Happily Ever After

Modern romance, gift shop encounters, and an underwater music video shoot

Danielle Evans
Gay Mag
Published in
11 min readApr 17, 2018

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WWhen Lyssa was seven, her mother took her to see the movie where the mermaid wants legs. At the ending, she shook her head and squinted at the prince and said, “Why would she leave her family for that?” which for years contributed to the prevailing belief that Lyssa was sentimental or softhearted, when in fact she just knew a bad trade when she saw one. The whole ocean for one man. Not that she knew much about the ocean: Lyssa had been born in a landlocked state, and at 30, it seemed the closest approximation she might get was her job working the gift shop in the lobby of the Titanic. It was not a metaphor: It was an actual replica of the Titanic, with a mini-museum on the lower level, though it made most of its money off weddings and children’s birthday parties hosted on the upper decks.

A second-tier pop star had rented the whole structure for a music video shoot, which would shut down normal operations for three full days. Lyssa had been planning on the time off, but when the video’s director came to finalize the plans for the space, he stopped in front of the shop glass, stared for a minute, walked in, and said, “You — you’re perfect.”

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Gay Mag
Gay Mag

Published in Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

Danielle Evans
Danielle Evans

Written by Danielle Evans

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. She teaches creative writing at UW-Madison.