"Smush! Smush! You'll never believe it!" Mogey exclaimed, bursting into his pal's study.
"Mmyes?" Smush replied, peering over the tops of his spectacles.
Mogey's breathlessness caught up to him - he held up a hand in a plea for time. Smush waited for his doubled-over pal to recover. A minute passed. Two. Smush returned to his book. He read one paragraph. Two.
"Someone... finally... wants to see it!" Mogey gasped at last.
"See wha-- YOU MEAN THE BALL?" Smush leapt from his chair. His spectacles collided with a taxidermied alligator and shattered into hundreds of pieces, but he paid them no mind. "We have a paying customer for the World's Largest Gumball?"
Mogey and Smush led the impatient family of tourists - who had been waiting, as you may recall, for at least two minutes plus two paragraphs - out to the barn. With obvious pride, Smush yanked on the curtain pull to reveal their roadside attraction to its first ever visitors.
"What's wrong?" Mogey asked, seeing the obvious dismay on the faces of their guests.
"Um," began the tourist dad uncertainly, "when we saw your billboards we were imagining something a bit less... chewed-on."
"Well you've got to chew the gum or it won't stick together, see?" Smush demonstrated by spitting out the slice of gum he was chewing and adding it to the thousands of other little wads that made up the beach ball-sized sphere.
"But a gumball is its own thing," declared the tourist mom. "You know, like from one of those big gumball machines. It's not a ball of used pieces of gum."
"This is better than anything you'd find in an old gumball machine," Mogey assured her. "Tell you what: how'd you like to add your very own pieces of gum? You can be part of history! Fruit Stripe or Hubba Bubba?"
The tourist children looked intrigued, but the tourist dad held them back. "I'm not sure..." he began.
"Oh you've got to add some gum to the ball!" Smush entreated. "Then we'll do commemorative photos. And you really must stop by our gift shop."
One look at the gift shop's World's Largest Gumball earrings, whose packaging proclaimed Made With Genuine Pre-masticated Gum, was enough for the tourist parents to grab their tourist children by the elbows and hustle out of that barn faster than a baby's foot finds the inside of a dirty diaper.
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