Free The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury

returning.
    Then—I knew.
    ‘I’ll help you to finish it,’ I said.
    I did. I built the rest of it up very slowly, then I arose and turned away and walked off, so as not to watch in crumble in the waves, as all things crumble.
    I walked back up the beach to where a strange woman named Margaret was waiting for me, smiling…

The Coffin
    There was any amount of banging and hammering for a number of days: deliveries of metal parts and oddments which Mr Charles Braling took into his little workshop with a feverish anxiety. He was a dying man, a badly dying man, and he seemed to be in a great hurry, between racking coughs and spittlings, to piece together one last invention.
    ‘What are you doing?’ inquired his younger brother, Richard Braling. He had listened with increasing difficulty and much curiosity for a number of days to that banging and rattling about, and now he stuck his head through the work-room door.
    ‘Go far far away and let me alone,’ said Charles Braling, who was seventy, trembly and wet-lipped most of the time. He trembled nails into place and trembled a hammer down with a weak blow upon a large timber and then struck a small metal ribbon down into an intricate machine, and, all in all, was having a carnival of labor.
    Richard looked on, bitter-eyed, for a long moment. There was a hatred between them. It had gone on for some years and now was neither any better nor any worse for the fact that Charlie was dying. Richard was delighted to know of the impending death, if he thought of it at all. But all this busy fervor of his old brothers stimulated him.
    ‘Pray tell,’ he said, not moving from the door.
    ‘If you must know,’ snarled old Charles, fitting in an odd thingumabob on the box before him, ‘I’ll be dead in another week and I’m—I’m building my own coffin!’
    ‘A coffin, my dear Charlie. That doesn’t look like a coffin. A coffin isn’t that complex. Come on now, what are you up to?’
    ‘I tell you it’s a coffin! An odd coffin, yes, but nevertheless,’ the old man shivered his fingers around in the large box, ‘—nevertheless a coffin!’
    ‘But it would be easier to buy one.’
    ‘Not one like this! You couldn’t buy one like this anyplace, ever. Oh, it’ll be a real fine coffin, all right.’
    ‘You’re obviously lying.’ Richard moved forward. ‘Why, that coffin is a good twelve feet long. Six feet longer than normal size!’
    ‘Oh, yes?’ The old man laughed quietly.
    ‘And that transparent top: who ever heard of a coffin lid you can see through? What good is a transparent lid to a corpse?’
    ‘Oh, just never you mind at all,’ sang the old man heartily. ‘La!’ And he went humming and hammering about the shop.
    ‘This coffin is terribly thick,’ shouted the young brother over the din. ‘Why, it must be five feet thick: how utterly unnecessary!’
    ‘I only wish I might live to patent this amazing coffin,’ said old Charlie. ‘It would be a god-send to all the poor peoples of the world. Think how it would eliminate the expenses of most funerals. Oh, but, of course, you don’t know how it would do that, do you? How silly of me. Well, I shan’t tell you. If this coffin could be mass-produced—expensive at first, naturally—but then when you finally got them made in vast quantities, gah, but the money people would save.’
    ‘To hell with you!’ And the younger brother stormed out of the shop.
    It had been an unpleasant life. Young Richard had always been such a bounder he never had two coins to clink together at one time: all of his money had come from old brother Charlie, who had the indecency to remind him of it at all times. Richard spent many hours with his hobbies: he dearly loved piling up bottles with French wine labels, in the garden. ‘I like the way they glint,’ he often said, sitting and sipping, sipping and sitting. He was the only man in the county who could hold the longest gray ash on a fifty-cent cigar for the longest