8:20 PM, August 4, 2026. I've been listening to Leonard Nimoy read Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" as I tinker with a book cover design in my little upstairs work room. I heard just moments ago that the story takes place today—this day, this year—so quick I looked it up, found the recording online, put it on, let it play.
I read all of The Martian Chronicles in high school and loved it. When I went to find the story just now, I couldn't remember what it was about—high school was a lifetime ago—but as I listened, it all came back to my memory in trickles, each moment appearing in my mind just before it hit my ears.
A post-apocalyptic story. Not even a story so much as the depiction of a moment in time, a day, inside one family's house in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast.
When I was a kid, that was what I thought the end of the world would be.
The air conditioner hisses and gurgles. Leonard Nimoy reads elegantly, with restraint, and the prose is more beautiful than I remember. There are robot mice cleaning the house for the absent humans, and the story feels realer than I could have imagined.
When Nimoy's voice trails off, leaving behind the fictional night of August 4, 2026, I look up and there's bright red in my window. The blush of a wildfire-smoke sunset. I get up and climb onto the futon bed, stick my head into the bubble of the skylight.
Black crows streak across the sky through the curtain of ash that has settled on the glass.
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