by Ray Bradbury
‘Oh, Miss Welkes, Miss Welkes!’ he wanted to cry.
Half an hour later, there she was, on the front porch, seated with her neat hands folded, and watching the door. It was the summer evening ritual, the people on the porches, in the swings, on the figured pillows, the women talking and sewing, the men smoking, the children in idle groupings on the steps. But this was early, the town porches still simmering from the day, the echoes only temporarily allayed, the civil war of Independence Afternoon muffled for an hour in the sounds of poured lemonade and scraped dishes. But here, the only person on the street porches, alone, was Miss Leonora Welkes, her face pink instead of gray, flushed, her eyes watching the door, her body tensed forward. Douglas saw her from the tree where he hung in silent vigilance. He did not say hello, she did not see him there, and the hour passed into deeper twilight. Within the house the sounds of preparation grew intense and furious. Phones rang, feet ran up and down the avalanche of stairs, the three belles giggled, bath doors slammed, and then out and down the front steps went the three young ladies, one at a time, a man on her arm. Each time the door swung, Miss Welkes would lean forward, smiling wildly. And each time she sank back as the girls appeared in floaty green dresses and blew away like thistle down the darkening avenues, laughing up at the men.
That left only Mr Britz and Mr Jerrick, who lived upstairs across from Miss Welkes. You could hear them whistling idly at their mirrors, and through the open windows you could see them finger their ties.
Miss Welkes leaned over the porch geraniums to peer up at their windows, her heart pumping in her face, it seemed, making it heart-shaped and colorful. She was looking for the man who had left the gift.
And then Douglas smelled the odor. He almost fell from the tree.
Miss Welkes had tapped her ears and neck with drops of perfume, many, many bright drops of Summer Night Odor, 97 cents a bottle! And she was sitting where the warm wind might blow this scent to whoever stepped out upon the porch. This would be her way of saying, I got your gift! Well?
‘It was me, Miss Welkes!’ screamed Douglas, silently, and hung in the tree, cold as ice.
‘Good evening, Mr Jerrick,’ said Miss Welkes, half rising.
‘Evening.’ Mr Jerrick sniffed in the doorway and looked at her. ‘Have a nice evening.’ He went whistling down the steps.
That left only Mr Britz, with his straw hat cocked over one eye, humming.
‘Here I am,’ said Miss Welkes, rising, certain that this must be the man, the last one in the house.
‘There you are,’ said Mr Britz, blinking. ‘Hey, you smell good. I never knew you used scent.’ He leered at her.
‘Someone gave me a gift.’
‘Well, that’s fine.’ And Mr Britz did a little dance going down the porch steps, his cane jauntily flung over his shoulder. ‘See you later, Miss W.’ He marched off.
Miss Welkes sat, and Douglas hung in the cooling tree. The kitchen sounds were fading. In a moment, Grandma would come out, bringing her pillow and a bottle of mosquito oil. Grandpa would cut the end off a long stogie and puff it to kill his own particular insects, and the aunts and uncles would arrive for the Independence Evening Event at the Spaulding House, the Festival of Fire, the shooting stars, the Roman Candles so diligently held by Grandpa, looking like Julius Caesar gone to flesh, standing with great dignity on the dark summer lawn, directing the setting off of fountains of red fire, and pinwheels of sizzle and smoke, while everyone, as if to the order of some celestial doctor, opened their mouths and said Ah! their faces burned into quick colors by blue, red, yellow, white flashes of sky bomb among the cloudy stars. The house windows would jingle with concussion. And Miss Welkes would sit among the strange people, the scent of perfume evaporating during the evening hours, until it was gone, and only the sad, wet smell of punk and sulfur would remain.
The children screamed by on the dim street now, calling for Douglas, but, hidden, he did not answer. He felt in his pocket for the remaining dollar and fifty cents. The children ran away into the night.
Douglas swung and dropped. He stood by the porch steps.
‘Miss Welkes?’
She glanced up. ‘Yes?’
Now that the time had come he was afraid. Suppose she refused, suppose she was embarrassed and ran up to lock her door and never came out again?
‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘there’s a swell show at the Elite Theater. Harold Lloyd in WELCOME, DANGER. The show starts at eight o’clock, and afterward we’ll have a chocolate sundae at the Midnight Drug Store, open until eleven forty-five. I’ll go change clothes.’
She looked down at him and didn’t speak. Then she opened the door and went up the stairs.
‘Miss Welkes!’ he cried.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Run and put your shoes on!’
It was seven thirty, the porch filling with people, when Douglas emerged, in his dark suit, with a blue tie, his hair wet with water, and his feet in the hot tight shoes.
‘Why, Douglas!’ the aunts and uncles and Grandma and Grandpa cried, ‘Aren’t you staying for the fireworks?’
‘No.’ And he looked at the fireworks laid out so beautifully crisp and smelling of powder, the pinwheels and sky bombs, and the Fire Balloons, three of them, folded like moths in their tissue wings, those balloons he loved most dearly of all, for they were like a summer night dream going up quietly, breathlessly on the still high air, away and away to far lands, glowing and breathing light as long as you could see them. Yes, the Fire Balloons, those especially would he miss, while seated in the Elite Theater tonight.
There was a whisper, the screen door stood wide, and there was Miss Welkes.
‘Good evening, Mr Spaulding,’ she said to Douglas.
‘Good evening, Miss Welkes,’ he said.
She was dressed in a gray suit no one had seen ever before, neat and fresh, with her hair up under a summer straw hat, and standing there in the dim porch light she was like the carved goddess on the great marble library clock come to life.
‘Shall we go, Mr Spaulding?’ and Douglas walked her down the steps.
‘Have a good time!’ said everyone.
‘Douglas!’ called Grandfather.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Douglas,’ said Grandfather, after a pause, holding his cigar in his hand. ‘I’m saving one of the Fire Balloons. I’ll be up when you come home. We’ll light her together and send her up. How’s that sound, eh?’
‘Swell!’ said Douglas.
‘Good night, boy.’ Grandpa waved him quietly on.
‘Good night, sir.’
He took Miss Leonora Welkes down the street, over the sidewalks of the summer evening, and they talked about Mr Longfellow and Mr Whittier and Mr Poe all the way to the Elite Theater …
If you enjoyed Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2, check out these other great Ray Bradbury titles.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The Classic novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 is part of the Voyager Classic series. It stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.
Buy the ebook here
The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity’s repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly locked them up.
But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more, piercing the hallucinatio
ns projected by the Martians. People brought their old prejudices with them – and their desires and fantasies, tainted dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with their caged flowers and birds of flame.
Buy the ebook here
If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art...
Yet the Illustrated Man has tried to burn the illustrations off. He’s tried sandpaper, acid, and a knife. Because, as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker as the figures enact their stories – voices rise, small and muted, predicting the future.Here are sixteen tales: sixteen illustrations...the seventeenth is your own future told on the skin of the Illustrated Man.
Buy the ebook here
In the backwaters of Illinois, Douglas Spaulding's grandfather makes an intoxicating brew from harvested dandelions. ‘Dandelion Wine’ is a quirky, breathtaking coming-of-age story from one of science fiction’s greatest writers. Distilling his experiences into “Rites & Ceremonies” and “Discoveries & Revelations”, the young Spaulding wistfully ponders over magical tennis shoes, and machines for every purpose from time travel to happiness and silent travel.
Based upon Bradbury’s own experiences growing up in Waukegan in the 1920s, ‘Dandelion Wine’ is a heady mixture of fond memory, forgiveness, magic, the imagination and above all, of summers that seemed to go on forever.
Buy the ebook here
In Green Town Illinois, Douglas Spaulding is in the midst of a small civil war with the old pitted against the young in this, the second book in Bradbury’s semi-fictionalised account of his childhood.
As the school board’s figure of authority Mr Calvin C. Quartermain attempts to outwit the boys at every turn, their antics increase and become ever more daring and mischevious. Once the shadow of winter draws across Green Town, the boys quickly realise that their enemy is not so much the senior members of their own community, but rather time itself which is ever ebbing away, just beyond the reach of their most daring trick yet: a bold attempt to sabotage the town’s clock.
Buy the ebook here
Two previously unpublished novellas comprise this astonishing new volume from one of science fiction’s greatest living writers. In the first, ‘Somewhere a Band is Playing’, newsman James Cardiff is lured through poetry and his fascination with a beautiful and enigmatic young woman to Summerton, Arizona. The small town's childless population hold an extraordinary secret which has been passed on for thousands of years unbeknownst to the rest of human civilization.
In the second novella, ‘Leviathan ‗99’, the classic tale of Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ is reborn as an interstellar adventure. It recounts the exploits of the mad Captain Ahab, who, blinded by his first encounter with a gigantic comet called ‘Leviathan’, pursues his lunatic vendetta across the universe. Born in space and seeking adventure in the skies, astronaut Ishmael Jones joins the crew aboard the Cetus 7 and quickly finds his fate in the hands of an indefatigable captain.
Buy the ebook here
Other Works
Also By Ray Bradbury
Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines
The Anthem Sprinters
Bradbury Speaks
Bradbury Stories
The Cat’s Pajamas
Dandelion Wine
Dark Carnival
The Day it Rained Forever
Death is a Lonely Business
Driving Blind
Fahrenheit 451
Farewell Summer
From The Dust Returned
The Golden Apples of the Sun
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Green Shadows, White Whale
The Halloween Tree
I Sing the Body Electric!
The Illustrated Man
Lets All Kill Constance
Long After Midnight
The Machineries of Joy
The Martian Chronicles
A Medicine for Melancholy
Moby Dick (screenplay)
Now and Forever
The October Country
One More for the Road
Quicker Than the Eye
R is for Rocket
Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1
Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2
S is for Space
The Small Assassin
Something Wicked This Way Comes
A Sound of Thunder
The Toynbee Convector
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Town
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
Yestermorrow
Zen in the Art of Writing
Additional Copyright Information
Copyright 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1976, 1977, 1981, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 by Ray Bradbury.
Copyright renewed 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2001 by Ray Bradbury.
‘The Whole Town’s Sleeping’ – McCall’s, September 1950.
‘The Rocket’ (‘Outcast of the Stars’) – Super Science Stories, March 1950.
‘Season of Disbelief’ – Colliers, November 25, 1950.
‘And the Rock Cried Out’ (‘The Millionth Murder’) – Manhunt, September 1953.
‘The Drummer Boy of Shiloh’ – Saturday Evening Post, April 30, 1960.
‘The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge’ (‘The Beggar on the Dublin Bridge’) – Saturday Evening Post, June 14, 1961.
‘The Flying Machine’ – The Golden Apples of the Sun, 1953.
‘Heavy-Set’ – Playboy, October 1964.
‘The First Night of Lent’ – Playboy, March 1956.
‘Lafayette, Farewell’ – The Toynbee Convector, 1988.
‘Remember Sascha?’ – Quicker Than The Eye, 1996.
‘Junior’ – The Toynbee Convector, 1988.
‘That Woman on the Lawn’ – Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1996.
‘February 1999: Ylla’ (‘I’ll Not Ask For Wine’) – MacLean’s, January 1, 1950.
‘Banshee’ – Gallery, September 1984.
‘One for his Lordship, and one for the Road!’ – Playboy, January 1985.
‘The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair’ – Playboy, December 1987.
‘Unterderseaboat Doktor’ – Playboy, January 1994.
‘Another Fine Mess’ – Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1995.
‘The Dwarf’ – Fantastic, January-February 1954.
‘A Wild Night in Galway’ – Harper’s, August 1959.
‘The Wind’ – Weird Tales, March 1943.
‘No News, or What Killed the Dog?’ – American Way, October 1, 1994.
‘A Little Journey’ – Galaxy, August 1951.
‘Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine’ (‘The Best of Times’) – McCall’s, January 1966.
‘The Garbage Collector’ – The Golden Apples of the Sun, 1953.
‘The Visitor’ – Startling Stories, November 1948.
‘The Man’ – Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1949.
‘Henry The Ninth’ (‘A Final Sceptre, A Lasting Crown’) – Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct. 1969.
‘The Messiah’ – Welcome Aboard, Spring 1971.
‘Bang! You’re Dead’ – Weird Tales, September 1944.
‘Darling Adolf’ – Long After Midnight, 1976.
‘The Beautiful Shave’ – Gallery, March 1979.
‘Colonel Stonesteels Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy’ – Omni, May 1981.
‘I See You Never’ – The New Yorker, November 8, 1947.
‘The Exiles’ (‘The Mad Wizards Of Mars’) –
MacLean’s, September 15, 1949.
‘At Midnight, in the Month of June’ – Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine-June 1954.
‘The Witch Door’ – Playboy, December 1995.
‘The Watchers’ – Weird Tales, May 1945.
‘2004–05: The Naming of Names’ – The Martian Chronicles, 1950.
‘Hopscotch’ – Quicker than the Eye, 1996.
‘The Illustrated Man’ – Esquire, July 1950.
‘The Dead Man’ – Weird Tales, July 1945.
‘June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright’ (‘And the Moon Be Still as Bright’) – Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1948.
‘The Burning Man’ ( ‘El Hombre Que Ardea’) – Gente (Argentina), July 31, 1975.
‘G.B.S.-Mark V’ – Long After Midnight, 1976.
‘A Blade of Grass’ – Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1949.
‘The Sound of Summer Running’ (‘Summer in the Air’) – Saturday Evening Post, February 18, 1956. ‘And the Sailor, Home from the Sea’ (‘Forever Voyage’) – Saturday Evening Post, January 9, 1960.
‘The Lonely Ones’ – Startling Stories, July 1949.
‘The Finnegan’ – Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 1996.
‘On the Orient, North’ – The Toynbee Convector, 1988.
‘The Smiling People’ – Weird Tales, May 1946.
‘The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl’ (‘Touch and Go’) Detective Book, Winter 1948.
‘Bug’ – Quicker than the Eye, 1996.
‘Downwind from Gettysburg’ – Playboy, June 1969.
‘Time in Thy Flight’ – Fantastic Universe, June-July 1953.
‘Changeling’ – Super Science Stories, July 1949.
‘The Dragon’ – Esquire, August 1955.
‘Let’s Play Poison’ – Weird Tales, November 1946.
