American cartoonist and intellectual humorist James Thurber was born in 1894, which loosely gives him a Victorian connection. Other than that, The Night the Bed Fell is a real-life-based story that anyone who lives in a house full of characters will immediately understand.
The story opens with the father of the family announcing he is sleeping in an old bed in the attic so he can think. The mother protests, convinced the bed will collapse and kill him. The family includes a number of eccentric personalities, including a cousin who fears he will stop breathing in his sleep and two aunts who just know they are being robbed each night (One piles her belongings outside her door, and the other gathers her shoes at her bedside and flings at the first sound).
A glimpse inside my house will reveal my husband who is kind and curmudgeonly by turns, me who rarely comes out of the attic, and a series of adult or nearly adult children who are nearly identical in appearance, but quite different and often clashing in personalities.
Included in this mix are six cats: Frances, a loner; Midnight, petite, skittish, and sweet; Faith, who has a nervous, teeth-grinding tic; Hope, an instigator; Charity, who has two fetishes: playing in water and chewing slender electrical cords; and Alex, who tags at your heels and cries to be picked up.
Our bed has never fallen, but in the next room, Faith just ran over Timothy (who WAS sleeping) and then jumped up onto a shelf and knocked a box on him. He flew out of bed, threatening evil things to her, should he catch her.
He won't, of course, but I wouldn't put it past her to flick water from her bowl on him the second he falls asleep.
The Night the Bed Fell is available for free reading online.
The story opens with the father of the family announcing he is sleeping in an old bed in the attic so he can think. The mother protests, convinced the bed will collapse and kill him. The family includes a number of eccentric personalities, including a cousin who fears he will stop breathing in his sleep and two aunts who just know they are being robbed each night (One piles her belongings outside her door, and the other gathers her shoes at her bedside and flings at the first sound).
A glimpse inside my house will reveal my husband who is kind and curmudgeonly by turns, me who rarely comes out of the attic, and a series of adult or nearly adult children who are nearly identical in appearance, but quite different and often clashing in personalities.
Included in this mix are six cats: Frances, a loner; Midnight, petite, skittish, and sweet; Faith, who has a nervous, teeth-grinding tic; Hope, an instigator; Charity, who has two fetishes: playing in water and chewing slender electrical cords; and Alex, who tags at your heels and cries to be picked up.
Our bed has never fallen, but in the next room, Faith just ran over Timothy (who WAS sleeping) and then jumped up onto a shelf and knocked a box on him. He flew out of bed, threatening evil things to her, should he catch her.
He won't, of course, but I wouldn't put it past her to flick water from her bowl on him the second he falls asleep.
The Night the Bed Fell is available for free reading online.
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