Dangerous People

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NOBODY KNOWS WHY the house named Hardcinder stands by itself on a rise of slaggy basalt, inside the curve of the other houses of that arm of the town.[1] Maybe at some time they enlarged the common place of Telina[2] but left the old house standing the way it does, sticking out into the common; or maybe some hard-headed people built the house there on the common because they wanted a foundation of rock. Nobody knows now. What happened a long time ago, or even not long ago at all, even what happens now, is a matter of memories and inventions and mostly has to be taken on somebody’s word.

So I give you my word:[3] a good many years ago[4] a family[5] was living upstairs in Hardcinder House, in the five southeast rooms with the deep balcony that goes around the corner of the house. The railing of the balcony is carved with grape stakes and grape vines and goats kneeling and standing up to eat the grapes. The children who grew up there knew each wooden goat, the grinning billy, the staring kid, the dancing nanny with her tongue sticking out, the lopsided goat missing one horn, cracked off maybe by some other child playing there some other time. A little girl[6] who lived in that household thought the grinning goat kept his mouth open because he was hungry for the wooden grapes that hung just out of his reach, so she put wild oats and parsley in his wooden mouth. Later on, her little son found the fat flank of the dancing nanny a place of comfort to lean on when he needed comforting, and soon after that, her little daughter tried hard to break the one horn off the one-horned goat so it would come out even, but she couldn’t do it. A few years later there was a second daughter waving her legs and reaching her arms out to the goats and the grapes.

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