Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2)

by Ray Bradbury

With love to the memory of GENE KELLY, whose performances influenced and changed my life

For they eat the bread of wickedness, And drink the wine of violence. —Proverbs 4:16-17

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder go when it dies?

Like all boys, they never walked anywhere, but named a goal and lit for it, scissors and elbows. Nobody won. Nobody wanted to win. It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow. Their hands slapped library door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.

God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.

Will watched, wondering why this woman was so happy and this man so sad.

now lay long in bed, strung together by marsh-grass, his bones easy in his flesh, his flesh easy on his bones.

Such delicious language.

He was marbled with dark, was Jim Nightshade, a boy who talked less and smiled less as the years increased.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

air so cold they ate ice cream with each breath.

He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child?

Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.

“You . . . all right . . . Charlie?” She drowsed. He did not answer. He could not tell her how he was.

the music squealing swift back with him like insucked breath.

Jim smelled smells that no one knew, heard ticks from clocks that told another time.

It crept blue eels of power on his praying-mantis fingers and his grasshopper knees.

It was a time to say much but not all.

Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?”

Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light.

For being good is a fearful occupation;

Will’s father’s face was a pond into which the two dark stone names sank without a ripple.

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. So vague, yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.

avalanche of books poised like the cuneiform stones of eternity on shelves, so high the unseen snows of time fell all year there.

Unconnected fools, that’s the harvest the carnival comes smiling after with its threshing machine.”

our hour is short, eternity is long.

We love what we know, we love what we are.

knowing vaguely there was a target up ahead but not quite how to get there.

We can’t be good unless we know what bad is,

stuffing himself with other people’s unhappiness, chewed their pain all day like spearmint gum, for the sweet savor,

“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain.

They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale.

maybe the carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets.”

I think it uses Death as a threat. Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

if you’re a miserable sinner in one shape, you’re a miserable sinner in another. Changing size doesn’t change the brain.

The two houses are empty.

Wair, where are the moms?

it crashed and spilled its contents to the floor like so many dead black ravens.

the poisonous drizzle from her lips, counted the folds in her stitch-wrinkled eyes, the Gila monster neck, the mummy-linen ears, the dry-rivulet river-sand brow.

The mastery of imagery is incredible.

Mr. Dark, the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls,

and, accepting, threw back his head for the second time tonight and showed his acceptance with sound.

Did friends last forever, then? For eternity, could they be counted to a warm, round, and handsome sum?

Not always. But maybe enough do.

Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.

Oh, Dad, I never knew you. I sure know you now.”

Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.