Pearl stepped off the boardwalk and onto the beach to collect shells. It was her Advent tradition to string them into a beautiful wreath and hang it on the front door of her pink bungalow. She always brought a pail and a camera, the latter in case she spotted something too big or messy to carry home. Rotting jellyfish and half-eaten pelicans were common examples. 

The moment Pearl’s bare foot hit the sand, the girl shook out her sun-bleached hair and surveyed the shore. She wandered around the beach facing the ground in pursuit of the best the shore had to offer. Scores of shells and stones littered the sand but few of them were well formed. Many of them were roughly chipped or only chips themselves. When Pearl sighted a gleaming black scallop shell, she pounced on it. Then she placed it in her pail and continued her search for the next natural treasure.

Hoping for a sand dollar or a mermaid’s purse, Pearl rolled up her faded jeans and drew closer to the sea. The scent of salt and fish washed over her body as she ambled into the wind. The breeze wiped drops of sweat off of her golden skin. Pearl dug around the sand with her toes, swishing them back and forth in the sea foam, before a scream stopped her. It was the shriek of someone in severe pain and anguish. Pearl bolted up and looked around. 

A second later, a mysterious something yards away caught her attention. It was to her right, also along the shore. At first, Pearl could not discern one figure from another. All she saw was the silhouette of a strange shape yet nothing explaining the shriek she had heard. Thinking it was a weird piece of driftwood or part of a small boat, the girl raced closer to the dark form. But instead of spying an addition to her ocean-themed wreath, Pearl spied something much more sinister: a jade serpent strangling a fledgling gull. 

Clouds of gray and white feathers billowed in the air. A few of them even smacked Pearl in the neck but not once did she take her eyes off of the dying gull. She could only stare helplessly. The gull writhed to and fro, frantically flapping its wings and snapping its beak, but the serpent refused to relent. It was determined to squeeze every last breath out of the bird. 

Pearl whipped out her camera and immediately turned it on. She started shooting picture after picture as the gull gagged and choked. At last the gull surrendered. Its neck flopped over the serpent’s middle, its eyes flat and glassy. Then the serpent began sucking the bird into its unhinged jaw, until nothing but the gull’s yellow feet hung out of the killer’s mouth. Pearl shivered as the bird’s body moved through the serpent’s belly in a giant lump. She lingered until the serpent slowly slinked into the dry beach weeds covering the nearby dunes. The weeds rustled as the serpent glided past them.

Now that the spectacle had ended, Pearl regained the feeling in her legs and sprinted to the safety of her home. She ran until she reached the front door, threw her mostly empty pail on the porch, and slammed the door behind her. Not a moment later, she was hooking her camera up to her archaic computer. The girl wanted to inspect every square inch of her photographs.

Pearl tapped her long, unpainted nails against the desk as she waited for the photos to upload. With every passing second, she grew more impatient. She was so anxious, as anxious as a culprit. Finally the photos appeared on her computer screen and she began to scroll through them. Pearl started to relive the horror of witnessing the gull’s death. The bird’s shrieking hit her ears so loudly that she pushed her camera off of her desk in an effort to escape the morbid sound. The sound disappeared but her camera had broken in two. 

“Fuck,” she whispered. Pearl nudged one part of the camera with her foot but left the pieces there on the floor. She lamented the loss for a moment and then turned back to the computer screen to complete her task.

Pearl began posting the photos all over the Internet, on any website she had a personal account and then on several forums. Within minutes, the world could recoil at the sight of the murdering serpent and the struggling gull. Then she started printing out the photos. Her printer whirred and then spat out one copy of each of the photos until Pearl had a thick stack of them. She ran to her kitchen and put one on the refrigerator. She hung it up using a plastic ABC magnet leftover from her kindergarten days. Her parents must see what she had seen.

Soon afterwards, Pearl dragged a table outside to her front yard. She laid the stack of photos on one end of the table and a change box on the other. As her neighbors walked by with their children or dogs or arm-weights, Pearl shouted her price at them. Few people actually purchased the photos but certainly everyone who passed by stared at the image taped to the front of the table. It was too gruesome to ignore.

After serving several hours as an impromptu vendor, Pearl retired to her house. She waited for her parents to come home and then sat down to dinner, where she told her tale of the gull’s doom.

Pearl had just finished her story and was slurping through her heap of spaghetti when her father put down his fork. “You took photos?” he asked, incredulously.

“Well…yeah, Dad. I mean…I had my camera…”

“Why didn’t you try to save the gull? Throw a rock at the serpent, maybe a stick?”

“David, listen to yourself!” Pearl’s mother interrupted. “Why would she do that? Put herself in danger like that?”

“Okay, but she didn’t have to take pictures of it. And sell them, nonetheless.”

No one replied. Pearl’s mother cleared her throat and twirled another bite of spaghetti for herself. The smell of pepper and tomato sauce did the rest of the talking for the evening.

Before getting into bed that night, Pearl shook out her sheets. She normally did so to check for insects that may have crept into her linens during the day. But this time she didn’t find any ants, crickets, or roaches. She shook the sheets and heard something like the sound of a rain stick. Her eyes fell to floor. Scales---coarse and bright green---were scattered across the hardwood. Pearl picked one up and rubbed it between her fingers. It looked exactly like one of the scales from the serpent that strangled the gull. Pearl shuddered. Then she shook out her sheets again until not a single scale remained on her bed. She crawled under her covers and fell asleep.

The next morning, after Pearl’s parents left for work, she puttered around the house, wishing her friends were free during winter break. Eventually she decided to complete the list of chores her mother left for her. She began dusting a vase in the living room when she thought to look in it. Something was layered at the bottom. Pearl gently waved the vase back and forth and heard the sound of clinking beads. She turned the vase upside down only to discover a shower of scales pour onto the floor. They were the same bright green ones she had encountered in her bed the night before.

Pearl started rummaging throughout the whole house, wondering where else she would find the scales. A brief survey revealed that the scales were everywhere. They overflowed from the shower, the kitchen sink, the cabinets, even the toilet. Pearl screamed and fainted on the bathroom tiles.

Pearl woke up to her mother’s fading hysteria.

“Pearl…Pearl, darling…open your eyes, please. Please.”

The woman fanned her daughter’s face with her hand until Pearl blinked. Her eyelids fluttered and gradually opened all the way, like an old camera shutter.

“Oh, thank God! Can you hear me? Pearl, say something!”

“M-mom…?”

“Pearl!” She threw her arms around her daughter and smiled. She nuzzled and said, “Listen---the neighbors heard you scream so they called me at work. They couldn’t get in the door. What’s the matter? What happened?”

“I…I saw scales.”

“Scales?”

“Serpent scales, the same color as the serpent I saw on the beach.”

“Here in the house?”

Pearl nodded wearily. 

“Show me.” The woman helped her daughter stand up and then demanded that they survey the house. But after darting in and out of every room, overturning pillows, books, and anything else they came across, they saw no evidence of a serpent.

Tired, mother and daughter plopped down on the living room sofa. 

“Believe me, Mom,” Pearl insisted, “I really saw them…the scales…”

Pearl’s mother sighed, “Please, just go to sleep, Pearl. You need to rest.”

Pearl did as her mother instructed but she hardly slept peacefully. All night, the sight of serpents---big, green, and menacing---plagued her mind.

When Pearl rose the next evening, she stared at the clock. She had lied in bed for nearly eighteen hours. The girl shot up and went to the bathroom to splash some water on her cheeks.  Then she popped into the kitchen, where her father stirred chili. Pearl’s father greeted her and served her a small bowl of chili.

“I hope it’s not too peppery,” he said. That constituted their conversation for the rest of the night. Everyone ate in quietly and in slow motion, like the most primitive of silent films. No one had the courage to discuss Pearl’s “incident,” as it was later termed.

Dinner exhausted Pearl and she headed to the bathroom immediately after finishing her meal. She wanted to brush her teeth and go to bed. She quickly glided over her teeth with her toothbrush and peppermint toothpaste, rinsed her mouth out with water, and left for her room. 

But instead of seeing a welcoming bed, Pearl confronted a coiled serpent. 

The serpent was about two or three feet long, much smaller than the one she witnessed slaying the gull but it was the same startling shade of green. Its eyes glowed in the dimly lit room. Afraid that the serpent would not be visible to her parents, much like the scales, Pearl seized the long desk lamp from her night table and pummeled the animal with the metal stem. Over and over, she struck the serpent until it was bloody and limp. Then Pearl wrapped the reptile up in her sheets and scampered to the bathroom, where she flushed the chunks of scales and innards down the toilet. 

The girl slept on the floor that night. She whorled herself up and nibbled the tips of her hair until she drifted off into a world full of serpents and gulls.

For the next couple of days, Pearl huddled up in the library or scoured the local supermarket for free samples of bread and cheese. Sometimes she headed to the mall and collected card after card of perfume testers. She wanted to avoid spending time at home or the beach. But at the end of the week, Pearl cast off her paranoia and decided there was no harm in returning to the beach. She was feeling particularly bold.

“I have to finish my Christmas wreath,” she muttered to herself that Friday morning. She hugged her knees as she sat on the front steps of the county library, a bunch of pamphlets and flyers at her feet. Pearl stood up and pulled an empty plastic grocery bag out of her pocket. Then she began walking toward the sandy shores she had known her whole life.

Pearl’s skinny legs bounded forward, almost as if they were separate from her body, beyond her corporeal control. Her eyes were blank, her mouth expressionless. But the girl was determined.

Once Pearl reached the beach, she flapped open her bag and picked through the sand. As usual, her first attempts yielded nothing but far-from-perfect shells. Mostly she found cracked mussel shells, thanks to hungry gulls that threw them from great distances above the ground to break them and suck out their squishy meat. Pearl shrugged her shoulders and gradually moved closer to the ocean, where prettier, fresher shells more likely resided.

As soon as Pearl met the border between land and sea, a magnificent oyster shell winked at her. It was beautiful. She snatched it up and eagerly searched for more. She needed about twenty of that size to make her wreath. Only a few feet away lied another oyster shell. But before Pearl could grab it, something snagged her ankle. She tripped and fell to the ground, face-first into the sand, pebbles, and shells. Her nose shattered and blood gushed all over her cheeks and lips. 

Pearl moaned. She desperately tried to bend to her neck to see what had caught her but she felt too weak. Around her sixth try, she finally mustered the strength to turn around. Then she glimpsed a stream of bright green scales sliding up her leg. Pearl’s head fell forward. She cried yet nobody heard her but the serpent constricting her slender frame. It pulled her farther and farther from the shore until the beach was nothing but a sliver of gold on the horizon. Soon the serpent started to pull Pearl down into the water and as she resisted, the exclamations of a dozen gulls pierced her ears.

She looked up and gasped the last breath of air left in her lungs. Pearl’s final view of the world showed thirteen brilliant white gulls cackling at her from the blackening sky. And every single one of them had a camera slung around their thick necks. Each gull took picture after picture until the girl disappeared beneath the water, never to resurface.