Something Wicked This Way Comes (Fantasy Masterworks 49) by Ray Bradbury

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So it was this night, Will's eyes shut, head leaned to the cool plaster. At first Dad's voice, a Congo drum, boomed softly, horizons away. Mother's voice, she used her water-bright soprano in the Baptist choir, did not sing, yet sang back replies. Will imagined Dad sprawled talking to the empty ceiling: '…Will…makes me feel so old…a man should play baseball with his son…' 'Not necessary,' said the woman's voice, kindly. ' ' - in a bad season. Hell, I was forty when he was born! And you! Who's your daughter?

Why he's the last peach, high on the summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them? But Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why; he knows.

It was blonde to whiteness and might take any colour, once set free of cold. How tall was she? The prism of the ice might well multiply her size or diminish her as you moved this way or that before the empty store, the window, the night-soft rap-tapping ever-fingering, gently probing moths. Not important. For above all - the lightning-rod salesman shivered - he knew the most extraordinary thing. If by some miracle her eyelids should open within that sapphire and she should look at him, he knew what colour her eyes would be.