Of course, these kinds of stories are ultimately reassuring, as they promise a universe that cares about “justice” - unless he’s just lost his mind. Someone once posited that the EC TALES FROM THE CRYPT Story Model A (killer gets his comeuppance in poetically appropriate way, usually involving the risen dead) was a last gasp of Romanticism in an unlikely form - gosh darn it, the universe still cares about un-righted wrongs but the only vehicle it has left is a rotting corpse.

Thanks for listening.

“Humor is a developed sense, stemming basically from cruelty. The more primitive a mind, the less selectivity exists. … A man slips on a banana peel and breaks his back. The adult stops laughing at that point, the child does not. And a civilized ego finds embarrassment as acutely distressing as physical pain. A baby, a child, a moron is incapable of practicing empathy. He cannot identify himself with another individual. He is regrettably autistic; his own rules are arbitrary…” Lewis Padgett, “When The Bough Breaks” (1944)

Of course, this story wouldn’t have turned out as great as it did (in my humble opinion) without the fabulous reading by Cheyenne Wright, who I’m continually amazed by. Pseudopod gets a lot of readers who keep their same “default” voices whenever they read, and I’ve only hear one other besides Cheyenne who actually get -into- the character.

Great job, Pseudopod! 7.7/10