To conclude my series about the books that left a deep imprint on my psyche, I want to tell you about Ray Bradbury.
I don’t remember how old I was — I want to say, ten? — when I fell hard for Ray Bradbury’s legendary short stories. I remember the Martians with their beautiful golden eyes. I remember a children’s bedroom with Safari-themed wallpaper (or something) that came alive.
But the story that touched me the most was one called “Tomorrow’s Child.”
In the story, a family is using some sort of a crazy-futuristic-experimental procedure to have a baby. And of course, there is a problem. The baby is born — um, a triangle. No it isn’t a deformity or an extra chromosome — through some sort of weird accident the baby got born into another dimension, and that is why he looks this way to his horror-stricken parents.
The parents try everything.  In the end, they come to the best solution of all. Instead of trying to change their child, they decide to use the weird-experiment-machine-process-whatever to enter into their child’s dimension, themselves.
Here is what the beautiful ending looks like: to the rest of the world, the mother, father and their baby are freaks, some sort of shapes, which ones I don’t remember. But to each other, the three look completely normal. More than that — they look beautiful.
Something about this ending grabbed me and never let go. I just loved it so much, the idea that you can be a triangle, and you don’t have to change. The others can change for you, if they want to.
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