Selling the Mini-Dolphins
Ryan Dilbert

My brother figured out a way to breed mini-dolphins. He called them dwarfins. They were so small they could swim in a glass of scotch.

“Everyone loves dolphins,” he said.

People could buy them and put them in their toddler’s bath, much to their child’s delight. They could put them in fish bowls or even a pair of glass earrings filled with water. At least that was the theory.

Very few people bought a dwarfin. They were embarrassingly expensive, for one thing, and secondly they just creeped people out. That small, dolphins were no longer majestic. Sure, they were cute enough to make you dizzy, but they also resembled tapeworms. If people ever swam with the mini-dolphins, they spent the whole time terrified that one of the dwarfins would wiggle right up one of their orifices.

But I had found a seller for the Dolphinitos (that was the working name for a while) in Japan. The company wanted to buy all the dolphins, the rights, the recipe, everything. My bro would be stoked by the numbers on the check, but I had to also inform him that the Japanese wanted to grind up the cute little dwarfins into a paste. It would be used as an add-in for stir-fry.

Apparently, the mini-dolphin meat is exquisite.

When I told my brother, he did his best not to cry, but the tears tiptoed down his face. The dwarfins were his babies. I’ve seen him kneel at the edge of his breeding pool, dip his face in, and kiss any of them that swim near the surface.

But he knew that his business has failed. He was running out of money and at heart he is a businessman.

“It is a great deal,” he tried to convince himself.

Before he signed the paperwork, he climbed into his pool fully dressed. His cream suit turned the brown of bread crust. He spread his arms out and made a slow hugging motion in the water. He embraced about a thousand of them at one time. I couldn’t hear what he was whispering to them, the clicks of the thousands of tiny dolphins gluing together and filling the room.

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