“No, we decided we wouldn’t carry cigarettes; since they’ve been linked, rather authoritatively, to cancer of the lung, we thought it wouldn’t be exactly in the best of taste to sell them—being a neighborhood grocery, I mean to say.”
“Uh-huh, well—listen, I’m just going home for a minute now to get a sack, or a ... trunk, or maybe a truck ... I’ll be right back ...”
Somehow the word spread through the neighborhood and in two hours the store was clean as a whistle.
The next day, a sign was on the empty store:
MOVED TO NEW LOCATION
And that evening, in another part of town, the same thing occurred—followed again by a quick change of location. The people who had experienced the phenomenon began to spend a good deal of their time each evening looking for the new location. And occasionally now, two such people meet—one who was at the big Get-Acquainted on West 4th Street, for example, and the other at the one on 139th—and so, presumably, they surmise not only that it wasn’t a dream, but that it’s still going on.
And some say it does, in fact, still go on—they say it accounts for the strange searching haste which can be seen in the faces, and especially the eyes, of people in the cities, every evening, just about the time now it starts really getting dark.
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