The Very Best of F & SF v1 Read Online Free Page B

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!”
    They stopped
running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never
stopped growing, tumultuous, even as you watched it. It was a nest of
octopuses, clustering up great arms of flesh-like weed, wavering, flowering in
this brief spring. It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the
many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink.
    The children lay
out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them,
resilient and alive. 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 squinted
at the sun until tears ran down their faces, they put their hands up at that
yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh fresh air
and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea
of no sound and no motion. They looked at everything and savored 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.
    And then—
    In the midst of
their running, one of the girls wailed.
    Everyone
stopped.
    The girl,
standing in the open, held out her hand.
    “Oh, look, look,”
she said, trembling.
    They came slowly
to look at her opened palm.
    In the center of
it, cupped and huge, was a single raindrop.
    She began to
cry, looking at it.
    They glanced
quickly at the sky. “Oh. Oh.”
    A few cold drops
fell on their noses and their cheeks and their mouths. The sun faded behind a
stir of mist. A wind blew cool around them. They turned and started to walk
back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles
vanishing away.
    A boom of
thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumbled upon
each other and ran. Lightning struck 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 moment until it was raining hard. Then
they closed the door and heard the gigantic sound 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.”
    They stood as if
someone had driven them, like so many stakes, into the floor. They looked at
each other and then looked away. They glanced out at the world that was raining
now and raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other’s glances.
Their faces were solemn 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 in 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.
     
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One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts - Shirley
Jackson
     
    Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote a
dozen books, including the masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House, but she is probably best-known for her short story, “The Lottery,”
which drew hundreds of outraged letters when it first appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. Barry Malzberg has pointed out that if F&SF had existed at the time, the story could easily have appeared in
our pages without raising any