The main conflict in the story is between Margot, a child who has relatively recently moved to Venus from Earth, and the other children in her class. The story takes place on Venus, a planet of constant rain, except for a few hours every seven years, when the sun briefly comes out. Margot is withdrawn and poetic, and refuses to play the games the other children enjoy. But her real crime is memory: "that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was." Margot's memory of the sun, in a sense, is her memory of being human. When the children lock her in a closet and forget about her during the time when the sun finally comes out, it is as if they are trying to erase, or deny, her humanity. The story ends, however, without any resolution to this conflict: what Margot does, after they let her out of the closet, is anyone's guess.
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