Farewell Summer ~ Ray Bradbury - Marimarister

―Then we stop it! We find out how our folks make us grow, teach us to lie, cheat, steal.
War? Great! Murder? Swell! We‘ll never be so well off as we are right now ! Grow up and you
turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the
First National Bank behind brass bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah!
All you do then is marry someone who screams at you! Well, do we fight back? Will you let me
tell you how to run?‖
―Gosh,‖ said Charlie. ―Yeah!‖
―Then,‖ said Doug, ―talk to your body: Bones, not one more inch! Statues! Don‘t forget,
Quartermain owns this graveyard. He makes money if we lie here, you and you and you ! But
we‘ll show him. And all those old men who own the town! Halloween‘s almost here and before
then we got to sour their grapes! You wanna look like them? You know how they got that way?
Well, they were all young once, but somewhere along the way, oh gosh, when they were thirty or
forty or fifty, they chewed tobacco and phlegm-hocked up on themselves and that phlegm-hock
turned all gummy and sticky and then the next thing you know there was spittle all over them
and they began to look like, you know, you‘ve seen, caterpillars turned into chrysalis, their
darned skin hardened, and the young guys turned old, got trapped inside their shells, by God.
Then they began to look like all those old guys. So, what you have is old men with young guys
trapped inside them. Some year soon, maybe, their skin will crack and the old men will let the
old young men out. But they won‘t be young anymore, they‘ll be a bunch of death‘s-head moths
or, come to think of it, I think the old men are going to keep the young men inside them forever,
so they‘re trapped in all that glue, always hoping to get free. It‘s pretty bad, isn‘t it? Pretty bad.‖
―Is that it, Doug?‖ said Tom.
―Yeah,‖ said Pete. ―You sure you know what you‘re talking about?‖
―What Pete is trying to say is that we gotta know with precision, we gotta know what‘s
accurate,‖ said Bo.
―I‘ll say it again,‖ said Doug. ―You listen close. Tom, you taking this down?‖
―Yup,‖ said Tom, his pencil poised over his note-pad. ―Shoot.‖
They stood in the darkening shadows, in the smell of grass and leaves and old roses and
cold stone and raised their heads, sniffling, and wiped their cheeks on their shirtsleeves.
―Okay, then,‖ said Doug. ―Let‘s go over it again. It‘s not enough just seeing these graves.
We‘ve got to sneak under open windows, listen, discover what those old geezers are sick with.
Tom, go get the pumpkins out of Grandma‘s pantry. We‘re gonna have a contest, see which of us
can carve the scariest pumpkin. One to look like old man Quartermain, one like Bleak, one like
Gray. Light them up and put them out. Later tonight we start our first attack with the carved
pumpkins. Okay?‖