The Burning Man by Ray Bradbury (Long After Midnight, 1976)1 opens with a boy called Doug and his Aunt Neva driving to the lake in a “rickety Ford” on a baking hot day. On the way they stop to pick up a hitchhiker, a strange man who, as soon he gets in the car, starts raving about the heat, whether it can make you crazy, and various other things. Eventually, after asking Neva if she thinks there is genetic evil in the world, he articulates his strangest idea yet:
“Now,” said the man, squinting one eye at the cool lake five miles ahead, his other eye shut into darkness and ruminating on coal-bins of fact there, “listen. What if the intense heat, I mean the really hot hot heat of a month like this, week like this, day like today, just baked the Ornery Man right out of the river mud. Been there buried in the mud for forty-seven years, like a damn larva, waiting to be born. And he shook himself awake and looked around, full grown, and climbed out of the hot mud into the world and said, ‘I think I’ll eat me some summer.’”
“How’s that again?”
“Eat me some summer, boy, summer, ma’am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain’t they a whole dinner? Look at that field of wheat, ain’t that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there’s breakfast. Tarpaper on top that house, there’s lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that’s dinner wine, drink it all!”
“I’m thirsty, all right,” said Doug.
“Thirsty, hell, boy, thirst don’t begin to describe the state of a man, come to think about him, come to talk, who’s been waiting in the hot mud thirty years and is born but to die in one day! Thirst! Ye Gods! Your ignorance is complete.”
“Well,” said Doug.
“Well,” said the man. “Not only thirst but hunger. Hunger. Look around. Not only eat the trees and then the flowers blazing by the roads but then the white-hot panting dogs. There’s one. There’s another! And all the cats in the country. There’s two, just passed three! And then just glutton-happy begin to why, why not, begin to get around to, let me tell you, how’s this strike you, eat people? I mean—people! Fried, cooked, boiled, and parboiled people. Sunburned beauties of people. Old men, young. Old ladies’ hats and then old ladies under their hats and then young ladies’ scarves and young ladies, and then young boys’ swim-trunks, by God, and young boys, elbows, ankles, ears, toes, and eyebrows! Eyebrows, by God, men, women, boys, ladies, dogs, fill up the menu, sharpen your teeth, lick your lips, dinner’s on!”
At this point Aunt Neva, who is obviously alarmed by the man’s raving, stops the car and tells him to get out, adding that she is armed with various items to ward off evil (crucifixes, holy water, wooden stakes, etc.). Aunt Neva and Doug continue their journey to the beach, and he learns that she lied to the man about being suitably equipped.
After a few hours at the lake they drive home in the dark. On the way (spoiler) they pick up a nine-year-old boy who has supposedly been left behind after a picnic. He is silent for a while, but then says something to Aunt Neva that makes her go pale. When Doug asks the boy what he said the car’s engine stops, and the boy asks whether either of them have ever wondered “if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world?”
This is, like most late-period Bradbury, over-written and fanciful, and in this case has also a random ending—presumably the boy is another incarnation of the man, but this doesn’t tie in with the creation theory outlined earlier, or explain why the man didn’t pull this trick when he was first in the car. Just because this is a fantasy, it doesn’t mean that any old thing can happen.
* (Mediocre). 2,400 words. Story link.
1. According to ISFDB, this was first published as El Hombre Que Ardea in Gente (Argentina), 31st July 1975.