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Fit Into Me: Book One, Fragment Twenty

Sitting alone in Vic’s Tavern, the tea house woman orders a drink, whiskey, one rock, recalling her mother’s valiant but futile fight against the intrusion of every new neighborhood bar and coffee shop that opened in Fenwick proper. It had been her mother’s desire to restore their family tea house to its former glory by upholding those longstanding moral standards of temperance, another, please, and modeling it after that most famous tea house, about which, in a 1905 special issue of Dekorative Kunst, Hermann Muthesius wrote: Today, any visitor to Glasgow can rest body and soul in Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms and for a few pence drink tea, have breakfast and dream that he is in fairy land. At last call, the tea house woman nods, one more, and watches while a stranger finishes a draft beer. The bar is overfull with out-of-towners home for the holidays, and the tea house woman asks the stranger to walk her home. The stranger does and the tea house woman invites the stranger in. The stranger’s name is Iris. In bed, the tea house woman strokes Iris’s hair and says, Hyacinth, Apollo’s lover, died from a discus to the head, though nobody ever said it was his due for being a homosexual. Instead he was immortalized in the form of a flower, though it was probably an iris, not a hyacinth.

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