On every hand stretched the forest primeval,—the home of noisy comedy and silent tragedy. Here the struggle for survival continued to wage with all its ancient brutality. Briton and Russian were still to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow’s End—and this was the very heart of it—nor had Yankee gold yet purchased its vast … Read more
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level … 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.