Grace

In the finest restaurant in all the world, in the finest kitchen in all the world, sits the finest crab in all the- ok you get it. Anyway, he is sulking, and his name is oliver (small o). Oliver-Small-O is The Last Crab Standing. Alone he waits, a marked crustacean, for soon the finest chef in all the yada yada shall be sharpening his blades and cracking some shell. For tonight dines the King Of Malundra, the Richest Man in all the Land. A Man with a hankerin' for some crab-crunchering, there's only one dish on the menu tonight, and it sure will be special. But lo! look as our oliver stills and weeps, spills a tear salted tear from stalks and taints the freshwater with soft despair. For oliver is a father-to-be, and expectant she waits, about to give birth but so cruelly aparted. Long he remembers, if only he'd known, the day of the shadow, the shadow boat-shaped:

And oft he recalls what he knew not await
As he lay and eyed up his fate on that bait.
But now all he does is to spit and to curse,
To rue and reflect and regret his outburst.

For though as we speak the Prince does get hungry,
A stalk meets the eye of the chef Monsieur Mungry.

And fortune favours poor oliver's side, for just then a bolt from the sky just so happens to gift the small-o with powers of telepathy. He wiggles his stalks and communicates the following: PLEASE DON'T COOK ME MONSIEUR STOP I HAVE A FAMILY TO TAKE OF AND A YOUNG WIFE ABOUT TO GIVE BIRTH AS WE SPEAK STOP SO PLEASE STOP. This puzzles Chef Mungry who concedes he may have been a little rash.

And for the first time in his god-forsaken piteous life, a life lived in rags and filth, a life of pain inflicted, love rejected, blood shunning blood and rage deflected, a life spent fighting the ghosts of that failed marraige that boy who ran nose bleeding from those drunken blunted rages of an abusive father who never was around anyway and gambled away the family's food, goddamnit, for all that, our Chef, our goddamn Chef, like the behatted messiah that he is, reaches into that cold and broken water and lifts oliver out, i said lifts him out, by the shell, by the back of that cold and broken shell he lifts him out, and sets his feet upon the rock.

Swim little crabby friend! I say swim for your life
'fore I come chopping and wielding my knife!
I wish I had some more suitable words
but words i have not, so flee from the birds.

And with that he turns his back on our crab and returns to his kitchen where outside the prince is very ticked off.

Splosh goes oliver, back to the blue,
To never forget the chef saved his poo.