Short Story Wednesday: "A Touch of Petulance" by Ray Bradbury

 

The story I am featuring comes from the collection Killer Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury. It was published by Hard Case Crime in 2020; the stories were selected by Jonathan R. Eller.

Bradbury wrote three crime novels in 1985, 1990, and 2002, but most of his short stories were in other genres. About half of the stories in Killer Come Back To Me are from the 1940s, and the others are from later decades. This book has a very nice cover and includes illustrations preceding some of the stories.

There is an introduction by Jonathan R. Eller. At the end, there is an essay by Ray Bradbury that was intended to be an introduction to A Memory of Murder, a collection of crime stories published in 1984. This seems appropriate since a number of stories that were in A Memory of Murder are also in Killer Come Back To Me.

"A Touch of Petulance"

First sentence:

"On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his 29th birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life."

I was surprised and delighted that this story has elements of time travel. 

Jonathan Hughes meets an older man on the train on the way home. He notices that this older man is holding a newspaper dated 20 years in the future, and that paper features an article about the death of his wife. The older version of Jonathan has come back in time to try to prevent her death.

The story was first published in 1980 in Dark Forces, a horror anthology edited by Kirby McCauley. It was adapted as an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater TV series; Eddie Albert plays the older man in that episode.