Michael Malone - Weebly

Blossom) not only conversed easily with a grown
stranger, but sank easily into the leather seat of a foreign
car, as if nothing could be more customary, utterly
disregarding her mother's warning: never get into a car
with a stranger.
Deserted by Joy (friendship can hold no candle to
the flame of love), Polly returned to books. We bloom
at different times. Joy's recreational petals were open,
Polly's tightly bound in leaves. Polly's ideational
blossom had flowered, while Joy's was but a bud. The
spring of some is others' summer, and in winter a few
(like Beanie) may still fall.
All spring, off in the library, while the slowed sun
shadowed her chair, Polly had practiced the same faith
as that expressed by an earlier New England young
female: that for solo excursions a book is the best
frigate. And on that voluminous ocean of print Polly had
sailed, if not as far as Emily Dickinson, then at least all
the way to London, Paris, and Moscow. And she had
decided she preferred the people she met there to her
fellow Dingleyans. For her, the garbled gawking of even