up in a couple of crab traps. So fair, so beautiful. Her voice stirred the hearts and loins of all wayward sailors. They would take her back to Eta Pi that evening. God, this was the stuff that legends were made of - mermaids, singing, absence of Puritanical morals, stupid as a pencil, no cumbersome lingerie - slithery.

But there was one caveat. Without a constant supply of plankton, Lorelei got cranky. Real cranky. She wasn't adverse to revelling in a drunken bacchanal, but she knew couldn't subsist on a diet of cheesy bread and ranch dressing, either.

With a mighty roar summoning the great Triton, causing the seas to swell and the waves to lap faster along the Delaware shoreline, she swiped the chumps with a swish of her barbed tail, injuring them in the process, and flippity flop, back into the grey Atlantic she went.