Jack Williamson - The Firefly Tree

VIP免费

2024-11-19 1 0 23.55KB 3 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

THE FIREFLY TREE

by Jack Williamson

__________________________________

Reprinted in Year's Best SF 3

HarperPrism

ISBN 0-06-105901-3

eBook scanned & proofed by binwiped 11-10-02 [v1.0]

They had come back to live on the old farm where his grandfather was born. His father loved it,

but he felt lonely for his friends in the city. Cattle sometimes grazed through the barren sandhills

beyond the barbed wire fences, but there were no neighbors. He found no friends except the

firefly tree.

It grew in the old fruit orchard his grandfather had planted below the house. His mouth

watered for the ripe apples and peaches and pears he expected, but when he saw the trees they

were all dead or dying. They bore no fruit.

With no friends at all, he stayed with his father on the farm when his mother drove away

every morning to work at the peanut mill. His father was always busy in the garden he made

among the bare trees in the orchard. The old windmill had lost its wheel, but there was an electric

pump for water. Cantaloupe and squash vines grew along the edge of the garden, with rows of

tomatoes and beans, and then the corn that grew tall enough to hide the money trees.

His mother fretted that they might cause trouble. Once he heard her call them marijuana. His

father quickly hushed her. The word was strange to him but he never asked what it meant because

he saw his father didn't like it.

He found the firefly tree one day while his father was chopping weeds and moving the pipes

that sprayed water on his money trees. It was still tiny then, not as tall as his knee. The leaves

were odd: thin arrowheads of glossy black velvet, striped with silver. A single lovely flower had

three wide sky-colored petals and a bright yellow star at the center. He sat on the ground by it,

breathing its strange sweetness, till his father came by with the hoe.

"Don't hurt it!" he begged. "Please!"

"That stinking weed?" his father grunted. "Get out of the way."

Something made him reach to catch the hoe.

"Okay." His father grinned and let it stay. "If you care that much."

He called it his tree, and watched it grow. When it wilted in a week with no rain, he found a

bucket and carried water from the well. It grew taller than he was, with a dozen of the great blue

flowers and then a hundred. The odor of them filled the garden.

Since there was no school, his mother tried to teach him at home. She found a red-backed

reader for him, and a workbook with pages for him to fill out while she was away at work. He

seldom got the lessons done.

"He's always mooning over that damn weed," his father muttered when she scolded him.

"High as a kite on the stink of it."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

展开>> 收起<<

Jack Williamson - The Firefly Tree.pdf

共3页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Jack Williamson - The Firefly Tree

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: