IT was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw, walking on the … Read more
They had almost finished with the loading. Outside stood the Optus, his arms folded, his face sunk in gloom. Captain Franco walked leisurely down the gangplank, grinning. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You’re getting paid for all this.” The Optus said nothing. He turned away, collecting his robes. The captain put his boot on the … Read more
The following story, the simple and domestic incidents of which may be deemed scarcely worth relating, after such a lapse of time, awakened some degree of interest, a hundred years ago, in a principal seaport of the Bay Province. The rainy twilight of an autumn day, — a parlor on the second floor of a … Read more
As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then … Read more
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is a short story by Ray Bradbury published in May 1950 in Collier’s magazine and later included in the collection The Martian Chronicles (1950). Set in the near future, the story presents us with a fully automated home whose inhabitants have disappeared. Although there are no longer any people to serve, the house continues to perform its routine functions: it prepares breakfast, cleans, reads poems, and performs a series of other tasks that serve as a memory of a family reduced to nothing more than shadows on an exterior wall.