The Exchange

[Continuing the posts of 9-3, 9-30, 10-1, 10-2, and 10-3, with apologies for being so erratic in posting…]

“I have to write a song about it,” intoned Joe, in the key of A.

He started to play air guitar on the binoculars of the little old lady with the blue hair.

“Oh, I need persimmons to make plentiful pudding to pacify the pirates into placidity,” he lowly lilted.

“Kay Pasa, Uncle Joe,” said Clara.

“Is Kay on the ship, too?”

“Yes, and you’d better get going, because I think she’s getting tired of waiting for this to pasa.”

Just then, as happens so conveniently in stories, Chad and Mike came strolling along. Joe explained the disappearance of the whole of Periwinkle County.

“If it’s Claire Nathan in trouble, we have no choice,” said Mike. “Randall… well, who cares? But if it’s Claire, we’ve got to do a benefit concert to raise money for persimmon ransom.”

“You have to do it in Maggie Dishtowel’s place,” said Clara.

“You mean Mogadishu?” asked Mike.

“Whatever,” said Clara. “The place where the pirates live. But there are no persimmons there.”

“We’ll just have to work out an exchange,” said Joe.

So Chad and Joe and Mike and Paul and Bob and Ron went to Mogadishu and gave a benefit concert for the pirated Periwinklians. The pirates all agreed that it was great and that they would abide by the exchange.

Some were happy to give up the piratical life for persimmons, but others insisted on a different sort of exchange.

That is why there is now an agricultural mission of Periwinklians in Somalia teaching former pirates how to grow persimmons, and why there is a shipload of Somali pirates plying the Blue Bottom River in Periwinkle County.