“All Summer in a Day” (abridged text)
By Ray Bradbury

(1)
"Ready?"
"Ready."
"Now?"
"Soon."
"Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?"
"Look, look; see for yourself!"
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, mixed together, looking out at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days, months, and years filled from one end to the other with rain, with the sound of water, with the sweet fall of showers and the roar of storms so heavy they were like tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.

(2)
"It’s stopping, it’s stopping!"
"Yes, yes!"
Margot stood away from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the amazed world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them move, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold, or a yellow crayon, or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and shaking hands. But then they always woke up to the endless sound of the rain upon the roof, the sidewalk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.

(3)
All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it:
I think the sun is a flower,
That blooms for just one hour.
That was Margot’s poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.
"Aw, you didn’t write that!" protested one of the boys.
"I did," said Margot. "I did."
"William!" said the teacher.
But that was yesterday. Now the rain was slowing down, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.
“Where’s teacher?"
"She’ll be back."
"She’d better hurry, we’ll miss it!"
They turned on themselves, moving like a spinning wheel.
(4) 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 picture photograph, 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 past the huge glass.
"What’re you looking at?" said William.
Margot said nothing.
"Speak when you’re spoken to." He gave her a shove. But she did not move; instead she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else.

(5)
They moved away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of the underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips didn’t move much. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the rain through the windows.
And then, of course, the biggest crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the way the sun and the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out. They had long since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was. But Margot remembered.

(6)
"It’s like a penny," she said once, eyes closed.
"No it’s not!" the children cried.
"It’s like a fire," she said, "in the stove."
"You’re lying, you don’t remember!" cried the children.
But she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them and watched the rain through the windows. And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had put her hands over ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn’t touch her head. So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away.

(7)
There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it was so important to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands of dollars to her family. And so, the children hated her for all these reasons of big and little importance. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness, and her possible future.
"Get away!" The boy gave her another push. "What’re you waiting for?"
Then, for the first time, she turned and looked at him. And what she was waiting for was in her eyes.
"Well, don’t wait around here!" cried the boy meanly. "You won’t see nothing!"
Her lips moved silently.
"Nothing!" he cried. "It was all a joke, wasn’t it?" He turned to the other children. "Nothing’s happening today. Is it?"

(8)
They all blinked at him and then, understanding, laughed and shook their heads. "Nothing, nothing!"
"Oh, but," Margot whispered, her eyes helpless. "But this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they know, the sun..."
"All a joke!" said the boy, and grabbed her roughly. "Hey, everyone, let’s put her in a closet before the teacher comes!"
"No," said Margot, falling back.
They moved about her, caught her up and carried her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they shut and locked the door. They stood looking at the door and saw it shake from her hitting and throwing herself against it. They heard her muffled cries. Then, smiling, they turned and went out and back down the tunnel, just as the teacher arrived.
(9)
"Ready, children?" She looked at her watch.
"Yes!" said everyone.
"Are we all here?"
"Yes!"
The rain was slowing even more.
They crowded to the huge door.
The rain stopped.
It was as if, in the middle of a movie about an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had gone wrong with the sound, thus silencing and finally cutting off all noise. Then, something had replaced the movie with a beautiful tropical picture which did not move or shake. The world was suddenly still. The silence was so huge and unbelievable that you felt you had lost your hearing altogether. The children put their hands to their ears. They stood away from each other. The door opened and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them.

(10)
The sun came out.
It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it was a bright blue color. And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, free from their spell, ran out, yelling into the springtime.
"Now, don’t go too far," called the teacher after them. "You’ve only two hours, you know. You wouldn’t want to get caught out!"
But they were running and turning their faces up to the sky and feeling the sun on their cheeks like a warm iron; they were taking off their jackets and letting the sun burn their arms.
"Oh, it’s better than the sun lamps, isn’t it?"
"Much, much better!"

(11)
They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, even as you watched it. The jungle was a giant mass, flowering in this brief spring. It was the color of black and gray ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses, and it was the color of the moon.
The children lay down, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh with life under them. They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they looked at the sun until the tears ran down their faces; they put their hands up to that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which left them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion. They looked at everything and loved everything. Then, wildly, like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles. They ran for an hour and did not stop running.

(12)
And then -
In the middle of their running one of the girls cried out.
Everyone stopped.
The girl, standing in the open, held out her hand.
"Oh, look, look," she said, shaking.
They came slowly to look at her opened hand.
In the center of it, round and huge, was a single raindrop.
She began to cry, looking at it.
They looked quietly at the sun.
"Oh. Oh."
A few cold drops fell on their noses and their cheeks and their mouths. The sun faded behind a mist. A wind blew cold around them. They turned and started to walk back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles going away.
(13)
A boom of thunder surprised them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they ran into each other. Lightning hit ten miles away, five miles away, a mile, a half mile. The sky darkened into midnight in a flash.
They stood in the doorway of the underground for a minute until it was raining hard. Then they closed the door and heard the loud sounds of the rain falling in tons and avalanches, everywhere and forever.
"Will it be seven more years?"
"Yes. Seven."
Then one of them gave a little cry.
"Margot!"
"What?"
"She’s still in the closet where we locked her."
"Margot."

(14)
They stood as if someone had hit them, like so many nails, into the floor. They looked at each other and then looked away. They looked out at the world that was raining now, raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other’s eyes. Their faces were serious and pale. They looked at their hands and feet, their faces down.
"Margot."
One of the girls said, "Well...?"
No one moved.
"Go on," whispered the girl.
They walked slowly down the hall to the sound of cold rain. They turned through the doorway to the room in the sound of the storm and thunder, lightning on their faces,
blue and terrible. They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it.
Behind the closet door was only silence.
They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.