Everybody dies, don't they?

Everybody come back.

Isn't that so?

You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?

How do the dead comeback, mother?

What's the secret? The Crowd by Ray Bradbury.

Mr. Spalner put his hands over his face.

There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream,

the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy,

and him hurled out of it. Then, silence. The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them

running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer

grass, and on the lined pavement

and over the asphalt street and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung

half into the night sky still spinning its wheels with senseless centrifuge. Where the crowd came

from he didn't know. He struggled to remain aware, and then the crowd

faces hemmed in upon him, hung over him like the large growing leaves of down-bent trees.

There were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking

down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into

a moon dial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time

of breathing or not breathing any more after. How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the

iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere,

a siren, a police voice, movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an

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