Other Fan Fiction ❯ Summer of the Rainfall ❯ One-Shot

[ P - Pre-Teen ]

Disclaimer:  This is based off of “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury.  I do not own that story.

She stopped reading.  The rain poured down outside, an avalanche of liquid snows, whirling frightened against the covered window, as animals scurrying against their cruel front doors, in hopes to come into the lit classroom.  

No, no, not at all, just because my name is Margot does not mean you're locking me in a closet!

One girl sat thinking furiously among her non-stirring classmates.  For a quarter of an hour, she had been reading “All Summer in a Day” for the non-stop chattering class.  From the start of her reading, a single drop fell on the window pane, a lone animal crawling to a place it could never reach.  During the first phrase of mentioned raindrops it splattered down so continuously it was a stream of horrendous hurricanes, furiously bashing and fighting for a place on the outside windowpane.  To Margot, the words that flowed as a stream hurtled from her talking mouth as what she read seemed to fill the room with an eerie magic that was now set free.  The story had been read through once, and now, as she read again, the rain still continued fiercely downward.

No, please don't do it. . .

But she wasn't so sure.  The pale, usually talkative cheerful faces of her classmates were now ghost-like and silent, an eerie silence that had only been heard since the rain had begun.  Their faces were like robots, incomprehensive, unknowing.  

She glanced despairingly at the story by Ray Bradbury once more, then at the small innocent, tiny rain drop pattern on her wrist.  

“Now don't let anyone see it,” the engineer Will Hampshire had warned, once she had seemingly magically received the mark inside the elder friend's new invention.  “Especially not touch it.  The results could be disastrous.”  

The mark had come from a contraption called the “Book Machine,” a strange, tall black box that held the wonderful scent of books, both the fresh, non-musty, new journey of a new unread adventures, and the stale, dusty, tangy odor of an elder journey, one whose yellow pages crinkled delightedly with well-known magic and held wondrous visitations to the distant past.  

“Works like a charm!” the old man had said, “I've finally made it- the one and only machine that will bring and keep bringing you so that you will not only read your beloved adventures, you will actually be inside them!”  

And so, Margot, her face wondrous as she read continually through her books of castles, witches, goblins, and fairies, eagerly stepped up to the well-known friend to give it a try.  And then yesterday, (oh, blessed, common yesterday!) a gang of her classmates had followed panther-like as she pounded down the brick school sidewalk path, and one had suddenly seized her roughly.  The words, horrid words, “Get her!” for these were the boys that randomly bullied a stray, common helpless-looking individual without once getting caught.  A random tackle into a lowly mud puddle, her sleeves skidding up her arms.  

“What's this, some crazy mark?”   

 “No, don't touch it,” she had cried, as an arm had come closer, too close, then a single prick of a dirty finger upon blue-marked skin, an angry cat finally reaching its small furry prize.  

But that was yesterday, and now the classmates, including the gang, sat silently, staring as if hypnotized, as a silent mist ringing in a high mountain.  And Teacher was missing.  

“No. . .” she moaned in the absence of the trustworthy, gentle adult friend, away on some errand.  Just like the teacher in the story she had read.  The mark on her arm burned slightly, mist cerulean and hue of deep rain than the usual sky blue, the color of promising sunny days, ones of non-dark magical interventions; ones of hope, happiness, buoyant laughter of common times.  

The tumbling rains continued.

Her peers sat stiffly, their heads and eyes slowly turning toward her in a synchronized move, blank angry gazes flashing.  

And before more of the story could unfold, Margot popped up from her chair, raced between the queer piercing stares of her classmates and sprinted up the wondrous classroom bookshelves.

“Sun, I've got to find the Sun,” she thought frantically, as classmate after classmate trudged mechanically toward the window, eyes focused on the pursuing waves.   

She searched.

A frantic flipping through hundreds of colored pages in hope for even a single sentence for a burning brightness the color of a penny, a lemon, one single phrase of magic that would stop the rain, the stares of her classmates, the unearthly magic!

then

“Where is the Sun,” she moaned in a frightened whisper, helpless with despair, books strewn all around her in semi-tidy piles.  Many times she thought she glimpsed a distant yellow brightness within the sticky pages, yet when she turned to the spot words were blank, and the once vivid picture was dull and colorless.  

Then an audible, forbidden line.

“Hey, everyone, let's lock her in a closet before teacher comes.”3

The speaker was small, shy William Tidé, the one who always sat quietly in the back of the classroom while the rest babbled on and on.  

The peers darted toward Margot and seized and pushed her roughly while she pleaded and cried as everyone pushed her through a long hallway, then unused classroom, then closet door.  

“No, no, you don't know what you're doing, it's the story, you can't!” she cried, beating upon the door as it trembled again and again, listening to the horrid gleeful footsteps as they faded, echoing into a terrible, horrendous nothingness of being alone.

“No, come back!” she shrieked once more.

On the other side of the door there was only silence.  

She felt through the small area of musty coats.

On each side, right and left, was a wall, solid, impermeable, a prison.

She sat down.  

The tatting rain began to slacken.

And then, exactly an hour later-

Footsteps.  Coming closer, slowly, but definitely growing louder as they approached, slowly but surely, guiltily trudging toward a sinner's doom.  Yet, it didn't matter, for they had taken away the Sun, the welcoming warmth of a familiar, Earthly Ohio day.  They had imprisoned her, to only know of the Sun's blissful hour by a silence, one unheard for seven years, then hear the terrible avenger that stole her yellow friend being released.

Through the dim light on the wall, a mirror.  And in the mirror, a small, frail girl, that, yes, looked as if the “rain had washed the blue from her eyes, the red from her lips, the yellow from her hair.”3

The footsteps stopped.  

A final memory stirred.

“Ready?”

“Ready. ”

“Soon?”

“Now,” Margot whispered, a small mournful trump to the unbearable silence.

A small, terrible pause, then a tedious, hesitant, soft click of a doorknob.

They slowly opened the door, and, even more slowly, let Margot out.3

1.  Bobbi Katz. “Things To Do If You Are The Rain”  
2.  Moiselle Renstrom. “Rain Is Falling All Around”.  Children’s Songbook. Deseret Company, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 1991.
3.  Ray Bradbury.  “All Summer in a Day”.  http://staff.esuhsd.org/danielle/English%20Department%20 LVillage/RT/Short%20Stories/All%20Summer%20in%20a%20Day.pdf