The Machineries of Joy by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury [Bradbury, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-08-20T12:00:00+00:00

The lines vanished. For a while I could recall no more, and then, unable to fend it off, for it came of itself, a last fragment appeared in the dark:

Better cold skies seen bitter to the North

Than stillborn stay, all blind and gone to ghost.

If Rio is lost, well, love the Arctic Coast!

O ancient Lazarus

Come ye forth.

There the poem stopped and let me be. At last I slept, restless, hoping for the dawn, and good and final news.

The next day I saw him pushing her along the pier and thought, Yes, that’s it! She’ll vanish and be found a week from now, on the shore, like a sea monster floating, all face and no body.

That day passed. Well, surely, I thought, tomorrow …

The second day of the week, the third, the fourth and then the fifth and sixth passed, and on the seventh day one of the maids came running up the path, shrieking.

“Oh, it’s terrible, terrible!”

“Mrs. Harrison?” I cried. I felt a terrible and quite uncontrollable smile on my face.

“No, no, her son! He’s hung himself!”

“Hung himself?” I said ridiculously, and found myself, stunned, explaining to her. “Oh, no, it wasn’t him was going to die, it was—” I babbled. I stopped, for the maid was clutching, pulling my arm.

“We cut him down, oh, God, he’s still alive, quick!”

Still alive? He still breathed, yes, and walked around through the other years, yes, but alive? No.

It was she who gained strength and lived through his attempt to escape her. She never forgave his trying to run off.

“What do you mean by that, what do you mean?” I remember her screaming at him as he lay feeling his throat, in the cottage, his eyes shut, wilted, and I hurried in the door. “What do you mean doing that, what, what?”

And looking at him there I knew he had tried to run away from both of us, we were both impossible to him. I did not forgive him that either, for a while. But I did feel my old hatred of him become something else, a kind of dull pain, as I turned and went back for a doctor.

“What do you mean, you silly boy?” she cried.

I married Paul that autumn.

After that, the years poured through the glass swiftly. Once each year, Roger led himself into the pavilion to sit eating mint ice with his limp empty-gloved hands, but he never called me by my name again, nor did he mention the old promise.

Here and there in the hundreds of months that passed I thought, for his own sake now, for no one else, sometime, somehow he must simply up and destroy the dragon with the hideous bellows face and the rust-scaled hands. For Roger and only for Roger, Roger must do it.

Surely this year, I thought, when he was fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two. Between seasons I caught myself examining occasional Chicago papers, hoping to find a picture of her lying slit like a monstrous yellow chicken. But no, but no, but no.…

I’d almost forgotten them when they returned this morning.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.