Read by David Moore

I won’t go into the details surrounding my dismissal from a well-known East Coast brokerage firm. other than to say I inadvertently let slip some information of a rather sensitive nature and, when it came down to drawing the line, the firm was more interested in maintaining their reputation than my livelihood.

Of course they were. But I didn’t exactly walk away empty-handed. They were all very civilized. There were no black marks on my resume; hell, they even found me another job. At a much smaller firm in Seattle.

And that’s where I met Mira, who this tale is really about.

Links mentioned: Closing music by Hopeful Machines, a side project of Ego Likeness Promo for Crescent, by Phil Rossi, rushing Amazon charts on July 9, 2009

Read by Claudia Smith

It was exactly what Marian was looking for–a home of her own, an address to prove she existed. She looked around feeling someone behind her. Gareth entered the lounge carrying a packing case. He spoke over the top of it.

“Nothing that soapy water and a paintbrush can’t fix.”

Read by Kris Johnson

The needle touched skin, vibrated with the small hum of a person in deep concentration.

The needle approached again, penetrated.

Read by Wilson Fowlie

Willett’s thin, angular face, with the stubble-shrouded cleft in his chin, remains handsome, or would have without the fleshy puckers where his eyes once were. But it’s as if those scars can see, because he turns to you.

You’re finally here, he says. His voice sounds choked with grit.

Do you know where Denise is?

He laughs. It’s a bark tinged with hysteria. Yes. Yes. Lenahan has her. He put us both deep under but he only kept what he wanted from me. Denise, he kept all of her. He planned to all along.

Who’s Lenahan?

Maybe, maybe – and now he’s struggling to speak, as though someone just told him an incredible joke and he’s still gasping for breath — maybe if you ask nice he’ll bring her back. He wanted me to tell you if you asked. He told me to.

Who is he?

And Willett tells you.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers Pseudopod listeners a free audiobook download of their choice from Audible’s selection of over 60,000 titles.

Read by Cayenne Chris Conroy

Rachel comes in the through the garage door in the kitchen. She’s carrying a large green ceramic flower pot. Inside the pot is the weirdest flower I have ever seen. Its stem is thick and curvy like a jungle vine. It’s about seven inches tall and has little white bumps, like tiny blisters, all along the stem. The head of the flower is furry and yellow with large red and black petals, wavy and erect, just the way a kid would draw them. There are several layers of petals and their pattern is mesmerizing: black-red-black-red on one layer, then the next would interchange to red-black-red-black, et cetera. As she carries the flower into the house the petals give the illusion of spinning, like little wheels turning inside larger ones.

“I guess…”

What We Want

Pseudopod is a genre magazine in audio form. We’re looking for horror: dark, weird fiction. We run the spectrum from grim realism or crime drama, to magic-realism, to blatantly supernatural dark fantasy. We publish highly literary stories reminiscent of Poe or Lovecraft as well as vulgar shock-value pulp fiction. We don’t split hairs about genre definitions, and we do not observe any taboos about what kind of content can appear in our stories. Originality demands that you’re better off avoiding vampires, zombies, and other recognizable horror tropes unless you have put a very unique spin on them. What matters most is that the stories are dark and compelling.

Since we’re an audio magazine, our audience can’t skim past the boring parts, so stories with beautiful language at the expense of plot don’t translate well. We’re looking for fiction with strong pacing, well-defined characters, engaging dialogue, and clear action. It can be beautiful too, if you’ve got all those other bases covered.

Dark humor is just fine, and we run it on occasion; but we are more interested in tragedy than comedy, and comedy is better received the more sick and morbid it is. Above all, we want stories that make us think, that stick with us, that make us catch ourselves checking the locks a second time before bed.

More tips here.

Length

We’re primarily interested in two lengths of fiction, which we’ve somewhat arbitrarily dubbed “short fiction” and “flash fiction”.

Short Fiction: This is the heart of our weekly podcast. We want short stories between about 2,000 and 6,000 words; we are quite hesitant to produce stories any longer than that. The longer the story is, the more brilliant it needs to be to sustain audience interest. We currently pay $100 for short fiction at this length.

Flash Fiction: We sometimes podcast short five-to-ten minute “bonus” pieces between our weekly main episodes. For this we’re looking at fiction under 1,500 words, with a sweet spot between 500 and 1000 words. Yes, that’s really really short. That’s the point. Our flash pieces are frequently quirkier and more experimental than our weekly features. We pay $20 for flash fiction.

If you have a story between 1,500 and 2,000 words, we’ll make a judgment call, based on whether we think the story would work better as a featured story or a bonus. But most of the time we’ll buy it as flash fiction.

Multiple and Simultaneous Submissions

We accept simultaneous submissions (sending a story to us and to one or more other markets at the same time), but appreciate being advised that the story is under consideration elsewhere. Please do not send multiple submissions (sending more than one story at a time to us) unless you have been told that it is acceptable for you to do so.

How We Want It

Example:

From: Edgar Allen Poe
Date: Dec 13, 1889
Subject: Submission: The Pit and the Pendulum
To: submit@pseudopod.org

Dear Pseudopod:

I would like to submit my horror story "The Pit and the Pendulum" for
your podcast.  My work has appeared in numerous online and print venues
including _The Norton Anthology of Literature_, the Project Gutenberg
Web site (http://www.gutenberg.org), and _The Simpsons Halloween
Special_.   This particular work is in the public domain since it was first
published over a century ago, and all rights are available.  It has 
previously been adapted into a shockingly strange movie by Roger 
Corman.  Thank you for your time and consideration.


Edgar Poe
poeman@gmail.com


6200 Words
The Pit and the Pendulum
By Edgar Allen Poe

I was sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at
length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses
were leaving me. The sentence -- the dread sentence of death -- was the
last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the
sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy
indeterminate hum.  It conveyed to my soul the idea of _revolution_ --
perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel.
This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more.  [. . .]

We accept stories in plain text pasted into the body of an email, sent to the address submit@pseudopod.org. We don’t want Word files, PDF files, scanned images of a book, or sound files of you reading the story. Messages with any such attachments will probably get bounced. We will accept messages that are HTML formatted, but if you know how to turn it off, we greatly prefer plain text. Send it from the email address at which you want us to correspond with you!

Please be sure to include the title of the story on the Subject: line of the message. Most of our workflow involves bouncing your email message from one folder to another, and we use the email subject to identify the story. A subject like “story submission” doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.

In the body of the message, we want:

1. Your name. (Your real name. The story can have a different byline, and we’ll credit that byline in public, but we need to know who’s legally offering us this story and to whom the check should be written.)
2. A cover statement briefly giving us your publication credits (your top five or six publications at most), and in particular telling us whether this story has been published before or adapted into audio. If there’s anything we need to know about available rights, tell us that too. If the full text of the story is available online, that’s great — let us know what the URL is so we can link to it.
3. The word count of the story, rounded to the nearest hundred words. Don’t go nuts over which word count method to use, or whether to round up or down. We pay flat rate; we really don’t care. We just want a ballpark.
4. The title of the story.
5. The story’s byline.
6. The text of the story. Use single spacing, with blank lines between paragraphs and _underscores_ or *asterisks* (or whatever) for emphasis.

Once again, that address is submit@pseudopod.org. Any stories sent to any other address will be trashed, most likely without a response.

No Multiple Submissions: Please, one story at a time! Unless you’re specifically told otherwise, this is the rule at every fiction market.

(The rest of these guidelines are basically just legalese.)

By sending us your story you understand and agree that:

• You are the original creator of the work submitted to us;
• You are the copyright holder of the work;
• You are not prohibited by any prior agreement from the transfer of non-exclusive electronic and audio rights to the work;
• All information in the contact and cover sections of your email is accurate and truthful;
• You accept sole responsibility for any false statements or encumbrances upon rights not disclosed to us.

If we buy your story we’ll send you a contract, and you’ll be bound to all of the above.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering whether you have audio rights to your stories: unless you’re doing work-for-hire for a game company, all reputable speculative fiction magazines of which we’re aware acquire serial print rights, often with non-exclusive electronic or anthology options. Some online markets may insist on electronic exclusivity for a certain period of time, and if so, you can’t publish it with us until after that period ends. However, we know of no regular short fiction market that contracts for exclusive audio rights. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen; always check your contracts.

What We Do With It

Once you’ve sent us your story, we will review it and respond to you via email in about two months. If it takes longer than that, please query.

If we decide we’d like it for our podcast, we’ll send you a contract as a PDF file in email. You will sign it and send it back to us either via email (after scanning it), fax, or postal mail. Then we’ll pay you via check or PayPal, whichever you indicated on the last page of the contract, and we’ll start producing.

During the production process we may contact you with questions about the story, its background, or pronunciations. We hope and expect that you’ll be available to help us, as a good performance makes all of us look good. Unfortunately, as everything we do is on a somewhat fluid schedule, we usually can’t give you an accurate timetable of when your story will appear in the podcast.

What the World Does With It

The audio files Pseudopod produces are released under a Creative Commons license. Specifically, we use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 license. Briefly, this means that the entire world has permission to distribute the podcast for free, provided they give credit for it, don’t try to make money off of it, and don’t change it in any way. Transcribing it, extracting portions from it beyond fair use, and mashing it up are all prohibited. This license applies only to our audio performance of your work, for which we’ve contracted and paid you. It does not apply to your story itself; you retain your copyright and all rights to any other use of the story.

We’ve had some questions about this from the writing community, so we’d like to make our reasoning clear. We know that Creative Commons licensing is scary to many writers, and it’s certainly a radical break from traditional rights that expire after a period of time. Our take is this: when we create a podcast, we are putting an MP3 file on the Web. That MP3 file is going to get downloaded and copied onto thousands of hard drives, CDs, iPods, and other portable devices across the world. That’s the point. We want people to listen to it. But once you’ve done that, you can’t take that file back. There is no way to delete the file everywhere it exists. There are some highly fallible ways to lock things down, but DRM sucks, and even if we believed in it it’s too complicated for us to implement.

So from a purely practical perspective, we can’t make our content expire. And we can’t stop people from copying our files, nor should we. Given that reality, why not give our listeners the full legal right to do what’s totally natural for an audio file (copy it, share it with people, and listen to it whenever they want), but make equally clear to them what they can’t do (share the story outside the podcast, or alter it in any way at all)? That’s our reason for the Creative Commons license. We’re not trying to plant a philosophical flag in the ground here; we’re just trying to reflect reality.

We hope you’ll agree with our reasons and choose to share your story with us. If you don’t, then we’re deeply sorry, but we feel it’s better that you know this now, before you make the decision to submit.

Any questions?

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, or criticism (but not stories) send them to our staff at editor@pseudopod.org. We’ll do our best to get back to you within a few days.

Thanks very much for your time, and we look forward to reading — and hopefully speaking — what you’ve got!

Read by Bob Eccles

When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimeter camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly light-weight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a ton. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.

And so was Grandfather..

Read by BJ Harrison of The Classic Tales podcast

Hiram knew his father, Jonah, could not refuse the Looking Men on the night they asked him to help kill William the Reeve.

But the friar had died that night when the Black Hand had laid itself upon him.

“Jordan, when are you going to settle down, get married and have us some children?”

By J.R.
Read by Ben Phillips

Beth, my most recent girlfriend, said I look like a hanged man when I walk because I always stare down at my feet.

Thinking About Polar Bears

By Mike Battista
Read by Matt Arnold

I wake up exhausted. I hadn’t slept well. My heart still beats quickly; the aftermath of vaguely remembered dreams.

Exit Exam, Section III: Survival Skills, Question #7

By David Erik Nelson
Read by Alasdair Stuart

7a) You are a werewolf. You kill and eat people. You are a vicious animal.

Theme music as usual: “Bloodletting on the Kiss” by Anders Manga
Additional music in this episode: rare rendition of “LabRatB” by Harmaline



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers Pseudopod listeners a free audiobook download of their choice from Audible’s selection of over 60,000 titles.

Read by George Hrab

My muscles tighten. My teeth clench. My irritable bowel is seriously pissed off.

Memories vibrate. They fall and crack open.

I was able to catch Wildclaw Theatre’s production of “The Dreams in the Witch House” and was greatly entertained. I haven’t seen “Revenants” yet but I notice it is getting quite promising reviews.

-Ben Phillips

Read by Alasdair Stuart

Niall is the worst of us. He’s meaner, more vicious, more crazy. He hates everyone: Jamaicans, Asians, queers…. Chances are he hates me as well. His Dad had been a violent waste-of-DNA and Niall intends to make us all pay. He doesn’t care about anything…and yet, only last Saturday, when we met up as usual, I found him anxious and attentive to every stranger on the street.

“Maybe…I don’t know.”

Donate / Buy Stuff

We rely on donations to pay our authors, as well as to cover the cost of bandwidth and other overhead. Our goal is to increase sponsorships until the day we no longer need to ask for these, but until that glorious day your choices are:

Donate Monthly

Donate Once

Buy Archive Discs

Tell the world!

If you enjoy our show, please recommend us to other fans of audio fiction. You are our PR department! Blog about us. Link to or redistribute our sexy 1-minute promo mp3. Or, link to one of our banners:

Paid Sponsorships

If you want to advertise to an audience of several thousand horror fans, one of the best possible ways to do it is to sponsor programming on Pseudopod. If you like, you can even advertise locally, targeting limited geographical areas using Wizzard Media’s targeted ad insertion technology. For example, in October of 2008, people who downloaded our show in southern California got to hear about Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios.

For current rates and more information, email ben@escapeartists.net.

Spread the pod’s foul seed via BitTorrent!

Our fans create, update, and seed torrents of past episodes, which we greatly appreciate since we currently lack suitable time and resources to handle this ourselves. There is one torrent that I know of on MiniNova. Please seed it if you can so it can spawn and be happy. Let me know (editor@pseudopod.org) if you create an updated one, and I will endeavor to link to it as well.

Volunteer to narrate

Do you know someone with an iron stomach and a talent for bringing to life what’s on the page, who can create high-quality voice recordings as digital audio files and upload them to a specified location by a specified deadline? We can always use more volunteer narrators to add variety to our sound. In particular at the moment, we’d like to do more justice to stories taking place in Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world. An interested potential narrator should drop a line to editor@pseudopod.org with a link to a dramatic reading — or, just ask and we will mail you our favorite challenging sample text so you can really show off your interpretive talent.

Read by Jenna Sharpe (who incidentally also voices Naija in Aquaria)

The man in the doorway was backlit by the low hanging sun, and when he told her about Ray it didn’t seem real. “Dead?” “Yes ma’am, I’m afraid so.” Fatima gripped the front of her blouse and twisted. She steadied herself against the door jam, and when she spoke it was a whisper, “Imkonsiz…” The detective frowned, as he was not learned in Uzbek, “I’m sorry?” “I say, is impossible.” Everything about her was fragile and too thin — her wrists, her neck, even the skin on her face, which was translucent in the morning light. “I wish you were right about that, ma’am.”



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Phil Rossi whose novel, Crescent Station is published this June.

Most of Cotton’s memories were gone. Like the name of the ship he had served on. Like the name of his commanding officer. His daughters’ names, which husband went with which daughter, which grandchildren came from which marriage, which fiancé held hands with which granddaughter. That had mostly melted away. His head felt like an icebox, like someone had opened the door, maybe just to grab a beer or to check the expiration date on the milk, and let all the cold air out, filled it up with thick stagnant heat. Alzheimer’s was a muggy goddamned country, the airless stomach of a huge beast that takes its sweet time digesting old useless machinery like him.

Read by Leann Mabry

The doctors come and ask me questions, but they always ask the wrong questions, so I’m stuck. I can give them the wrong answers or no answer at all. I try to explain, try to teach them what the right question is, but they never listen.

“How are you, today, Carolyn?” they ask. And, “Did you have the nightmares again last night?” And occasionally, “Ready for your medication?” The last question I don’t mind as much. The round blue pills give delicious sleep — sleep without dreams. They just make it harder to sleep without them. But the purple pills, the ones with the jagged edges, they make me numb, detached, and that frightens me.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Matthew Wayne Selznick

As rain began to speckle the partitioned windows of the station, an ancient engine groaned into view. Villers soon found himself squeezed into a dingy and narrow car of questionable vintage. Making his way to a window seat, he noted his fellow travelers were exclusively of the lower classes. Peasant women, shapelessly hunched within their shawls. Dark men who drank from bottles concealed in their coats and ate pieces of bread right from the loaf, breaking off the chunks with large, uneven teeth. Scampering children who seemed to belong to no one, or at least recognized no one’s authority.

In his suit and vest, Villers was uncomfortably aware of his relative affluence. He checked his watch chain to make sure it was securely fastened, shifted his billfold so that it was lodged deeply within his breast pocket. As Sophie had once warned him amidst the rumpled sheets of their conjugal bed, “Some people will steal the gold out of your teeth if you give them half a chance!”

Read by Kris Johnson

“A what?! What did you say? A duel?”

A duel.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Hugo-nominated graphic artist Cheyenne Wright (for his work on Girl Genius, Volume 8)

It was a cold January when Paul Robinson parked his flatbed pick-up on the edge of Shady Lake. The ice was ten inches thick. Plenty thick, yet it still didn’t compare to the rind of ice that had settled around his heart.

He began to arrange the inside of the shanty, a homemade thing of clapboard and two by fours. He lit a pile of pre-soaked coals in an old coffee can for extra warmth, the flame swirling for a moment like a dervish, then settling to a comfortable glow. As he slid his Styrofoam bait bucket across the shanty’s floor, steam seeping from beneath the lid, he heard the crunch of cleated boots behind him. He turned.

Read by Ian Stuart

“I know you come from the States and you see this Isle of St. Mary as nothing but quaint. Well, we is a quaint folk and content to be in our cups at the Bishop n’ work the fields and tend to tourists and pull fish from the sea. But as your kin I am to say that the Scilly Isles hold secrets. Every day some of them are shown but only the wise would know it. Only an islander can tell you of it. I want you to listen because you are my kin and so you’ll be told of the Isles of Scilly.

“If you look out from any portion of St. Mary’s out to the wide and gray sea you can gaze at the Grave of Ships. The isle is not friendly to outsiders who sail and never has been. It was in 1707 that a whole treasure fleet was dashed unto the rocks and drowned many a soul, including Shovell, the lord of that ill-fated expedition. Since then the Crown hasn’t much use for Scilly or the government we have nowadays. Since Shovell’s treasure spilled on our beaches, along with the bloated bodies, the isle has claimed hundreds of other vessels. Some drawn too close by storms, others lured in by Wreckers with their false lights and sharp blades.”



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Ben Phillips

When I wake I’m craving almonds and want to die. Pretzeled in the top sheet, fighting the light… hurts when I move, go easy… something died in my mouth, breath could bring down a plane, and the light… Jesus, that’s… fuck, that’s bright. Hot too… pores fuming booze… sheets wet, what the… oh God I must’ve… I mean, I haven’t been that fucked up since… clothes on still, one shoe, nice touch… stomach in revolt, just thinking about it makes… aw Christ, I’m gonna… run for it, wait… that was close. Too close. Why do I do this? Now if only I could remem– Wait a… I catch my reflection in the mirror, one shoe on, halfway to the bathroom… I approach, stick out my neck and the new mark there… what the f…? Is that…? Aww man, what did I do? What the hell did I do?!

Read by Ralph Walters

He turned his eyes back to the road, and in the light of the high beams he saw a man stumble into the path of the car. Without thinking, Jack swerved.

The car bounced violently, and then its left front side smashed into a tree. The steering column surged forward, like an ocean wave, and crushed Jack’s stomach. Dustin wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He flew face-first through the windshield, rolled across the hood, and tumbled off onto the ground.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Alasdair Stuart

It had been some time since we had last been called to a meeting of the White Street Society and all of us yearned to quench the thirst for the strange that these meetings had fostered in our souls, which is why the three of us – Drake, Lewis and myself – finally abandoned formality and stopped by the clubhouse uninvited, fully expecting Augustus to be absent, overseas perhaps, investigating some mysterious mystery. Instead, we stood frozen in surprise and dripping with February rain in the doorway of the clubroom, watching our old friend sitting by the fire and reading the papers, as cool as an oyster.

“And where’s Charles?,” said Lewis, as an unfamiliar manservant helped him off with his overcoat.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Alasdair Stuart

I could see the fear in her eyes, and I drew back into the thickets of thorns and nettles, watching her. She was the first person I had seen in the lane for many years, one of the village children, one of the innocents. I did not wish to frighten her, and I felt my loneliness rush in on me like a tide. But she fled, a scrabble of scuffed shoes on the loose stones and she was gone, running through the meadow grass and buttercups, scattering the sheep in her haste. I drifted back into the shadows and wallowed in remorse.

The girl must have told them about me, for the children came back, the boys leading the way, goading, teasing, daring each other to be brave, the girls hanging back in the long grass. They came up to the bank, laughing, throwing stones into the shadows; but stones can’t hurt me, not any more.

Read by Nerraux

He’d spent his free period reading up on the Lurker at the Threshold, the All-in-One and the One-in-All, the Opener of the Way, and now he tried to detect the signs of Its presence. But nothing smelt like the stench of the grave. No hideous ichor was seeping out from underneath his bedroom door. The upstairs hall was painted the same robin’s egg blue that it’d always been and it was not suffocating beneath an encrustation of poisonous mold that glowed a deathly, bioluminescent green. He took a deep breath and opened the door to his bedroom. Yog-Sothoth sat at the end of his bed, absorbed in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4.

“Hold on,” Yog-Sothoth said without looking up. “I have almost… accomplished my… Pro Challenge.”



Happy Father’s Day!

Read by Alasdair Stuart

By the time I cleaned myself up, Arj had scrounged me a fresh t-shirt. I stopped outside the recovery room to pull it on.

Of course, the rest of us were fear junkies too, otherwise we wouldn’t be sneaking around the labs after hours like the cast of Flatliners.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Ben Phillips

Allie first saw the fairies in the flower garden beside the driveway, and they were naked. But maybe they would be her friends. She didn’t have any friends because Mom and Dad didn’t want people to come into the house and discover Bobby. How to make friends with them, when they were almost invisible? She thought the spicy-fragrant petunia blossoms were small enough to make skirts for them; she knew they were girl-fairies because of their long hair, lavender, pink, and pale green, but her eyes weren’t good enough to see if they had nipples, like her own, which must be concealed. Perhaps a tiny cloverleaf could cover each breast, though she wasn’t sure how to keep them in place. “Mom,” she said, “May I borrow some thread?” Mom’s sharp gray gaze flicked away from her needlework, a scene of a Japanese garden. Mom had all sorts of hobbies. “You may have that black spool that’s almost gone.” Allie chewed the end of her braid. “Colors would be better.” Mom threw down her needlework, annoyed. “I want to make little clothes.”

Read by Ian Stuart

“I’m Mr. Sinclair.” The smiling old man introduced himself. “Not too early, am I?”

“Of course, I can always come back another time,” said the old man. He frowned and scratched his chin. “That would be rather inconvenient, though. I’ve come all the way from Oxford. Traffic was an absolute nightmare.”

Happy Halloween!

Read by Cat Rambo

The house tilted. A thighbone rolled off my kitchen table and clattered onto the floorboards. I cocked my head and waited for a warning. Silence. It was still sulking.

“A fine house you are! Allowing a stranger to sneak up on me.”

If you’d like to leave us e-mail, you have your choice of options:

• General comments on stories, performances, the podcast, bad dreams you’ve had, whatever can be sent to feedback@pseudopod.org. Please note that anything sent to that address is considered public and may be read on the podcast. By e-mailing us at that address you’re giving us your consent. So if you want your opinions to remain private, send it to our ‘editor’ address instead.


• Business correspondence, troubleshooting questions, queries about submissions, or private feedback can be sent to editor@pseudopod.org


• Finally, we have a dedicated address for story submissions, but rather than give it to you here we urge (nay, require) that you read our submission guidelines to ensure that your story is appropriate for us and correctly formatted.

Our snailmail address, should you wish to send us an old-fashioned letter or donate by check, is:

Escape Artists, Inc.
P.O. Box 965609
Marietta, GA 30066

And, of course, you’re welcome to leave us a comment on the Web page any time you like.

Read by Alasdair Stuart

She asked me, “Will you teach the secrets of the soul and flesh?”

“I remember the case. I taught the boy to banish it.”

Read by Ben Phillips

I dropped the half-eaten turkey on rye back on my plate and stared darkly at the new wheel-chair ramp, a big yellow exclamation mark visible from the sidewalk. Warning! Freak in Residence! Imagining the whispered concerns of our new neighbors was fuel for the fire of my self-pity. I was so lost in my gloomy fantasy that I did not notice the first tapping until it became a knocking, and then a scrape. As if someone had hit the wooden deck under my wheels and then dragged a hands worth of nails along it. I glanced around; Tammy had not re-emerged. I looked down. A glint of something wet. Something like an eye or wet flesh, staring up from the darkness under the deck. I twisted the steel rims under my hands and adjusted my position to look again. The thing was gone. I listened, and for a moment, I heard a sound like a wet blanket dragging on dirt, then Tammy re-appeared and the sound was lost under her footsteps and sigh of satisfaction.

“Yeah, thanks,” I was still turning the fragment of a moment over in my mind. I had seen an eye. Someone was under our house. Crawling in the dust and dirt, under the decking, under the floors, slithering around the concrete pilings, the ducting of the central heating that terminated in black metal grills in our floors and doing what? Listening? Searching for a way to break in?

Read by Dani Cutler

“With eight years property management experience under your belt, I really see no reason to fax over your resume. Tell you what, I’m wide open this morning. I need to run an errand, pick up a few things for the interview, but why don’t you just come on down to Grisholm’s Corporate Towers and we’ll have a quick chat?”

“I’m thinking eleven o’clock. And when you get here, Becky, just come on down to the basement. I’ll be waiting.”

Sponsored by CONTAGIOUS, by Scott Sigler.

No end in sight. He tossed aside the empty water bottle, now useless. One bottle left. Two more liters. But in this heat, that wouldn’t last long.

Sand slipped under his feet as he scaled the next dune. This one was much steeper than the others, forcing him to rest halfway to the top. Perhaps it, with its one arm and poor coordination, would not be able to climb up. The top could mean safety. But this was only hopeful, foolish thinking. He knew it would find a way up. It would not stop until it had him.

Sponsored by CONTAGIOUS, by Scott Sigler.

I sit at the table and work on my bonsai scar. I press the silver head of the meat tenderizer into my left thigh, stippling the skin. I do not feel pain; I scarcely feel the pressure. My nerves are dead, there on my left thigh, where I grow my scar. Matches, hot needles, knives, and time. I tend my scar, I do not control it. Skin and muscle are unpredictable– this is not like painting a picture, carving a piece of wood. The flesh knows its own logic, the bruises come strangely, the healing proceeds unevenly. I collaborate with my flesh.

Read by JC Hutchins

Stosh wore his sneakers as he walked along the incoming tide, let cool water ooze over his toes. It was awkward, squishing along in the wet sand, but he didn’t want to risk stepping on a broken seashell or a needle. His shoes were already filthy, not much left for the water to ruin.

He swept his eyes over the beach, scanned among piles of trash for Liddy. Instead he spotted a skinny figure running his way.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Ben Phillips

Desdemona used to trace the stars with her finger, connecting the dots, naming her own constellations.

Desdemona.

Desdemona — who gave me thirty-one birthdays when I had none. Desdemona — who laughed and made snow angels on rooftops because the snow there was cleanest, the closest to Heaven. Desdemona — who made an angel of snow and blood in the dirty street on the day I lost her.

Too far.

Read by Ralph Walters

The first thing they did when they took a trip like this was pick new names. This time they were Michael and Jennifer. The house was empty when they got there; it was beautiful, the summer home of very wealthy people. The interior was an open shell, rugs on a stone panel floor with a kitchen in back and an open-sided spiral staircase that led up to a balcony bedroom and another set of stairs in back that led to a kitchen. The house was surrounded by grass, which was surrounded by woods, which were surrounded by a wooden fence. They took their clothes off as soon as they got inside. Jennifer threw hers in the corner; Michael left a trail, starting with his shirt at the front door and ending with his underwear at the kitchen. “Jesus, I’m hungry…” He stopped suddenly and looked at her sheepishly, like a dog that knows it’s done something wrong. “No, I didn’t mean…” Jennifer shook her head. “I know you didn’t. Don’t worry.” She hoisted herself up onto the counter, put her hand on his shoulder, and tilted her head to the side. He spit on her neck. His saliva was bright green; it hissed like oil in a frying pan, and a second later there was a swollen red mark on her neck. He nibbled on it gently, and her skin tore and split like tissue paper. She closed her eyes as he pressed his mouth against the wound. They stayed at the house for about two weeks.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.