The One Who Waits. Your analysis of the story, the best one will be duly awarded and placed here.
The first contestant is from Estonia. The second contestant is from Moscow. Ray Bradbury I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Now it is morning. Voices. "All right! " One voice. The Veldt. A Sound of Thunder. The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water.
Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness: Warm phlegm gathered in Eckels' throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind the desk.
"Does this safari guarantee I come back alive? " The Pedestrian. The Last Night of the World. Originally published in the February 1951 issue of Esquire "What would you do if you knew this was the last night of the world?
" "What would I do; you mean, seriously? " "Yes, seriously. " "I don't know — I hadn't thought. She turned the handle of the silver coffeepot toward him and placed the two cups in their saucers. He poured some coffee. "Well, better start thinking about it," he said. "You don't mean it? " He nodded. August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains. The Illustrated Man. The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair.
He called her Stanley, she called him Ollie.
That was the beginning, that was the end, of what we will call the Laurel and Hardy love affair. She was twenty-five, he was thirty-two when they met at one of those dumb cocktail parties where everyone wonders what they are doing there. But no one goes home, so everyone drinks too much and lies about how grand a late afternoon it all was. They did not, as often happens, see each other across a crowded room, and if there was romantic music to background their collision, it couldn’t be heard. For everyone was talking at one person and staring at someone else. They were, in fact, ricocheting through a forest of people, but finding no shade trees. “Stan!” “Ollie!” “Why don’t you do something to help me!” They grabbed each others arms, laughing again. “I-” She said, and her face brightened even more.
“Well,” he cried, “let’s get out of here!” His car door slammed, his car engine roared. Los Angeles raced by in late afternoon sunlight. “Hold it!” “And?” Embroidery. Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit 451 Teacher's Guide. Fahrenheit 451 Reader's Guide. The Drummer Boy of Shiloh. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. The Lake. The Dog In The Red Bandana. In memory of the master storyteller, who died yesterday, we thought we’d repost this absolute must-must-must-read short story, which was written… two years ago when he was 89.
The April Witch. Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy.
Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a limegreen frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth. It's spring, thought Cecy. Now she inhabited neat crickets on the tar-pool roads, now prickled in dew on an iron gate. "I want to be in love," she said. She had said it at supper. But in her high bedroom, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the colour of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum.
"Yes," she sighed. "What? " The Gift. The Gift by Ray Bradbury Tomorrow would be Christmas, and even while the three of them rode to the rocket port the mother and father were worried.
It was the boy's first flight into space, his very first time in a rocket, and they wanted everything to be perfect. So when, at the customs table, they were forced to leave behind his gift, which exceeded the weight limit by no more than a few ounces, and the little tree with the lovely white candles, they felt themselves deprived of the season and their love. The boy was waiting for them in the terminal room. "What shall we do? " "Nothing, nothing. "Silly rules! " The Rocket Man. The October Game. The Small Assassin. Just when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell.
There had been little subtle signs, little suspicions for the past month; things as deep as sea tides in her, like looking at a perfectly calm stretch of tropic water, wanting to bathe in it and finding, just as the tide takes your body, that monsters dwell just under the surface, things unseen, bloated, many-armed, sharp-finned, malignant and inescapable. A room floated around her in an effiuvium of hysteria. Sharp instruments hovered and there were voices, and people in sterile white masks. The Happiness Machine. All Summer in a Day. A Story of Love. Undefined Ray Bradbury That was the week Ann Taylor came to teach summer school at Green Town Central.
It was the summer of her twenty-fourth birthday, and it was the summer when Bob Spaulding was just fourteen. Everyone remembered Ann Taylor, for she was that teacher for whom all the children wanted to bring huge oranges or pink flowers, and for whom they rolled up the rustling green and yellow maps of the world without being asked. She was that woman who always seemed to be passing by on days when the shade was green under the tunnels of oaks and elms in the old town, her face shifting with the bright shadows as she walked, until it was all things to all people.
As for Bob Spaulding, he was the cousin who walked alone through town on any October evening with a pack of leaves after him like a horde of Hallowe'en mice, or you would see him, like a slow white fish in spring in the tart waters of the Fox Hill Creek, baking brown with the shine of a chestnut to his face by autumn. "Yes.