Summer Morning, Summer Night by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury [Bradbury, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-08-20T22:00:00+00:00

A Walk in Summer

THE ROOM WAS like the bottom of a cool well all night and she lay in it like a white stone in a well, enjoying it, floating in the dark yet clear element of half-dreams and half-wakening. She felt the breath move in small jets from her nostrils and she felt the immense sweep of her eyelids shutting and opening again and again. And at last she felt the fever brought into her room by the presence of the sun beyond the hills.

“Morning,” she thought. “It might be a special day. Anything might happen. And I hope it does.”

The air moved the white curtains like a summer breath.

“Vinia …?”

A voice was calling. But it couldn’t be a voice. Yet—Vinia raised herself—there it was again.

“Vinia …?”

She slipped from bed and ran to the window of her high second story bedroom.

There on the fresh lawn below, calling up to her in the early hour, stood James Conway, no older than herself, sixteen, very seriously smiling, waving his hand now as her head appeared.

“Jim, what’re you doing here?” she said.

“I’ve been up an hour already,” he replied. “I’m going for a walk, starting early, all day. Want to come along?”

“Oh, but I couldn’t … My folks won’t be back ’till late tonight, I’m alone, I’m supposed to stay …”

She saw the green hills beyond the town and the roads leading out into summer, leading out into August and rivers and places beyond this town and this house and this room and this particular moment.

“I can’t go …” she said, faintly.

“I can’t hear you!” he protested, mildly, smiling up at her under a shielding hand.

“Why did you ask me to walk with you and not someone else?”

He considered this a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He thought it over again, and gave her his most pleasant and agreeable look. “Because, that’s all, just because.”

“I’ll be down,” she said.

“Hey!” he said.

But the window was empty.

THEY STOOD in the center of the perfect, jewelled lawn, over which one set of prints, hers, had run leaving marks, and another, his, had walked in great slow strides, to meet them. The town was silent as a stopped clock. All the shades were still down.

“My gosh,” said Vinia, “it’s early. It’s crazy-early. I’ve never been up this early and out this early in years. Listen to everyone sleeping.”

They listened to the trees and the whiteness of the house in this early whispering hour, the hour when mice went back to sleep and flowers began untightening their bright fists.

“Which way do we go?”

“Pick a direction.”

Vinia closed her eyes, whirled, and pointed blindly. “Which way am I pointing?”

“North.”

She opened her eyes. “Let’s go north out of town then. I don’t suppose we should.”

“Why?”

And they walked out of town as the sun rose above the hills and the grass burned greener on the lawns.

THERE WAS a smell of hot chalk highway, of dust and sky and waters flowing in a creek the color of grapes. The sun was a new lemon.

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