Summerhill Read Free Page B

up with questions. But the dog lived there for quite some time before he got around to that.
    In the World of the Pale Gray Sky, there were no storms, and there was no rain; the sky was simply always gray, the same dull, uniform color in all directions. The gray did not come from clouds; the gray simply was. Sometimes there were clouds, or what looked like they might have been clouds, but Summerhill never paid those much heed.
    There was no sun, either, and so there was no night and no day, no way to demarcate the passage of time, and so Summerhill never bothered to do so.
    The backdrop of that sky was broken only by tall, angular buildings that stabbed upwards, spearing the faintly-swirled gray in all directions, as far as the eye could see. Many of the buildings were a drab green; others were steel blue or slate blue; more rarely were they hues of yellow or red. Some had windows; some did not.
    Nobody lived in those innumerable buildings, though. Nobody ever went into them, and nobody ever came out. Nobody wandered the endless streets between them. Nobody except for a lone dog named Summerhill. The whole world was one unending city, all for him.
    Summerhill himself was far more colorful than anything else in his world. The rich hues of his fur stood out against the backdrop wherever he went. Even the clothes he wore all had the same washed-out, drab look to them, as if the world itself refused to allow too much color into it, but try as it might, it couldn’t leach the color out of him .
    One thing the dog had noticed from time to time, when passing mirrors and windows, was that the gray of his eyes matched the gray of the sky exactly. He’d forget this on occasion, and whenever reminded of it, he would ponder the similarity only briefly before dismissing it as coincidence.
    Summerhill could also make the plants grow. He would do this on occasion, in order to add a tiny splash of color to the world around him. Flowers would sprout from the grayish-green grass of the city’s deserted parks or blossom on trees or grow up between the cracks in the pavement whenever he willed them to. These flowers didn’t thrive in his world of no sunlight, though, and they always eventually faded and turned the same pale gray as the sky, the same pale gray as his eyes.
    Plants didn’t make for particularly good company, besides, and the lack of anyone to provide friendship or companionship had come to wear at him more and more as time continued to drift by. Eventually, it dawned on Summerhill that it was a little silly that he’d have a place like this all to himself. He could have all the time in the world (and near as he could tell, he did) and even then he’d still never get to see it all. So what was the point of it?
    For as long as he could remember, he was the only person who had ever lived in the World of the Pale Gray Sky. It seemed obvious that other people must have lived there at some point, though, since there were all those towering buildings that struck up into the sky in all directions, and someone must have built those. Right?
    The question was largely academic, but before Summerhill could spend much time pondering its ramifications, the blue light appeared.
    By itself, the blue light might not have been remarkable, except for the fact that it marked, for the first time in Summerhill’s memory, the one time anything had happened in the World of the Pale Gray Sky. That in and of itself was far more interesting than any academic or theoretical quandary.
    To the unaided eye, it was a merely beam of blue light that had streaked across the sky. Summerhill had never seen a shade of blue so bright, so intense, so different . He would have thought it was a shooting star, except that it wasn’t dark out, and moreover, neither stars nor darkness actually existed.
    He contemplated the streak of light as he leaned against the wall of a tobacconist’s shop that had no actual tobacconist to run it. His eyes peered out at the dull