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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Little Big - at the Junipers

"The kitchen was papered with baskets of impossibly luscious fruit, blue grapes and russet apples and cleft peaches that protruded like bottoms from the harvest. Marge moved dish after steaming dish from stove to oilcloth, and when it was all consumed, Jeff poured out banana liqueur into tiny ruby glasses. That did it; all his polite remonstrance with their hospitality vanished, and marge "did up the davenport" and Smoky was put to bed wrapped up in an earth-brown Indian blanket.
  For a moment after the Junipers had left him, he lay awake looking around the room. It was lit only by a night-light in the shape of a tiny rose-covered cottage. By its light he saw Jeff's maple chair, the kind whose orange paddle arms always looked tasty to him, like glossy hard candy. He saw the ruffled curtains move in the rose-odorous breeze. He listened to the dust-mop dog sigh in his dreams. He found another sampler. This one said, he thought but could not be sure:

The Things that Make us Happy
Make us Wise

He slept."

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