Death Is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780380789658
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1985-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

I woke at dawn not believing where I was. I woke incredibly happy, as if something beautiful had happened in the night. Nothing had, of course, it was just sleeping among so many rich pillows by a woman who smelled like spice cabinets and fine parquetry. She was a lovely chess game carved and set in a store window when you were a kid. She was a freshly built girl’s gym, with only the faintest scent of the noon tennis dust that clings to golden thighs.

I turned in the dawn light.

And she was gone.

I heard a wave come along the shore. A cool wind blew in through the open French doors. I sat up. Far out in the dusky waters I saw an arm flash up and down, up and down. Her voice called.

I ran out and dove in and swam halfway to her before I was exhausted. No athlete this. I turned back and sat waiting for her on the shore. She came in at last and stood over me, stark naked this time.

“Christ,” she said, “you didn’t even take off your underwear. What’s happened to modern youth?”

I was staring at her body.

“How you like it? Pretty good for an old empress, huh? Good buzz-um, tight rump, marceled pubic hairs—”

But I had shut my eyes. She giggled. Then she was gone, laughing. She ran up the beach half a mile and came back, having startled only the gulls.

Next thing I knew the smell of coffee blew along the shore, with the scent of fresh toast. When I dragged myself inside she was seated in the kitchen, wearing only the mascara she had painted around her eyes a moment before. Blinking rapidly at me, like some silent screen farm girl, she handed me jam and toast, and draped a napkin daintily over her lap, so as not to offend while I stared and ate. She got strawberry jam on the tip of her left breast. I saw this. She saw me seeing this and said, “Hungry?”

Which made me butter my toast all the faster.

“Good grief, go call Mexico City.”

I called.

“Where are you?” demanded Peg’s voice, two thousand miles away.

“In a phone booth, in Venice, and it’s raining,” I said.

“Liar!” said Peg.

And she was right.

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