Ray Bradbury response thingy

Hey readers!

In language arts class (we don't have english, we have 'language arts') we read a story called "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury. I don't know if any of you have read it. I'm not really a Bradbury fan myself - all his weirdness just kinda, well, weirds me out - but I did like this story. However, I digress.

Basically the story is about life on a rainy Venus when the sun can only be seen once every seven years. A class of children is supposed to be let outside to play for two hours while the sun shines, but one of the kids - a certain William - locks a girl in a closet, so she misses the precious time. The girl is frail little Margot (Bradbury actually doesn't mention a surname, I just added it cause I felt like it), who hasn't lived on Venus her whole life, as the other kids have, but remembers what life on earth is like.

My class (which is not on Venus, thank you very much) was supposed to answer questions about the story and do a vocabulary assignment, but after reading my last assignment (the photo essay I posted the other day), my teacher was duly impressed with my writing talent and allowed me to instead write this.

The 'this' in question is a letter from one of the other children in Margot's class to a friend (or relative, I don't know which; whoever they are, their name is Sam) back on earth. Now, the letter-writer is fictional. I just invented her to show an outside perspective on the conflict in the story.

Dear Sam,

Yesterday should have been wonderful, because we got to see the sun. And it was wonderful, at first. But as soon as the beautiful sun was gone and it began to rain again, we all felt absolutely terrible. I still feel absolutely terrible, because what William did - and what the rest of us helped him to do - has most likely ruined Margot Kandien's childhood.

Here is what happened. As you, Sam, probably know, yesterday was the day when the sun was to be visible from Venus, the planet where I live. Our schoolteacher was to let us outside during those magical two hours, but she had to deliver a note to another teacher first. She was gone for about twenty minutes, and during those twenty minutes William locked Margot in the closet.

Why didn't I help her? Why did I just stand there, laughing like an imbecile? Poor little Margot, the only one of us who really remembered the sun.

It was the only time there will be sun here for seven years, and we deprived

Margot of it, the one who needed it more than any of us. It should have been me. William should have locked me in the closet, and Margot should have been the one to see the sun!

Now nobody knows what to do with William. True, he didn't really mean to keep Margot from seeing the sun; he just meant to keep her locked up until the teacher got back to let us outside. But in our excitement we all forgot, just forgot about her - pale little Margot Kandien with her washed-out eyes. She is the only one who knew, who really remembered what the sun was like. She tried to tell us about it once. She called it a penny, a fire in the stove, but we told her she was lying and ran off laughing. Why did we call her a liar? Poor wispy Margot, who cried in the shower room and wouldn't let the water touch her head. Was it too much like the constant rain, rain that slowly drilled into her, washed all the color from her until she became so thin and soft to near transparency, so that it seems like a single gust of wind would waft her away?

Margot wasn't lying, not at all. The sun is like a penny, and a fire, and so many other things too, and she knew them all and would have told us of them if only we hadn't been so resentful of her knowledge. She knows so much more than we do, about Earth and the sun and what life is like down there on your planet, the place we Venus children can only dream about.

And now she'll never be the same. I haven't seen her since yesterday, but I can tell, from the way she looked when she came out of that closet, that she'll be different. She'll be worse. I know, and she knows, that her parents can't afford to send her back to Earth. She'll have to wait, Margot will, until she's sixteen and can glimpse the sun at last. And if William tries to lock her up again or in any way prevent her from seeing it, that marvelous, beautiful sun that was everything we could have imagined and more, I will do all in my power to stop him, even if it means letting him and the others lock me up in her place.

Because Margot's got to see the sun again. She's got to.

Yours Truly,

Hannah Vaine

OKAY, so maybe a child of the age mentioned in the story (which is nine, by the way) wouldn't have written this. But I think it's good anyway, don't you?