By Trent Jamieson
Read by Cheyenne Wright
“My Daniel’s out there.” Mother Beet crossed her stick-thin legs, lit a cigarillo, then offered me one. I shook my head, staring into the black hollows where her eyes should be. Black hollows that held my measure, nonetheless, and stared back. Tiny brown cockroaches nested in the right orbit. They bubbled and hissed, irritated by the smoke perhaps. “I can feel him, sure’s the memory of spittin’ the bastard, bloody and blind-eyed, out of me womb.”
I sat, and her smoke-bound mutterings washed against me. Folk like that, their words are weighty. You listen and not without fear.
By Kevin Anderson
Read by KJ Johnson
Blood gathered in pools around the body as the afternoon sun gave it a sickly glimmer. I remember thinking how much the dark liquid really seemed to belong on the pavement. Like oil, transmission fluid or lizard-green coolant, the blood was at home on the asphalt.
It’s amazing the things you notice when events force you to grown up in the span of a moment. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story really starts two hours earlier, with Gina.
Standard Podcast [38:17m]:
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By Andrew Nicolle
Read by Amanda Fitzwater
The place we’re heading for is called Island Lagoon, smack-bang in the middle of the South Australian Outback. It looks like everything else out here in the bush: dry, dusty, the odd saltbush scattered along the plain. But I know this place is different.
First, the name is a bit inaccurate. You’d think a place called Island Lagoon would have some water, or maybe some swampland. It doesn’t. Not usually, anyway. Most of the year it’s just a dry saltpan, and if you blinked, you’d probably miss it.
Sometimes though… sometimes after heavy rain it turns into a salt lake. And when it does, things can get disturbed.
By Joel Arnold
Read by Ben Phillips
Okay, this is where it gets tricky. Confession time. The night I cheated on my wife -
No - let’s save that for later.
The night Mary wakes up and screams “I can hear him! Make him stop!”
“Honey, it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
She sits up staring blindly as I turn on the bedside lamp, “No, I heard him. I saw him. His shadow - like he was over me, breathing.”
“Settle down. You were having a bad dream.”
“No,” she insists. The bed shakes with her tremors. “No.”
“You were dreaming.”
She starts to cry.
Standard Podcast [19:17m]:
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By Russell L. Burt
Read by Elie Hirschman
Kenneth was twelve when the significance of garbage day first struck him. That’s when it became his job to patrol the household’s trash bins, bag their contents, and then toss the bags into the huge plastic garbage can outside his kitchen door. Well, now it was a huge blue can. Back then it had been a couple of smaller, metal cans. But superficial differences aside, the result was always the same. The detritus that had accumulated over the week was gone, disappearing while you slept, as if by magic.
Standard Podcast [3:25m]:
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