Read Online I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online Page A

“Both.”
    The sea came in on the shore three times, softly.
    The afternoon came on. The sun struck the skies a grazing blow. The yachts bobbed hot and shining white in the harbor swells. The smells of fried meat and burnt onion filled the wind. The sand whispered and stirred like an image in a vast, melting mirror.
    The radio at their elbow murmured discreetly. They lay like dark arrows on the white sand. They did not move. Only their eyelids flickered with awareness, only their ears were alert. Now and again their tongues might slide along their baking lips. Sly prickles of moisture appeared on their brows to be burned away by the sun.
    He lifted his head, blindly, listening to the heat.
    The radio sighed.
    He put his head down for a minute.
    She felt him lift himself again. She opened one eye and he rested on one elbow looking around, at the pier, at the sky, at the water, at the sand.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” she asked.
    â€œNothing,” he said, lying down again.
    â€œSomething,” she said.
    â€œI thought I heard something.”
    â€œThe radio.”
    â€œNo, not the radio. Something else.”
    â€œSomebody else’s radio.”
    He didn’t answer. She felt his arm tense and relax, tense and relax. “Dammit,” he said. “There it is, again.”
    They both lay listening.
    â€œI don’t hear anything—”
    â€œShh!” he cried. “For God’s sake—”
    The waves broke on the shore, silent mirrors, heaps of melting, whispering glass.
    â€œSomebody singing.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’d swear it was someone singing.”
    â€œNonsense.”
    â€œNo, listen.”
    They did that for a while.
    â€œI don’t hear a thing,” she said, turning very cold.
    He was on his feet. There was nothing in the sky, nothing on the pier, nothing on the sand, nothing in the hot-dog stands. There was a staring silence, the wind blowing over his ears, the wind preening along the light, blowing hairs of his arms and legs.
    He took a step toward the sea.
    â€œDon’t!” she said.
    He looked down at her, oddly, as if she were not there. He was still listening.
    She turned the portable radio up full, loud. It exploded words and rhythm and melody:
    â€œâ€”I found a million-dollar baby—”
    He made a wry face, raising his open palm violently. “Turn it off.”
    â€œNo, I like it!” She turned it louder. She snapped her fingers, rocking her body vaguely, trying to smile.
    It was two o’clock.
    The sun steamed the waters. The ancient pier expanded with a loud groan in the heat. The birds were held in the hot sky, unable to move. The sun struck through the green liquors that poured about the pier;struck, caught and burnished an idle whiteness that drifted in the offshore ripples.
    The white foam, the frosted coral brain, the kelp pip, the tide dust lay in the water, spreading.
    The dark man still lay on the sand, the woman in the black suit beside him.
    Music drifted up like mist from the water. It was a whispering music of deep tides and passed years, of salt and travel, of accepted and familiar strangenesses. The music sounded not unlike water on the shore, rain falling, the turn of soft limbs in the depths. It was a singing of a time-lost voice in a caverned seashell. The hissing and sighing of tides in deserted holds of treasure ships. The sound the wind makes in an empty skull thrown out on the baked sand.
    But the radio on the blanket on the beach played louder.
    The phosphorescence, light as a woman, sank down, tired, from sight. Only a few more hours. They might leave at any time. If only he would come in, for an instant, just an instant. The mists stirred silently, aware of his face and his body in the water, deep under. Aware of him caught, held, as they sank ten fathoms down, on a sluice that bore them twisting and turning in frantic gesticulations, to the depths of a hidden gulf in the