- The world is my oyster: A badly written story -

On the bottom of the seabed there lived an oyster. He was a bright, spritely little oyster, the kind whose definition of a glorious death would be to land himself a spot as hors d'oeuvres on a connoisseur's dinner menu.

Oyster got along well with everyone in the ocean, from the barnacles clinging to the pier to the eels slithering through the caves; he counted among his best friends a tortoise, a starfish, a tuna and the corals.

One day something the reefs had done irked Oyster significantly; he wasn't coralling with them, but it was all causing him much distress. He tried not to think about it, but the more he kept it all to himself, the more he felt like a bloated puffer fish. And so at the risk of being called a wimpy shrimp, he decided to tell his friends.

First, he turned to Tortoise, but then he saw that she was already carrying tons of those pesky barnacles on her back, and he decided against weighing her down further. He went in search of Starfish, but when he found him, he remembered that Starfish had just lost a limb and was busy growing it back -- and learning about Oyster's problem would only impede his recovery. So then he thought he could seek solace in Tuna, but she was nowhere to be found. Much later, he learnt from a mutual salmon friend that Tuna had learnt a new route for the Great Transatlantic Migration in the winter, and was busy fine-Tuning it. And for obvious reasons he couldn't turn to the coral reefs.

Only then did it dawn upon him that all his friends had their own problems, and although he was more than happy to listen to them and see what he could do to help, beleaguering them with his little problem just didn't seem fair. And so Oyster decided to clam up, and from then on, in an effort to prevent his problems from becoming those of some other marine animal, he kept some things to himself, and eventually began shrinking further and further into his shell, which, with time, began to cast a shadow on his form.

The other fish noticed that he had become a little more cynical and recondite, and urged him to make them privy to his inner thoughts. But not wishing to affect their moods in any way, he didn't; for this he was even labelled "shellfish" by a diving bird he later befriended - but although it did dampen his spirits considerably, he figured he could live with that.