Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

“Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.”
 — The great science fiction author Ray Bradbury died last night in Southern California at age of 91. He’ll be best remembered for The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451, which are important to so many of our early reading experiences. But his 1954 short story, “All Summer In a Day” is the thing that always stuck with me the most. If you’d like to read it, it is here. And short and simple and devastating.