The Little Friend

“Yodel-ay-hee-hoo,” he said to himself, very softly, beneath his breath.

Violently, she sneezed.

Show me in the Bible where it say chunk bricks at your neighbor. Hmn? Look all day and you aint going to find it because it aint there.”

and yet try to give Harriet’s mice away to filthy little strangers?

She sat down again. Echoes, black bells.

“The black spot is in Treasure Island,” said Harriet. “That’s what the pirates gave you when they were coming to kill you, just a blank piece of paper with a black spot on it.”

For a while, her agitation even felt like fun. But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t quite forget that nobody cared if she was having fun or not

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we,” said Edie. “Just the other day I read something Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams when he was an old man, that most of the things he’d worried about in his life never came to pass. ‘How much pain have cost us the evils that never happened.’

“It’s awful being a child,” she said, simply, “at the mercy of other people.”

Like a nasty hang-over, the vapors of the dream still pressed in on him low and poisonous.