Shells of anomiidae, also called mermaid’s toenails, jingle shells, saddle oysters. Lovely, paper-thin, luminescent treasures, they washed up in great quantities on the beach at the end of Annawamscutt Road. I went and collected hundreds of them whenever the tide was out, poured them into jelly jars, and gave them to friends who lived far from the ocean. I was always curious about why they all looked so different, and then I found out their shapes are determined by the shape of the object they grow on. They are the negative cast of whatever is on the seafloor, a random collection of what happens to be down there — rocks, other shells, sunken timbers, old moorings. Thus the alpha privative, the starting “a-” to indicate negation, or absence, of “nomos,” law. There is no law to this order of creature. It forms itself to the world, wrapped around its surround. Cut it loose from that context, and you have anomie, as Emile Durkheim once taught us, so very long ago.