"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950)

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior
eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two
coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior
eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two
coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

An aluminum wedge
scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and
flushed them away to the distant sea.

An aluminum wedge
scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and
flushed them away to the distant sea.

The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and
emerged twinkling dry.

Then, like mysterious invaders, they
popped into their burrows.

The house stood alone in a city of
rubble and ashes.

Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn.

Still farther over, their images burned on wood
in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball,
and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it
had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protection
which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

It quivered at each sound, the house did.

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in
choirs.

For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the
copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out.

It ran
wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died.

Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray
leaves in an electrical wind.

Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches.

Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in
crystal substance.

Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot
still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors!

Now the walls dissolved into distances of
parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky.

The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study
a click.

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
if mankind perished utterly;

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
if mankind perished utterly;

A failing tree bough crashed through the kitchen window.

Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove.

The quenching rain ceased.

The quenching rain ceased.

Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its
wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries
quiver in the scalded air.

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its
wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries
quiver in the scalded air.

And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high,
low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone.

In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses,
oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control
mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a
thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or
after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning
mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes

In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses,
oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control
mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a
thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or
after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning
mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes

In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses,
oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control
mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a
thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or
after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning
mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes

And one voice, with sublime disregard
for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the
wires withered and the circuits cracked.

And one voice, with sublime disregard
for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the
wires withered and the circuits cracked.

In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making
breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips,
which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!