A Sound of Thunder

The story takes place in the future where time traveling has already been invented. A man named Eckles goes on a Safari to the past where the focus is to hunt a T-Rex. He, and the rest of the safari, are given explicit instructions to not step off the path and not to touch anything. When Eckles gets freaked out by his first glimpse of the T-Rex and the whole group runs back to the time machine, Eckles goes off the path. He discovers that besides just mud on the bottom of his boots there's a small, crushed butterfly. When they return to present day, they discover that everything has changed, from the language they speak to the president that was just elected. Eckles is shot by the leader of the safari.

A cool quote during their interaction with the T-Rex, is: "The Monster,at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in six seconds.  The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast's mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun." The description and word choice in this paragraph really pull the reader into the moment and makes them experience the different sensations that the characters are. I can almost see the gun shots and smell the slime and old blood.

On a side note, I think it's a bit ironic how stepping on one butterfly can change the world so monumentally while the whole point of the trip was to hunt the Tyrannosaurus.

Embroidery

The story begins with a group of woman sitting in rocking chairs, embroidering. They are discussing something, though it's not clear what. It becomes clear, as the story moves on, that something is going to happen that they all know about,, something bad. They talk about simple things that they won't have to do past that night, like making dinner or reading papers, while they begin to cry. One woman who's embroidering a lovely scene, messes up a man's face on her cloth and undos the whole man instead of just his face, leaving an empty landscape. At one minute to five, they all head out to the porch. When the clock strikes five and nothing seems to happen, all the woman relax, but not even thrity seconds later a fire can be seen rapidly making its way towards them and destroying everything in its path.

A quote that left an impression on me was the very end of the story. One of the woman compares herself to an embroidery as the fire wrecks havoc on the area. "For now, yes, now! it was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh, the pink thread of her cheeks, and at last it found her heart, a soft red rose sewn with fire, and it burned the fresh, embroidered petals away, one by delicate one...." The story ends like this, with the elipses and the image of burning flesh. It's interesting how Ray Bradbury makes this scene sound so beautiful and calm as everything is destroyed. The juxtaposition is what is so haunting.

The Garbage Collector

This story by Ray Bradbury is called The Garbage Collector and it tells the simple story of a garbage man. At first, the story discusses the mundane aspects of his job and the little ways he and his friends keep it interesting, then it takes us right to him having a discussion with his wife about how he wants to quit his job. You're left startled and curious and as he proceeds, you're left to slowly gather information about what's going on; finally coming to the conclusion that there is a war going on and it will soon become the garbage men's job to clean up the dead bodies. The story itself is anticlamactic considering that nothing actually happens and no action is taken, but the images you're left with leave you shaken.

A shocking quote that the protagonist says to himself is: "Wondering if you put the bodies in the trucks... with the heads on the right, or the feet on the right. Men and women together, or separated? Children in one truck, or mixed with men and women? Dogs in special trucks, or just let them lay? Wondering how many bodies one garbage truck can hold. And wondering if you stack them on top of each other and finally knowing you must just have to."

This story is definitely interesting and is successful as a short story. Though nothing extraordinary physically happens, you're left to ponder and fill in the blanks, which almost makes the story more effective since one's imagination can supply more detail than any written story.