The Complete Short Stories Vol.1 1953-1963 by Robert F. Young

Author:Robert F. Young
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-29T02:28:41+00:00

His father had just started to look down at him when the lightning hit the clearing. At least his father thought it was lightning, but Geoffrey knew better. And he understood suddenly why the house had seemed so peculiar. It was peculiar only when you thought of it as a house instead of as a spaceship.

His father was plunging ahead into the underbrush, shouting: “If a tree catches fire, the whole woods will go!” Geoffrey followed him. But there wasn’t any fire in the clearing when they reached it. There wasn’t anything in the clearing at all, except a small blackened spot where the “house” had stood, and an acrid chemical smell.

His father was shining the flashlight around wildly. “Well, I’ll be damned !” he was saying. “I could have sworn that was a bolt of lightning. But it couldn’t have been of course. Lightning means a thunderstorm, and a thunderstorm means rain, and anybody, even a fool like me, knows it doesn’t rain any more!”

Suddenly there was an odd sound in the leaves of the trees, a gentle rustling sound. His father stopped shining the light around then, and stood perfectly still in the middle of the clearing, his face uplifted to the sky. The rustling sound grew louder, became a steady patter. Geoffrey felt the first drop of rain then, and then the second. Abruptly the whole sky lit up with lightning—real lightning, this time—and from somewhere, thunder crashed.

Slowly, the patter of raindrops turned into a steady downpour, and still his father stood unmoving in the clearing, his face uplifted to the sky. Lightning flashed again, and Geoffrey saw how wet his father’s face was, saw the raindrops coursing down his cheeks. And suddenly he realized that some of the drops weren’t rain at all, but tears instead.

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