Free Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury Page B

Grandma to her mother.
    They all laughed. The dust storm puffed up about them. Their laughing became choked.
    Showers of lint, tides of sand, golden flakes of pipe tobacco fluttered, shivered on the exploded and re-exploded air. Pausing, the boys saw the tread of their shoes and the older people's shoes pressed a billion times in the warp and woof of this rug, now to be smoothed clean as the tide of their beating swept again and again along the oriental shore.
    "There's where your husband spilled that coffee!" Grandma gave the rug a blow.
    "Here's where you dropped the cream!" Great-grandma whacked up a great twister of dust.
    "Look at the scuff marks. Boys, boys!"
    "Double-Grandma, here's the ink from your pen!"
    "Pshaw! Mine was purple ink. That's common blue!"
    Bang!
    "Look at the path worn from the hall door here to the kitchen door. Food. That's what brings the lions to the water hole. Let's shift it, put it back the other way around."
    "Better yet, lock the men out of the house."
    "Make them leave their shoes outside the door."
    Bang, bang!
    They hung the rugs on the wash line now, to finish the job. Tom looked at the intricate scrolls and loops, the flowers, the mysterious figures, the shuttling patterns.
    "Tom, don't stand there. Strike, boy!"
    "It's fun, seeing things," said Tom.
    Douglas glanced up suspiciously. "What do you see?" "The whole dam town, people, houses, here's our house!" Bang! "Our street!" Bang! "That black part there's the ravine!" Bang! "There's school!" Bang! "This funny cartoon here's you, Doug!" Bang! "Here's Great-grandma, Grandma, Mom." Bang! "How many years this rug been down?"
    "Fifteen."
    "Fifteen years of people stomping across it; I see every shoe print," gasped Tom.
    "Land, boy, you got a tongue," said Great-grandma.
    "I see all the things happened in that house in all those years right here!" Bang! "All the past, sure, but I can see the future, too. Just squinch up my eyes and peek around at the patterns, there, to see where we'll be walking, running around, tomorrow."
    Douglas stopped swinging the beater. "What else you see in the rug?"
    "Threads mostly," said Great-grandma. "Not much left but the underskin. See how the manufacturer wove the thing."
    "Right!" said Tom mysteriously. "Threads one way, threads another. I see it all. Dire fiends. Deadly sinners. There's bad weather, there's good. Picnics. Banquets. Strawberry festivals." He tapped the beater from place to place portentously.
    "That's some boardinghouse you got me running," said Grandma, glowing with exertion.
    "It's all there, fuzzylike. Hold your head on one side, Doug, get one eye almost shut. It's better at night, of course, inside, the rug on the floor, lamplight and all. Then you get shadows all shapes, light and dark, and watch the threads running off, feel the nap, run your hand around on the fur. Smells just like a desert, I bet. All hot and sandy, like inside a mummy case, maybe. Look, that red spot, that's the Happiness Machine burning up!"
    "Catsup from somebody's sandwich, no doubt," said Mom.
    "No, Happiness Machine," said Douglas, and was sad to see it burning there. He had been counting on Leo Auffmann to keep things in order, keep everybody smiling, keep the small gyroscope he often felt inside himself tilting toward the sun every time the earth tilted toward outer space and darkness. But no, there was Auffmann's folly, ashes and cinders. Bang! Bang! Douglas struck.
    "Look, there's the green electric runabout! Miss Fern! Miss Roberta!" said Tom. "Honk, Honk!" Bang!
    They all laughed.
    "There's your life-strings, Doug, running along in knots. Too many sour apples. Pickles at bedtime!"
    "Which one, where?" cried Douglas, peering.
    "This one, one year from now, this one, two years from now, and this one, three, four, five years from now!"
    Bang! The wire beater hissed like a snake in the blind sky.
    "And one to grow on!" said Tom.
    He hit the rug so hard all the dust of five thousand centuries jumped from the