FROM Bradbury TO Anderson

    We’ve had a lot of rain in Georgia this week. Cold too—temperatures almost ten degrees lower than the previous records. Extreme heat in the West. Floods in the North and East and here in Georgia too. Elsewhere the permafrost thaws, the polar ice melts and dissolves in a rising sea.

    Are we on the brink of some manmade climate catastrophe, a holocaust caused by ignorance rather than aggression? Bradbury’s poem and my flash fiction speak of the destruction of mankind, and rain.

    There Will Come Soft Rains is one of my favorite short stories by Ray Bradbury (or anyone else). The poem I quote here is embedded within his amazing tale, which takes place on August 4th and 5th, 2026.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground

And swallows circling with a shimmering sound

And frogs in the pool singing at night

And wild plum trees in tremulous white.

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence wire,

And not one will know of the war.

Not one will care at last when it is done

Not one will mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly.

And Spring herself when she wakes at dawn

Would scarcely know that we are gone.

     My short story, Hope’s Legacy, may have taken some inspiration from Bradbury’s writing. The first sentence was given as a prompt in a flash fiction contest. I don’t remember if it garnered a prize.

Hope’s Legacy

    Raindrops dripped from the branch of the barren oak tree.  That was yesterday.

    We had summoned our small energies to celebrate. A feast—one hard, dried trout from our meager cache, washed down with careful swallows of the heavenly gift of water, the first in twenty months.  

    The manmade drought had turned the landscape sere, brown and gray for all seasons. Clouds of dogwoods, glorious rhododendrons and bright azaleas had once dotted the lush, verdant canopy of sweet gum, oak, maple and pine during springtime. A few remaining trees and shrubs still resisted the pernicious radiation from sterile clouds that circled the globe, their brave roots gradually shriveling and dying while searching for moisture in the parched, hard clay.

    Starving, marauding hordes long ago had stripped fields of standing crops, leaving nothing to feed domestic or displaced wild animals.  Those contaminated carcasses then too were devoured by the dwindling remnants of humanity, leaving their cracked, white bones to dry in the sun.

    We do not know who started the war, who prevailed, who survived—or if others like us postpone death in desperate isolation. We resist for one reason alone:  that our infant child might grow to independence.  We subsist in the wild, like our ancient ancestors, on roots and nuts and dried fish from the now-withered streams.

    Our child, Hope, sits laughing against the trunk of the sad oak tree. The rain, the first of her experience, delighted her.  She curiously strokes the soft green sprouts that have burst forth from the moistened earth, as she stares with unsighted eyes toward the clear blue sky.

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - (     ProetryPlace Blog 15     http://richardandersonbogs.blogspot.com