Isabella A Yellman
Williams
English 9 Honors
4 June 2012
Section 3: Summary Paragraph
Continuing
Each of the four future-set science fiction stories, “All Summer in a Day”, “There Will Come Soft Rains”, “The Cold Equations”, and “Report on the Barnhouse Effect”, have an end to one thing and the continuing past it, as the universe and humans within it must. For “All Summer in a Day” there is the one glint of sunlight in a rainy world, but it does not last forever. The sun hides behind its gloomy cover of clouds once more, and nothing can stop it from leaving the children below to continue without. A lonesome house burns to the ground, leaving so little behind in “There Will Come Soft Rains”, but the single wall will keep calling out its song, waiting for each day to fall in place as it echoes itself. “The Cold Equations” speaks of a harsh reality where an innocent girl must end her life to save many others, and she ends it with final word to her lost brother. She who spoke the words, “I’m guilty, so what happens to me now?” not knowing the answer was her end. She may be dead, but her brother and the pilot of the ship she stowed away on will not forget her, they will not be able to. For the narrator of “Report on the Barnhouse Effect”, nothing had yet ended, but it would in time leave for him to take his place. His once professor, the master of an unknown force, would die eventually, as those against him hoped. But in his turn the student plans to conquer the force, continuing the legacy of his mentor. He wrote in his report, “Sooner or later, Professor Barnhouse must die. But long before I shall be ready. So, to the saber-rattlers of today and even, I hope, of tomorrow – I say: Be advised.” Like each other story, something will continue, and he will continue in his master’s place. Everything must end, as the sun will go out and the Earth fall to rubble, but something will continue for another time.
Section 4: Short Story
The Morning Comes So Dark (Inspired by “There Will Come Soft Rains”)
Power lines skew across the street, charred cables leaning against charred houses.
Nothing moves.
A single green leaf glides on a whispering wind.
A cloud slips over the sun.
Calm water slithers along its cut out path, under two parts of a grey steel bridge. If anyone could see it they would see only fish, bobbing up and down with no care.
After all, dead things don’t really care about anything.
A mid-sized town, lightless and woven with fried power lines, rotting rivers, and silent streets, sits with only the wind to whisper its name and the sky to show its mood. Its smaller neighbors lack their glowing windows as well, but trails of ant-like cars make lines to each one of them; little ants, hoping to escape their fate.
But it’s hard to escape the sun.
Humanity has come so far in constructing its demise. A web of power lines ready to surge and houses that may look good, but are hardly fire repellant. A single solar flare could bring their civilization to charred ruins, though this one was bigger than most.
The wind calls out, shouting to the clouds, twisting them to meet it. The river chuckles, speeding its course to escape as the cars tried. Burnt houses are ripped from the ground in a volatile gust of wind, and then flung out into knives of sleet.
If the earth will end the elements will take it first, sparing little in their fury.
Oceans rise to take back their territory, the angered natives fighting against a long spent invader. The wicked moon catches a glimpse of the chaos from it hanging place, waiting to be freed of its circling upon earth’s destruction.
Shreds of life, on the earth brought to ruin, rise. Hippos sink into their water, sands and grass wiping at their hides. The night’s owl calls out to its waker, protesting the day’s dark. Hyenas run from the laughing of a fire, their own jokes gone for fear.
A shivering body in a mid-sized town, beneath the ground of a charred house, cowers from a tornado. Above her wind hisses like a snake, and the sleet sounds out a thousand hoof-beats. The fire that had long since gone out left this small cellar of spider webs and broken dolls to its rest, and the same cellar held a last person.
Around her wrist a digital watch made no movement. The batteries had been shorted; a cellar roof could not stop radiation. A small glow came from a smaller fire started on the hair of Barbie, now a pile of small twigs with a red-orange dancer among them. At a distance where the light made the oppressing dark cautious she sits, her watch poking from a grey towel lost long ago. The fire is her friend and enemy here, the single light she has and the beast that ate her home.
If she could do more than croak for smoke inhalation she may talk to herself. Nothing passed the time, there was only sleeping, eating ancient provisions, and staring into the meager flame. White chalk smeared the floor in drawings better than could be expected of a new teenager, her first day’s work.
Outside the wind grows weary of playing with toy houses and whines to the river of dead fish. Clouds clear a little, allowing way for a sad, still-trapped moon to frown down in its daily cycle. Night brings the owl from far off to flight, and a waterlogged hippo crawls out of its muddy pool. The girl sleeps, though she does it only because it is quiet, not for knowing night has come.
Daylight does not penetrate the mid-sized town for some time. It is on the other side of the great earth the sun shows its face in the hours of the afternoon, weary and exhausted through a haze of Australian dust. Far from civilization an old farmer sits at his bench, knowing only of the previous storms and his watch having broken. No power line threaded to the house on the edges on civilization, no telephone that would let him know the end of civilization has near come, if not already come. If he rode an hour to the west he would cross many deserted towns, but he did not.
While he does not know of so many deaths, he does know it is his last day. A burnt down cigar emerging from a thick beard is only aiding the lung cancer. His fields once filled with animals and wheat now lay barren as he waits for the end.
The man creaks on the bench as ancient as him. His calm gaze stays to the west, following the sun to the other side of the earth. A wind carries the smoke from his cigar and tousles grey, oily hair. Sand sinks to the ground, leaving only the blinding light of his final sunset.
A girl covered in an old grey blanket takes a step to the cellar’s exit. Her fire is near gone, with no food ready to feed it. The wooden door takes some shoves to open, and she tentatively steps out into the world. The faintest glow in the east reminds her that it’s not all over. She can find someone, she can live.
An old man watches the sun set in the west, and a young girl snuggles in her blanket, waiting for the sun to rise. Each one is waiting; one for a new beginning, one for a long coming end. Each one has their own world, no people to share the moment with.
Beeping surprises the young girl, an alarm set before all this happened. A croaking laugh escaped her lips, her watch chose now to work.
“There’s still hope. Time goes on,” came out her raspy whisper, quiet as the breeze.
The old man sets aside his cigar, the girl stands up and smiles. For one instant they see the sun at the same time, half below the horizon in an Australian sunset, and the other half lighting up a mid-sized town.
The earth shakes beneath their feet, the world splits away to two halves of an aged whole; they are held close together by gravity praying it is not the end, but no longer one and the same.
The cruel moon grins and flings of, free of its eternal curse as gravity weakens.
Then it goes black.
Cold takes over, blood runs too cold.
A thousand light-years away nothing knows of the dead star. It will be generations before the final rays of light reach them. So much longer than the eight minutes the two people, a young girl and an old man, didn’t know they were waiting. And for whatever sees the star blink out in the night, it won’t make a difference. Where it is to be found, each life has its own path, one that is not so influenced by other’s finale.