Selected Short Stories of Ray Bradbury: All Summer in a Day

The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.

It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands.

They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall.

Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands.

Now the rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes.

She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair.

Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows.

And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn’t touch her head.

So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away.

There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands of dollars to her family.

And so, the children hated her for all these reasons of big and little consequence. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness, and her possible future.

"Well, don’t wait around here!" cried the boy savagely. "You won’t see nothing!"

"Oh, but," Margot whispered, her eyes helpless. "But this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they know, the sun…"

"All a joke!" said the boy, and seized her roughly. "Hey, everyone, let’s put her in a closet before the teacher comes!"

They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door.

It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a beautiful tropical slide which did not move or tremor.

The world ground to a standstill.

The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether.

It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large.

And the sky around it was a blazing blue tile color.

And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their spell, rushed out, yelling into the springtime.

They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, tumultuously, even as you watched it.

It was a nest of octopi, clustering up great arms of fleshlike weed, wavering, flowering in this brief spring.

The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them resilient and alive.

They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they squinted at the sun until the tears ran down their faces

they put their hands up to that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion.

They looked at everything and savored everything.

In the midst of their running one of the girls wailed.

They turned and started to walk back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles vanishing away.

A boom of thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumbled upon each other and ran.

Then they closed the door and heard the gigantic sound of the rain falling in tons and avalanches, everywhere and forever.

They glanced out at the world that was raining now and raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other’s glances.

Their faces were solemn and pale.