The title is from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale. The story is about a lone house that remains intact in a city obliterated by a nuclear bomb. There is no dialogue, other than the chilling automated pre-recorded devices within the house, giving the illusion that these objects are alive. The only things alive. The shock of the shadows of the family on the wall, frozen in time, is an eerie, emotionally annihilating, and starkly relevant, image.
First published in Collier’s Weekly, 1950, and collected in The Martian Chronicles, 1997
A Personal Anthology 