Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

‘You’re saving cocoons.’ That’s what he’d say. ‘Corsets, in a way, you can never fit again. So why save them? You can’t really prove you were ever young. Pictures? No, they lie. You’re not the picture.’

‘Affidavits?’

‘No, my dear, you’re not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You’re not these trunks of junk and dust. You’re only you, here, now – the present you.’

Mrs Bentley nodded at the memory, breathing easier.

‘Yes, I see. I see.’

The gold-ferruled cane lay silently on the moonlit rug.

‘In the morning,’ she said to it, ‘I will do something final about this, and settle down to being only me, and nobody else from any other year. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’

She slept.…

The morning was bright and green, and there at her door, bumping softly on the screen, were the two girls. ‘Got any more to give us, Mrs Bentley? More of the little girl’s things?’

She led them down the hall to the library.

‘Take this.’ She gave Jane the dress in which she had played the mandarin’s daughter at fifteen. ‘And this, and this.’ A kaleidoscope, a magnifying glass. ‘Pick anything you want,’ said Mrs Bentley. ‘Books, skates, dolls, everything – they’re yours.’

‘Ours?’

‘Only yours. And will you help me with a little work in the next hour? I’m building a big fire in my back yard. I’m emptying the trunks, throwing out this trash for the trashman. It doesn’t belong to me. Nothing ever belongs to anybody.’

‘We’ll help,’ they said.

Mrs Bentley led the procession to the back yard, arms full, a box of matches in her hand.

So the rest of the summer you could see the two little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs Bentley’s front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silver-mouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends.

‘How old are you, Mrs Bentley?’

‘Seventy-two.’

‘How old were you fifty years ago?’

‘Seventy-two.’

‘You weren’t ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?’

‘No.?’

‘Have you got a first name?’

‘My name is Mrs Bentley.’

‘And you’ve always lived in this one house?’

‘Always.’

‘And never were pretty?’

‘Never.’

‘Never in a million trillion years?’ The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o’clock on a summer afternoon.

‘Never,’ said Mrs Bentley, ‘in a million trillion years.’

And the Rock Cried Out (#ulink_5031267f-4f8c-5d32-b3f7-f5d60f3ca819)

The raw carcasses, hung in the sunlight, rushed at them, vibrated with heat and red color in the green jungle air, and were gone. The stench of rotting flesh gushed through the car windows, and Leonora Webb quickly pressed the button that whispered her door window up.

‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘those open-air butcher shops.’

The smell was still in the car, a smell of war and horror.

‘Did you see the flies?’ she asked.

‘When you buy any kind of meat in those markets,’ John Webb said, ‘you slap the beef with your hand. The flies lift from the meat so you can get a look at it.’

He turned the car around a lush bend in the green rain-jungle road.

‘Do you think they’ll let us into Juatala when we get there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Watch out!’

He saw the bright things in the road too late, tried to swerve, but hit them. There was a terrible sighing from the right front tire, the car heaved about and sank to a stop. He opened his side of the car and stepped out. The jungle was hot and silent and the highway empty, very empty and quiet at noon.

He walked to the front of the car and bent, all the while checking his revolver in its underarm holster.

Leonora’s window gleamed down. ‘Is the tire hurt much?’

‘Ruined, utterly ruined!’ He picked up the bright thing that had stabbed and slashed the tire.

‘Pieces of a broken machete,’ he said, ‘placed in adobe holders pointing toward our car wheels. We’re lucky it didn’t get all our tires.’

‘But why?’

‘You know as well as I.’ He nodded to the newspaper beside her, at the date, the headlines:

OCTOBER 4th, 1963: UNITED STATES, Europe SILENT!

THE RADIOS OF THE U.S.A. AND EUROPE ARE DEAD. THERE IS A GREAT SILENCE. THE WAR HAS SPENT ITSELF.

It is believed that most of the population of the United States is dead. It is believed that most of Europe, Russia, and Siberia is equally decimated. The day of the white people of the earth is over and finished.