Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online

as if it was holding still. Only when you closed your eyes and lay down could you feel the world spinning under your bed and hollowing your ears with a black sea that came in and broke on cliffs that weren't there.
    There was a smell of rain. Mother was ironing and sprinkling water from a corked ketchup bottle over the crackling dry clothes behind Tom.
    One store was still open about a block away--Mrs. Singer's.
    Finally, just before it was time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relented and told Tom, "Run get a pint of ice cream and be sure she packs it tight."
    He asked if he could get a scoop of chocolate on top, because he didn't like vanilla, and Mother agreed. He clutched the money and ran barefooted over the warm evening cement sidewalk, under the apple and oak trees, toward the store. The town was so quiet and far off you could hear only the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars.
    His bare feet slapped the pavement. He crossed the street and found Mrs. Singer moving ponderously about her store, singing Yiddish melodies.
    "Pint ice cream?" she said. "Chocolate on top? Yes!"
    He watched her fumble the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the scoop, packing the cardboard pint chock-full with "chocolate on top, yes!" He gave the money, received the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across his brow and cheek, laughing, thumped barefootedly homeward. Behind him the lights of the lonely little store blinked out and there was only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seemed to be going to sleep.
    Opening the screen door, he found Mom still ironing. She looked hot and irritated but she smiled just the same.
    "When will Dad be home from lodge meeting?" he asked.
    "About eleven or eleven-thirty," Mother replied. She took the ice cream to the kitchen, divided it. Giving him his special portion of chocolate, she dished out some for herself and the rest was put away, "for Douglas and your father when they come."
    They sat enjoying the ice cream, wrapped at the core of the deep quiet summer night. His mother and himself and the night all around their small house on the small street. He licked each spoonful of ice cream thoroughly before digging for another, and Mom put her ironing board away and the hot iron in its open case cooling, and she sat in the armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert and saying, "My land, it was a hot day today. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. It'll be soggy sleeping.
    They both sat listening to the night, pressed down by every window and door and complete silence because the radio needed a new battery, and they had played all the Knickerbocker Quartet records and Al Jolson and Two Black Crows records to exhaustion; so Tom just sat on the hardwood floor and looked out into the dark dark dark, pressing his nose against the screen until the flesh of its tip was molded into small dark squares.
    "I wonder where Doug is? It's almost nine-thirty."
    "He'll be here," Tom said, knowing very well that Douglas would be.
    He followed Mom out to wash the dishes. Each sound, each rattle of spoon or dish was amplified in the baked evening. Silently they went to the living room, removed the couch cushions and, together, yanked it open and extended it down into the double bed it secretly was. Mother made the bed, punching pillows neatly to flump them up for their heads. Then, as he was unbuttoning his shirt, she said, "Wait awhile, Tom."
    "Why?"
    "Because I say so."
    "You look funny, Mom."
    Mom sat down a moment, then stood up, went to the door and called. He listened to her calling and calling, "Douglas, Douglas, oh Doug! Douglasssssss!" over and over. Her calling floated out into the summer warm dark and never came back. The echoes paid no attention.
    Douglas. Douglas. Douglas.
    Douglas!
    And as he sat on the floor, a coldness that was not ice cream and not winter, and not part of summer's heat, went