A/N: Since there's no separate category for other Bradbury stories, I'm posting this tag to 'Ylla', part of The Martian Chronicles.
"I'll be all right tomorrow."
Well, tomorrow was here, and she wasn't all right.
Ylla stood in the doorway of the house she shared with her husband. In the background she could faintly hear his 'singing book' as his fingers passed over the hieroglyphs. She'd grown tired of that song and its wistful tale of Mars long ago.
Before land turned red, and the waters turned to dust, a green land was this planet's mother...
She shut out the sound, instead focusing on a song that had become as much a part of her as her flat yellow eyes and slightly dreamy disposition.
Drink to me only with thine eyes...
The dusty, red, endlessly barren terrain seemed to fade away at thought of space-ships and a strange being with blue eyes and black hair. Nathaniel York. Real or not, he'd seemed like a kind person, and had made her feel like there still was such a thing as kindness and respect.
Something she hadn't felt with Yll for years.
"Drink to me only with thine eyes," she sang softly. If she kept singing...wishing...hoping...maybe this Nathaniel would come take her away to this 'earth' place he'd talked about in her dream. Or had it been reality? She couldn't tell anymore.
There was no answer but the heat of the scorching sun seeping into her skin and the unchanging plains of red dust and dry fossils.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said miserably. "And it will never be all right."