While Bradbury does not give a specific date indicating when the story is set, the audience can infer that the story takes place in the distant future judging by the complex society built on a faraway planet.

The main character, Margot, is an outcast, who is bullied and criticized by her classmates for being different. Unlike the other nine-year-old students, Margot moved to Venus five years ago and remembers seeing the sun when she lived in Ohio. Margot has no friends and is portrayed as a rather timid, melancholy girl, who misses the warmth of the sun. On the exact day that the rain is supposed to stop, Margot's classmates lock her inside a closet, where she misses the rare opportunity to enjoy the sun.

The story is set in Venus sometime in the future on a day when the rain stops briefly.

A group of children are living on Venus.  It rains every day for seven years.  The children have not seen the sun in all that time.  The children are nine years old, and have not seen the sun since it came out seven years before for an hour.

And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.

A girl named Margot came from Earth, and remembers the sun.  The other children are angry because she has seen it and they haven’t.  On the one day the sun comes out they decide to lock her in a closet, and she misses the few minutes of sun.

The story demonstrates that children are children, no matter the setting.  The children are cruel to Margot because she is different, and because they are jealous.  Due to their actions, she misses seeing the sun.  Only then do the children regret what they have done.

Although the story is set on Venus, the context is white, middle-class America of the 1950s. The children go to a well-run middle-class elementary school with time to talk about the sun coming out and to write essays or poem about it. They are not forced wholly into rote learning and are encouraged to express themselves creatively, which are features we associate with middle-class schools.

We don't get a description of the other students, but Margot is a white girl, seemingly of European descent, as she is blond-haired and blue eyed:

the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair.

We also learn she is from Ohio, a quintessentially American midwest state. This is the world of "Dick and Jane" books: even though we don't know, we can assume the other children are similarly as white as Margot (however, a reader of different ethnicity could feel free to assign whatever background they wanted to the other students—this is one of the joys of the lack of description).

We also know that the parents are aspirational and middle-class: they tolerate the ever rainy climate on Venus because of the high pay. Bradbury is recreating a world familiar to his American readers of the 1950s.