Pretty Maids

She awoke this morning feeling especially contrary

She was quite often PO’d, a genetic thingy, but today she was seething.

It was getting nearly impossible to count the money she’d poured into fertilizers!

Getting pretty bells and cockle shells to grow was no easy thing, let alone having pretty maids all in a row to actually stand still.

They seemed never satisfied with their hair, lipstick color, skirt length, etc., and their various boyfriends kept interfering!

 

She thought back to her last boyfriend, how she had given him her heart, but in spite of that, he eventually became so fed up with the constant buildup of fertilizer and garden soil beneath her fingernails, that he had just unceremoniously dumped her!!!

They were all the same.

No concern at all about breaking a girl’s heart!

Bloody boyfriends!

Curse them all!

Too frustrating!

Any gardener would be contrary!

 

However, in spite of it all, today was the day.

She’d had a load of cow manure and a case of Miracle-Gro delivered yesterday and it was now or never.

As she was busting her butt, hand spreading it all, her neighbor, a botanist came by.

When he saw what she was doing he had to stifle a laugh.

 

Quickly explaining himself, he told her bells were made of copper and her cockle shells were the remnants of dead mollusks.

The pretty maids all in a row, along with their boyfriends, couldn’t stop laughing.

Mary broke down in tears!

Her reputation was shattered.

 

Her garden shop became increasingly visited less and less, until it became nothing more than a wind-blown, dust bowl!

It seemed she also vanished from sight, but in fact she became a ragged, homeless, vagabond travelling endless filthy, disease laden, back alleys of old London town.

This was her life, until by chance, she was found, barely recognizable, by one of the few pretty maids who had always respectfully stood in a row.

If she hadn’t noticed the tattered remnants of the old garden shop crest on Mary’s filthy, dreg of clothing, she too would have just passed by.

 

However, fate had the pretty maid run to Mary, take her face in her hand and explain that her effort’s had finally succeeded!

In spite of the impossibility of it, her pretty bells and cockle shells had exploded in growth, the pretty maids all in a row assembled each day for precisely one hour of growth and folks from all round continually streamed by to purchase these rarities!

 

Although the garden shop has since become one of England’s greatest success stories, questions still go unanswered in regard to just what Jack Horner was actually eating in that particular corner.