Free I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury Page A

strange green hair lay in the shallows. Among the stirring glitter, deep under, was the man.
    Fragile. The foam bubbled and broke. The frosted coral brain rang against a pebble with thought, as quickly lost as found. Men. Fragile. Like dolls, they break. Nothing, nothing to them. A minute under water and they’re sick and pay no attention and they vomit out and kick and then, suddenly, just lie there, doing nothing. Doing nothing at all. Strange. Disappointing, after all the days of waiting.
    What to do with him now? His head lolls, his mouth opens, his eyelids loosen, his eyes stare, his skin pales. Silly man, wake up! Wake up!
    The water surged about him.
    The man hung limply, loosely, mouth agape.
    The phosphorescence, the green hair weed withdrew.
    He was released. A wave carried him back to the silent shore. Back to his wife, who was waiting for him there in the cold rain.
    The rain poured over the black waters.
    Distantly, under the leaden skies, from the twilight shore, a woman screamed.
    Ah —the ancient dusts stirred sluggishly in the water—isn’t that like a woman? Now, she doesn’t want him, either!
    At seven o’clock the rain fell thick. It was night and very cold and the hotels all along the sea had to turn on the heat.

The Inspired Chicken Motel
    I t was in the Depression, deep down in the empty soul of the Depression in 1932, when we were heading west by 1928 Buick, that my mother, father, my brother Skip, and I came upon what we ever after called the Inspired Chicken Motel.
    It was, my father said, a motel straight out of Revelations. And the one strange chicken at that motel could no more help making said Revelations, write on eggs, than a holy roller can help going wild with utterances of God, Time, and Eternity writhing along his limbs, seeking passage out the mouth.
    Some creatures are given to talents inclined one way, some another. But chickens are the greatest dumb brute mystery of them all. Especially hens who think or intuit messages calcium-scrawled forth in a nice neat hand upon the shells wherein their offspring twitch asleep.
    Little did we know that long autumn of 1932, as we blew tires and flung fan bells like lost garters down Highway 66, that somewhere ahead that motel, and that most peculiar chicken, were waiting.
    Along the way, our family was a wonderful nest of amiable contempt. Holding the maps, my brother and I knew we were a helluva lot smarter than Dad, Dad knew he was smarter than Mom, and Mom knew she could brain the whole bunch, any time.
    That makes for perfection.
    I mean, any family that has a proper disrespect, each for the other, can stay together. As long as there is something to fight about, people will come to meals. Lose that and the family disintegrates.
    So we leaped out of bed each day hardly able to wait to hear what dumb thing someone might say over the hard-fried bacon and the under-fried scrambleds. The toast was too dark or too light. There was jam for only one person. Or it was a flavor that two out of four hated. Hand us a set of bells and we could ring all the wrong changes. If Dad claimedhe was still growing, Skip and I ran the tape measure out to prove he’d shrunk during the night. That’s humanity. That’s nature. That’s family.
    But like I said, there we were grousing down Illinois, quarreling through the leaf change in the Ozarks autumn where we stopped sniping all of ten minutes to see the fiery colors. Then, pot-shotting and sniveling across Kansas and Oklahoma we plowed into a fine deep-red muck and slid off the road on a detour where each of us could bless himself and blame others for the excavations, the badly painted signs, and the lack of brakeage in our old Buick. Out of the ditch, we unloaded ourselves into a great Buck-a-Night Bungalow Court in a murderers’ ambush behind a woods and on the rim of a deep rock-quarry where our bodies might be found years later at the bottom of a lost and sourceless