The first time I saw her, my best friend Otter told me "she sells seashells by the seashore". But Otter oughtta told me more on her. To begin with shelling and selling the shellfish fed her only when and if she could find and finish a few dozen a day or better. Most months this meant diving all day and kniving all night - every evening spent with wet seaweed spread across the sand floor infront of her shack's door, the dull blade of her father's bayonet prying open the cracks of every clam, spilling oily oysters into the palm of her hand and dropping every paltry prawn to the sand. Of course many were the months she came up short on mussel-shell medallions, though her fingers were left knotted by kniving and her auburn hair bleached blonde by brine after every day spent diving.

For a time she assisted Silly Sally in shooing her seven silly sheep. Said she to Silly Sally as they shilly-shallied South, "These sheep shouldn't sleep in a shack, sheep should sleep in a shed". And over their argument over whether sheep should sleep in a shack or in a shed, Silly Sally got it in her head to find a new assistant, one not so threateningly well-read. And so with the arrival of six short, slow shepherds, our seashell-selling seductress was left looking for a new occupation by which to barter her bread. And it was by this need that she was led, not to me but instead to the palace on the hill behind the crik, where work she will as nursmaid to the sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep, who was sick.

Of course rumors ran rampant regarding her relationship with the sixth sick sheik and her occupation with her patron's oldest ovine and its monthly malignant malady. But the beauty of the barrows and the unblemished beaches belie the dispositions of our burro-headed denizens. Since our town's inception, our citizenry shows a certain tendency towards a certain sort of crudity, that being the sort that flows. First there was the fig plucker, who was not the fig plucker but the fig plucker's son and who's only plucking figs til the fig plucker comes. Not to mention the pheasant fluffer, who was not the pheasant fluffer nor the pheasant fluffer's mate and who's only fluffing pheasants cause the pheasant fluffer's late. Together they'd all gossip on our seashell-seller's fate. They'd say of her "She slit the sheet. The sheet she slit, and on the slitted sheet she'll sit". And all their talk of a slitted sheet with the sixth sick sheik made me sick as his sheep and I shouted my grief so they banished me deep to the slums on the heath. And within those withered and woodless wards on the heath I would watch the clouds come and fill up the creeks, and wither I wandered there was nowhere to sleep for the withering water left everyone's shacks unshucked on the heath.

And when I heard from my best friend Otter that the rivers were overrunning and that Otter's buddy beaver had drowned with his dam, I knew the rains would take our town and knock a few of our houses down. I tried to warn them about the water, but the gate ward warned me that I was unwelcome and I oughtta stick to the company of Otter. And so the storm went unchecked, and her shack, filled with shellfish unshucked, was left to lie on the beach unchucked. And since she couldn't stay with the Sheik unplucked, now she spends her nights at Peter Piper's. Piper a pernicious and pusillanimous purveyor of purgatives and potables; purportedly a potioner, probably a pusher and possibly a pimp, Piper is perpetually picking at a peck of pickled peppers. While I, in place of pursuit, ponder her plight and ply my tooth to its root, prying and praying perchance to recruit a place in her presence as a leaf on the shoot.

Would that I could, to reshuck her shack or do any such good. I would chuck all the wood that a woodchuck could. If a woodchuck could chuck wood.