Ray Bradbury's 'There Will Come Soft Rains' Is Set on This Date

Ray Bradbury's short story There Will Come Soft Rains opens with a clock announcing the date: "Today is August 4, 2026, the city of Allendale, California." That date, long a piece of science-fiction shorthand for the distant future, has now arrived — a quiet occasion for readers who noticed the calendar catching up with the text.

What the story describes

The tale takes place in a house that runs itself. A voice-clock sings the hours; the kitchen stove produces breakfast for a family — eight pieces of toast, eight eggs, sixteen slices of bacon, coffee and milk — and later scrapes the untouched meal into the sink. Robot mice clean the floors, the nursery walls animate animals for the children's hour, card tables and martinis appear on the patio, and a voice asks Mrs. McClellan which poem she would like read that evening. Nobody answers, because nobody is there.

A house alone in a ruined city

Only gradually does the story reveal the setting: the house is the one house left standing in a city of rubble and ashes, which at night gives off a radioactive glow visible for miles. The west wall is scorched black except for five silhouettes burned into the paint — a man mowing a lawn, a woman bending to pick flowers, a small boy with his hands flung into the air, a thrown ball, and a girl reaching to catch it. A sick dog wanders in and dies.

The poem it reads to nobody

That evening the house selects, at random, Sara Teasdale's poem There Will Come Soft Rains. The verses describe swallows, frogs and wild plum trees and conclude that nature would scarcely notice if mankind perished utterly. The poem gives the story its title and its argument: the machine keeps performing human rituals for an audience that no longer exists.

How it ends

A falling branch breaks a kitchen window and spills cleaning solvent, and the house fights the resulting fire with pumps, water rats, wall sprays and chemicals stored in the attic. The fire wins; the house collapses into its own cellar. Among the ruins one wall survives, and inside it a single voice repeats, over and over, "Today is August 5, 2026". The full text is available at the link below.