There is nothing like a passage about death, written by the Master, Ray Bradbury.

My favorite is from his short story...
'Death and the Maiden.'
It first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Here's an exerpt:

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"Strange. Half my years afraid of life. The other half, afraid of death. Always some kind of afraid. You! Tell the truth, now! When my twenty-four hours are up, after we walk by the lake and take the train back and come through the woods to my house, you want to..."
He made her say it.
"...sleep with me?" she whispered.
"For ten thousand million years," he said.
"Oh." Her voice was muted. "That's a long time."
He nodded.
"A long time," she repeated. "What kind of bargain is that, young man? You give me twenty-four hours of being eighteen again and I give you ten thousand million years of my precious time."
"Don't forget, my time, too," he said. "I'll never go away."
"You'll lie with me?"
"I will."
"Oh, young man, young man. Your voice. so familiar."
"Look."
He saw the keyhole unplugged and her eye peer out at him. He smiled at the sunflowers in the field and the sunflower in the sky.
"I'm blind, half blind," she cried. "But can that be Willy Winchester 'way out there?"
He said nothing.
"But, Willy, you're just twenty-one by the look of you, not a day different than you were seventy years back!"

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Here...
...is death, presented to Clarinda, the woman who has hidden herself away in the far woods, beyond the world really, until we find her an old woman afraid to die, having run from death for many years. Death will never get her, with all her ingenious ways of eluding 'it'.

But death comes to her as the one she had loved, whom she was to have married so many many years ago. When 'he' comes knocking, she can only say...." Oh that's NOT fair...to show up like THAT..."

That's 'my' #1 favorite. What's yours?



[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 08-05-2003).]

Interesting post. When I read this, my first thought was the scene in F451 where the woman sets herself and books on fire in front of everyone. But when I looked it up, this was Ray's magic. Although I had remembered this very vivid scene, Ray's writing of it was quite minimalist.

In Dandelion Wine, I was pretty impacted by the scene where the two women come across the dead body of the woman killed by "The Lonely One":

"They turned a curve in the path -- and there it was.
In the singing deep night, in the shade of warm trees, as if she had laid herself out to enjoy the soft stars and the easy wind, here hands at either side of her like the oars of a delicate craft, lay Elizabeth Ramsell!
Francine screamed.
'Don't scream!' Lavinia put out her hands to hold onto Francine, who was whimpering and choking. 'Don't! Don't!'
The woman lay as if she had floated there, her face moonlit, her eyes wide and like flint, her tongue sticking from her mouth.
'She's dead!' said Francine. 'Oh, she's dead, dead! She's dead!'
Lavinia stood in the middle of a thousand warm shadows with the crickets screaming and the frongs loud."

I thought the sense of Elizabeth being laid out there, almost like she had laid herself out on a late-night picnic to look at stars was a kind of juxtaposition of the violent nature of her death (strangulation, we presume, based on the other murders). I also thought it was weird that she was settled there as if she had floated there -- rather than left there by a murderer.

The other scene I remember was in "The Next In Line" where the dead in the rows are all described -- each in different kinds of positions, and that those positions all said something about the death of the person.

Describing the mummies that had been "unburied" and then left "above ground" in the tombs, Bradbury writes:

"They resembled nothing more than those preliminary erections of a scupltor, the wire frame, the first tendons of clay, the muscles, and a thin lacquer of skin. They were unfinished, all one hundred and fifteen of them. They were parchment-colored and the skin was stretched as if to dry, from bone to bone. The bodies were intact, only the watery humors had evaporated from them. . .
. . . They were screaming.
They looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared.
And been frozen that way.
All of them had open mouths. Theirs was a perpetual screaming. They were dead and they knew it. In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it. . ."




[This message has been edited by Mr. Dark (edited 08-06-2003).]

Certainly the most pleasant depiction, and my favorite, is "Good-bye, Grandma."

Goodbye Grandma gets my vote. I choke up nearly every time I read it.

You know, there is another story that affected me greatly years ago, and that was, "The Tombling Day."
Another is 'Sailor at Home from the Sea.' Incredible!!
The name skips my mind right now, but the story of the farm where a family stops by and finds the owner dead in bed, with a single stalk of wheat. Was 'The Scythe' the title? That, too, was a profound, a mighty profound story. The ending was amazing.

The very topic of 'death' in Bradbury's stories, elicit incredible measure of his storytelling gift....

Yes, "Goodbye, Grandma" jumps out of all he has put to page. Why? For its serenity, gentle imagery, poignance, and final capturing of peace. The water on the shore, the sand, the beautiful illumination, and then the fading gracefully away. It just seems right!

If you have been by the side of a loved one at such a "miraculous" moment when "all must be as it must be," the sadness at first is too overwhelming for one to recognize the privilege granted for being present. Yet, with time, it comes to make more sense. You have been chosen to be close and be felt in the final glow of your loved one's life on earth.

Grandma said all of her goodbyes and passed on her list of "to do's" to her family. We should all be so blessed.

The opposite of this feeling is the one you get when reading "The Crowd" - creepy!

Surprised no one has mentioned El D�a de Muerte. This is my favorite Bradbury short story. Anyone read this?

Ought Not,

Dug out my copy of The Machineries of Joy and treated myself to a re-reading of El Dia de Muerte. Holy frijoles! If no one�s read this for a while, I highly recommend a re-visit. Bradbury at his feverish best. Several story lines working here, with echoes of The Next in Line and an early glimpse of The Halloween Tree coming down the road from a few years away. Deft transitions from scene to scene create an hallucinogenic effect that puts Bradbury in the upper ranks of the surrealists. Definitely a change of pace. Thanks for the suggestion.

Pete

You're welcome, pterran! It is surreal isn't it? Your descriptions was right on the mark of how I feel about it! I haven't yet read The Halloween Tree. I plan on reading it this coming October. As I've said before, I love the Mexican stories. Some may disagree with me but these tromp the Irish tales. I do not know why. I'm not much of a critic since I go more with feelings rather than pulling out the scalpel and scissors. I'll leave that to the experts in that particular field.

"The Life Work of Juan Diaz", which also appears in the collection THE MACHINERIES OF JOY, is another poignant work dealing with the subject of death (and does anyone else remember the wonderful episode from THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK SHOW, based on that story...I seem to recall it starred a fine character actor named Frank Silvera).

The Smiling People, could be one of my favorite morbid pulp classics, when I first read it the story left an impression, now a grin, still a eeww. I will always love There was an old woman. I think that was the title. she would not give up, for love nor money.