Read by Eric Luke

The boss is coming. She graciously gives me time to collect myself. We’re in some kind of a lounge; everything is upholstered with vertical stripes and there are flaming torches on the walls. The boss is not big on context, sometimes. I don’t hold it against her, she’s a busy lady.

I had a regular job not too long ago but I did something I shouldn’t have and lost it. She fired me, but never got upset. She’s never all that surprised when people do things they shouldn’t.

Read by Ben Phillips

I clear a space toward the back of my sorting table, by the auto parts bin. It’s as far back as I can reach and enough other crap is piled there that the bottle will probably go unnoticed.

Two years. That’s how long I’ve been here. They caught me a couple weeks after the war started. Damn it happened fast. They just appeared, everywhere, all across the world. One day the price of oil and some brush war were the big news; the next day, the world broke and they invaded what was left. Maorg, Hoods and a half-dozen other kinds appeared out of nowhere, hitting every continent at once.

Read by Jacquie Duckworth

I set my feet and reached for the next rung of the ladder. The wind snatched at my clothes, whipping my bomber jacket against my thighs, and then pulling it outwards in a billow, tugging me sideways towards the scary drop.

I’d snared the rats with generous dollops of peanut butter in long rectangular, live-catch traps. Their fur was sleek and glossy. They were greedy, bright-eyed pests, always wanting more than they needed. Never satisfied.

Read by Cayenne Chris Conroy of the Teknikal Diffikulties podcast

Her teachers never asked her to remove the headphones. What was the point? The girl earned a 100% on every quiz and exam, and when they called on her, Lynnette spat the answer back like a rifle ejecting a shell.

And Lynette was tall. She towered past six feet by the time she reached eighth grade. And her long black hair that she rarely brushed only made her seem taller when it fell down over her wide shoulders; she was heavy-set, truly big-boned, more muscle than fat. And she put that muscle to use during the “Lynette Incidents,” as they came to be called.

Read by Ben Phillips

It occurred to me later that week that maybe, just perhaps, it was happening to the other family men in the office, that they were also noticing these things about their families –- Thomas Malone, only in his early 20s but with two young boys, looked harried a lot of the time, and I thought about taking him out for a drink after work one day. But how do you go about broaching that subject? How many drinks would you need in you to mention you thought your family had been…? And what would happen to you if you got back looks that moved from the merely quizzical to the horribly worried? The whole idea of it happening elsewhere to other people was still hazy at that point anyway, so I thought I’d better let him come to me. I was an approachable boss, after all.

At home, it was how I imagine living in a haunted house must be. You moved in dread of every little awry sign, trying to convince yourself that the gaps between them were widening rather than shortening, accelerating. And that if the signs were there, then they really weren’t growing any more significant, they really weren’t becoming bone-rattlingly critical.

Read by Mike Bennett

The wind bit into his skin like daggers into flesh. The cold was like no other he had felt, and he knew it was only going to get worse, day by day. Never mind the night; even people such as himself had to find shelter by night or end up a victim of his own trade by dawn. Gregorie’s eyes panned out across the vast, empty, bleak Russian landscape. It reminded him of looking out to sea from the docks at Cherbourg, with its long piers and obstacle strewn harbor to keep His enemies at bay. The steppes of Russia, much like the waters outside the port city.

A groan redirected Gregorie’s thoughts. He looked at the makeshift path the Grand Army had carved through the snow. While Russia might be near-featureless, His army was leaving behind plenty of markers.

Read by Nerraux

It reminds me of the place Jackson and I lived in during our final year of university. The corridors are filled with the partial light of forty-watt bulbs, and the walls look soiled and gummy — the odour of cooking meat and bleach sweating from them. Only three straight corridors, one on top of the other, each end marked by a staircase: the building feels decidedly utilitarian. Unlike our old apartment, however, there’s no telling how long Jackson will be here for.

“I feel like I’ve been robbed by myself,” he says, surveying the scattered boxes. “She only took the things I cared most about. Gilbert, she even took my cat. My cat!” He shakes his head. “All she left me was this.” His trembling hands unwrap a framed photograph of Janet and himself in Africa on the trip they had planned over a year to take together. In it, Jackson is adjusting a safari hat too large for him, trying to keep it from falling over his eyes. Janet has her brown cheek pressed up against his, focused on something beyond the photographer. Both are smiling. “I know I should throw this away,” he says. “But I can’t. Why can’t I throw it away?” I shift boxes around, wondering how I’m suddenly supposed to know the answer.

Read by Cheyenne Wright

Floating above the earth, Kulin checked the boundary around the graveyard. To his relief the hungry ghosts were contained, but the binding charms showed signs of deterioration. He cloaked his lifeforce so the dead would ignore his presence; a chill settled over his heart. He could not maintain the illusion for long.

The Tamga stood in the middle of the cemetery. Its skinny arms stretched upwards, and its black hair flared out. Kulin shrank into himself, and concealed his life’s pulse.

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.

Holiday-themed stories (regardless of which holiday) are ideally submitted 4-5 months prior to the holiday in question. The same guideline applies if you have a book coming out soon and want to publish a short story with us to coincide with its release, and we’re always happy to delay publishing if the resulting timing is better for author promotion. (Although for a sure bet, you can always just grease our palms with a sponsorship two months beforehand — contact amanda@escapeartists.net.)

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, although we may occasionally consider exceptional stories as long as 7,500 words. Anything longer than that will not be considered at all. (You are almost certainly better off cutting it down to 6,000 or less, even if it has been published previously at a greater length. The longer a story is, the more brilliant it needs to be to sustain audience interest in audio, and Pseudopod stories in particular tend to be no longer than 5,000 words as a rule.) 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 do not accept multiple submissions. Please, one story at a time! Unless you’re specifically told otherwise, this is the rule at every fiction market.

We do consider simultaneous submissions (a story sent to us as well as one or more other markets at the same time), but we appreciate being advised that the story is under consideration elsewhere. In the event it is accepted by us as well as the other market(s), you’ll just need to let the editor know in response to your acceptance letter what other market(s) are slated to publish it and when. That gives us the chance to mention the fact in the intro to the story. We will also try to delay publication so as not to “scoop” the other market(s) before the publication date over there, but it will be up to you to communicate with the other market(s) to find out whether they insist on this or not. Unless you tell us so, we will consider delaying publication to be optional on our part. (In our experience, since we use audio format most other markets don’t seem to care one way or the other, and even appreciate it if we go live with it around the same time or sooner because it acts as publicity for them. But you never know, and should always check. For our part, though, we have no strong preference either way.)

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.

(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 Cayenne Chris Conroy

Getting infected makes your brain rewriteable. Surviving makes you able to rewrite. Not everyone gets it; most natives are immune and even many tourists are. One half percent is a low enough number that tourists flock in by the thousands, through the major port city and down south to the waters. The adults that get it are in a coma within 24 hours.

By the time Szo saw his mother, he’d turned nineteen minds for Hawk. He remembers the first one particularly, like you remember a first girl or first trick. But he remembers all the others, too. “Don’t know why you would,” says Jonny. “I don’t remember all the men.” But Szo does, and he clings to each one, proof that somehow he is not like Jonny, not like Hawk, not like himself. This is all temporary and therefore changeable, rewriteable.

Read by Ben Phillips

What finally saved him at the not-so-tender age of fourteen was a book about lucid dreams he found at the community college library. He followed the recommended exercise out of desperation, repeating until he fell asleep: “I will know when I am dreaming. I will remember what I dream.”

Just as his first encounters with the morbid plunged him into nightmare, his first attempt at lucid dreaming introduced him to unlimited power. He again found himself in the City of Mazes, pursued by a crowd pulled on fleshy strings. You are all inside my head, he thought, and knew they were. He commanded, Stop, and they did, collapsing to the ground as their severed strings thrashed like loose hoses.

The Desert

By Tom Leveen
Read by Jaron Cohen

“They haven’t moved since . . .” Dom started to say, then cut himself off. I knew how the sentence finished. Since Trish and Jack had made a run for their car parked beyond the driveway, that’s what he was going to say. Since the spiders had swarmed them.

Benefits

By John Robinson
Read by Freeman Goodyear

The real person will never know that a copy of them just committed adultery in another part of town because, well, we can grow you from a piece of hair. A bit of skin. Fingernail clipping. Done. Person goes home, clone gets reduced to composite atoms, spouse is none the wiser — everybody’s happy!

Bird in a Wrought Iron Cage

By John Alfred Taylor
Read by the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine crew

He opened up the musty buffalo-hide trunk with its green-stained brass fittings and pulled out the cage inside. For a second, I thought it held a huge brown spider, until I saw the fingernails like broken roots. Then it crawled to the corner of the cage and picked up a pen.

Theme music as usual: “Bloodletting on the Kiss” by Anders Manga
Additional music in this episode: “Ihaveseenthis” by Hopeful Machines

Read by Ben Phillips

It was a Tuesday night when the Primakov received an emergency transmission on the ICT radio from The Bakapor, a distressed fishing vessel from Petropavlovsk. The captain translated the Russian slowly, word by word, with a phrasebook. The night was completely calm, and the ocean lapped up against the hull with gentle rhythmic intensity. The Bakapor had lost fuel after a storm, and required additional petrol if the sailors were ever to see their wives and mothers again. The Primakov wouldn’t even have to change direction to give them assistance.

Read by Elan Ressel, voice actor for hire through Voices.com

It was just before the referendum, when white people voted on giving black people the right to vote. The skies were clear, the African sun was hot on my young face, and the wild scent of earth, of renewal, was in everything. All the Stop signs had F.W. sprayed on them. Stop F.W. Stop De Klerk.

I watched the Boer Nation on TV. Eugène, big and red-faced, a barrel of beer full of righteous White-Christian indignation. Eugène and his boys. I watched the bombs flower over Johannesburg in brilliant reds and yellows, fire and blood. Eugène and his boys valiantly rode to battle with pipe-bombs and guns, and I watched it on television. I felt like I was locked up, bound within the confines of the house, the garden, the walls, the barbed wire.



A quick primer on Afrikaans slang:

bankie - a bank coin bag, or bag of similar size, in which marijuana is sold (i.e., a dimebag)
dagga - marijuana (pronounced Dacha — the gg is the sound in Spanish J or hebrew Chet)
lekker - good, excellent
moer - to beat brutally
moffie - homosexual (slur)
jol - fun, good time
kaffir - a black south African (slur)
voetsek - go away; get lost; fuck off
tokoloshe - spectre/gremlin (orig. Zulu mythology)

Edit: Listener André Vermaak wrote in regarding the above slurs to emphasize that they are possibly more offensive than any used in American slang.

Read by Jaron Cohen

I thought about the brittle old letters in my briefcase, which included (among genial advice on writing and cranky complaints about publishers) a few passages of deep loathing about “the niggers and immigrants who fester and shamble in the slums of our fallen cities.” Ah, Lovecraft. I always wondered how my great-grandfather’s letters back to him might have read. I doubted if old Cavanaugh Payne ever told his idol that he was a “miscegenator” himself. Three generations later, I was fresh out of white skin privilege myself, but I had enough of Cavanaugh’s legacy to clear all my debts, assuming I could ever find the isolated country house where this collector lived.

The hand-drawn map Fremgen had mailed me was crude, and obviously not to scale, so it was a little like following a treasure map made by a pirate with a spatial perception disorder.

Read by Ian Stuart, voice actor for hire through voices.com

A
DESCRIPTION
OF THE ADMIRABLE
TABLE OF LOGA-
RITHMES:
WITH A DECLARATION OF
The Most Plentifvl, Easy,
And Speedy Vse thereof in both kindes
of Trigonometrie, as also in all
Mathematicall calculations.

He shuffled through the other papers in the box. All writings by or about the man: extravagantly illustrated occult texts; religious revelations; serious biographies. At the bottom, wedged beneath a thick medical textbook with an MRI scan of the brain on the cover, Tom caught sight of several off-white stones. Their smooth, heart-shaped surfaces gleamed in the torchlight.

Read by Kris Johnson

I shrugged my shoulders and leveled the .44 cap-and-ball at its plaintive face. The squirrel thanked me, got up on its hind paws, put the metal in its mouth, and suckled on the long barrel like a caged guinea pig taking water from a bottle.

We are meat, mad meat. Nothing more.

Read by Rich Sigfrit

“I’m glad you volunteered tonight. I’m not sure I’m ready to go solo again quite yet.” Tim pointed at a nasty welt on his own neck before he popped the neck brace in place. “This gear saved my life, but it still hurts to swallow.”

“I suppose you’re right…” It just seemed so disrespectful. Each of them had been a person once, with a family.

Check out this author’s list of favorite Pseudopod episodes, replete with links to each one in our archives.

First Things First

Escape Artists, Inc., will never sell customer data to anyone. Ever. Period. Even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t know how to go about it. But in case the “opportunity” ever arises, let’s make it clear: we won’t sell any information to any other parties, under any circumstances. We won’t share it for free, either. If confronted with a court order we will of course comply with it, but only to the extent required by law.

We Don’t Know Your Credit Card Number

We’re primarily in the business of buying stories and producing audio recordings of them to release on the internet for free. We sell sponsorships of episodes, and ask for donations from listeners, to assist us in doing this. In the process of accepting your donation via Paypal.com, we will see the email address you use to log into Paypal (although certainly not your password or any financial information other than the donation amount you have chosen) and we may possibly address a single thank-you email to that email address at some point. But that’s all we’ll ever do with it. We don’t receive credit card or bank information at all, nor would we hold onto that information even if Paypal screwed up somehow and did send it to us. We would instead freak out, and immediately notify both you and Paypal that something is horribly wrong. We have never had anything like this happen, nor do we ever expect to see that day.

Any business dealings you have with a sponsor, beginning with the act of visiting a sponsor’s website, has nothing to do with us, and we take no responsibility for it. We just link there, man.

If You Post It, It Is Public

Our discussion forum exists for the purpose of public discussion. If you post words there, you implicitly assert that those words were written by you, or excerpted within the dictates of Fair Use law in the USA. You also agree that it’s okay (although in no way guaranteed) that whatever you posted will remain there indefinitely to be viewed by anyone in the entire world, and argued against and/or ridiculed by other posters, and maybe even by our staff. Welcome to the internet.

Big Brother Is Kinda Watching, But We Don’t Really Talk to Him

When you visit our site, the Web server logs your IP address and the page you visited or file you downloaded. We use our hosting provider’s logging and traffic analysis to determine our audience size, and report that size to potential sponsors; but we don’t make any special efforts to tie your IP address to you, and we don’t share this information with anyone else. We just want to know how many people are visiting and what they want. Our mining is not deep. The hosting provider could potentially give us information about how many listeners are located in which general geographical areas, but right now they don’t offer us that service, and in the foreseeable future our listenership will never be so large that it would be worth our while to try to target certain areas with certain sponsorships. So, we’ll probably never see that information either. If you want us to know where you are, look for the thread on our forums and post there to let us know.

Have a Cookie

When you make an account on our forums, our server gives your Web browser a cookie that can be used to identify you next time you visit. This is essentially just used to say “Hello Bob!” and keep you from having to type your password in again. There’s nothing nefarious going on. If you want to turn cookies off, no big deal. You’ll just be called “Guest” every time and have to put in your password before you log in.

Life Is Inconstant

One of the downsides of not going with the exhaustive legal statements is that we can’t be sure this is comprehensive, and it may change from time to time. If we’ve forgotten anything of concern to you or you have any questions at all, please drop us a line at info@escapeartists.net and we’ll do our best to respond to any concerns you may have. Thanks very much!

Here are our conditions of use. We’ll do our best to be pleasant about it, but when it comes down to it, donating to us or even browsing our site indicates that you agree to these conditions:

Creative Commons Licensing

Pretty much all the content on this site is copyrighted by Escape Artists, Inc., or by the individual authors whose work we’re publishing. The sound files are published by us under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license, the full text of which can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

What this means, in short, is that it is legal to share any or all of these sound files in their entirety, but illegal for third parties to profit from them, or modify them in any way to create derivative works. If you want to sample one for your next electronic dance music opus, you have to drop us a line so we can get permission from the author — which will probably be easy, so by all means drop us a line; but it is not implicitly granted, and is in fact illegal unless a separate arrangement is made.

We Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Escape Artists, Inc., and its staff is never (unless individually credited as such) responsible for authoring any of the stories we publish, and will not take responsibility for views that seem to be expressed by authors in their stories. Because first of all, if you ever think you know what view an author is expressing, you should be careful, because authors can be very tricky like that sometimes. Hosts, musicians, and other contributors to the audio are responsible for their own contributions, which are copyrighted by their individual creators and licensed under the same Creative Commons license as the rest of the sound file. Participants in our public forum are entirely to blame for everything they say there, and Escape Artists, Inc., can take no responsibility for anything they may say. All other text appearing on these websites, not including story excerpts, but certainly including magnificent literature such as the document you are now reading, is copyrighted to Escape Artists, Inc.

There may be adult language and concepts in many of the stories and other content. You agree to cope with that. If something offends you, we hope you’ll let us know why it offends you before you call the lawyers or the press or the fire department. We don’t promise to change anything, but we might, and if we can take reasonable steps to make you happy we will. Except Pseudopod — they don’t care about anything.

Escape Artists, Inc., will not take responsibility for the content of our sponsors, their web sites, or their products. If we worked for them, they probably wouldn’t be paying us to promote their stuff. In fact, we don’t take responsibility for anything on any sites we link to. To belabor the obvious: that’s not our stuff.

If You Post It, It Is Public

Our discussion forum exists for the purpose of public discussion. If you post words there, you implicitly assert that those words were written by you, or excerpted within the dictates of Fair Use law in the USA. You also agree that it’s okay (although in no way guaranteed) that whatever you posted will remain there indefinitely to be viewed by anyone in the entire world, and argued against and/or ridiculed by other posters, and maybe even by our staff. Welcome to the internet.

You Came for the Stories, Right?

Our principal purpose here is making available audio that you can download for free. We will not make you download it. If you decide you want to download it, we will make a best-effort attempt to have hale and hearty servers ready to fling delicious audio your way at all hours of the night and day. But, you agree that if they should happen to fail to serve you the file you expected in its entirety, you will not freak out or accuse us of plotting against you. Like restaurant servers, our file servers are very sensitive beneath their impersonal, obedient veneers, and may take a disliking to you. We have little control over this despite our considerable efforts to keep them firmly in line.

Danger

You may be killed by robots at any time. We have no control over this, either.

Privacy

We also have a separate page for our privacy policy. That’s part of this agreement too.

Life is Inconstant

Like the universe, this site is a perpetual work in progress, and all the content on it may change from time to time. That includes these conditions. This policy stuff probably won’t change often, because we’re lazy and we’d rather get it right the first time, but if it does, you agree not to flip out.

And if you have a problem, you agree that you’ll let us know via e-mail, info@escapeartists.net, so that we can try to set things straight with you.

Sound good to you? Thanks for your cooperation, and enjoy!

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 forum any time you like.

Read by Ben Phillips

In lieu of an excerpt, we shall regale you with some correspondence between the author and Pseudopod’s chief editor.

From Mike Norris’s cover letter: I learned of an extraordinary occupation, wherein an ordinary Joe, toting only a bible and a pistol, could legally cross the southern border under the licenses of the U.S. physicians that accompanied him to perform free roadside surgical procedures right in the back of his van. I managed to track down one of these medical coyotes, and I wrangled an interview out of him, explaining that I was a writer interested in publishing a story about his fascinating mission. That much was true … If I’m to be damned for a story I’ve written, “El Dentisto que Corta” will be my one-way ticket to Hell.

Ben’s response: Dear Mike, Thank you for sending us “El Dentisto que Corta”. Yes, I’m pretty sure you are going to hell for writing it, and we’re probably going to join you because we’re going to produce it. …


Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.

Order now from PodDisc.com

No polos or coffee mugs yet. Maybe next time. Thanks very much for all your continued patience and support, from all of us at Escape Artists!

Read by Cayenne Chris Conroy of Teknikal Diffikulties

After he pitched his nylon tent in a nearby juniper grove at the base of the hill, he slept until moonrise. Then, under the pale light, he unfolded his steel trench-shovel and walked uphill toward the cemetery, looking for love.

Dondo squatted over his haunches beside the grave, holding his hands over the sandy earth like he was warming himself beside a campfire. He pinched sand from the base of the tombstone, tasted it, then spat to the north. Here was love. He dug.

Read by BJ Harrison of The Classic Tales

As if reading Montresor’s thoughts, Luchesi reached down toward his feet; his hand came back proffering a long-necked bottle. “Here,” he spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, after shooting a look towards the palazzo’s attendant-less hallway. “Medoc — what I just happen to have handy with me, you understand. But it should serve as a worthy substitute.”

Vestiges of his nightmare shrouded Montresor’s thoughts. Dry-mouthed, he attempted to swallow nonetheless. “You must have misheard me, I’m sure.”

Read by Ian Stuart

A woman carrying a tray of drinks emerged from the kitchen. She was tall and spare and the loose clothing she wore only accentuated the impression. Sarah noted with alarm the condition of her hands, all knobbed joints and cracked skin. Setting the tray down, the woman looked at each of them, her head bobbing birdlike on a thin neck.

“Would you like a drink?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Read by Cayenne Chris Conroy of Teknikal Diffikulties

Passing the hall, he heard a sigh emanate through their locked bedroom door. That was a good sign. It was an indication Linda was still breathing, at least, and probably still able to speak. The morning after an appointment, she was always so sore, so exhausted. Often, she’d sleep well into the afternoon. Sighs, coughs, little Linda-noises, they were the beacons that guided Lewis through a haze of uncertainty that filled those hours before she’d allow him to view the balance of her attributes.

Linda’s appointments were just part of the deal. She’d made that clear before they ever tied the knot. “They’ll come for me,” she’d told him, “from time to time.”

Marilyn Monroe lies naked and dying.

I am her death.

Read by Phil Rossi

He had been trained, as all of us had, to assemble his rifle by touch - but to our dismay, we discovered that Private Sperling could do it in near-silence. He pushed the parts together with delicate care underneath the stiff, thin sheets of his bunk bed, the click of pins and bolts so muffled that none of us heard a thing in the cramped confines of our modular shelter.

We didn’t know the Decharai had made contact with him.

Read by Jaron Cohen

Every night since I was seven years old he’s swooped down at me out of the darkness of sleep: a pale, skeletal boy with thin arms thrust out like wings, eyes like white domes in black craters, mouth open as he screams acceleration.

His name is Wren.

Read by Alasdair Stuart

“Now paint in little white eye sockets.” Colin told Briony. “And teeth at the bottom.” He’d already had her draw India-ink crossbones under the big black mole.

(Colin hoped he and the Doctor would still be laughing two hours from now, but wasn’t going to bother Briony with gloomy possibilities. At least his mole had smooth edges and was still all one color.)

Read by Ben Phillips

“When I was your age, I ran away from school all the time. The tribal police would gather all us kids up from the hogans and the cabins, haul us to the boarding schools, cut our hair, tell us not to talk Navajo, feed us flour with bugs in it. All that crap you hear about now in documentaries. I ran away to my auntie’s house near Canyon de Chelly. She was a seer and a hand trembler. The Navajos around there, if they couldn’t sleep or they were sick, they sent a runner to my auntie and she came with her rock crystal and her corn pollen and went over their home until her hand trembled like she was holding on to an electric fence. And she saw things. Visions no one else could see. The sort of visions you’re seeing now. The things that cause sickness. Death. Things that have to be dealt with. Things that have to be sung and prayed over, so the person can be healthy again.”

Read by David Moore

It was nine p.m. when Jesus Christ tried to get into Drake’s Bar and Grill with no ID. Jimmy stood up from wrestling a new keg of Yuengling into position. He spotted Jesus and had to smile. In his 30 years of owning Drake’s, Jimmy had seen the local frat kids do a lot of laughable things, but they weren’t usually intentional, and more rarely still – were they clever. This, he had to admit, was both.

Jimmy came from behind the bar and worked his way through the Saturday night Carson Street crowd until he was within talking distance of Pete, and Christ’s entourage.

Read by Donna Lynch

Before she finished her cutting I stood behind her, and circled her arms with my arms. As she sliced a carrot, I shoved at her hand. The knife slid into her wrist, and she swore. Blood dripped onto the neat pile of chopped beans.

Nunury’s eyes widened, ready to cry. I’d never yelled at her when we were alive. “I’m sorry,” I said, gathering her in my arms. “You know I’d never hurt you.”

Read by Ben Phillips

The following has been transcribed from a journal, the owner of which has since passed away. In accordance with his last wishes, it has not been altered from its original manuscript, save where deemed necessary for page formatting.

There are memories I bear which erupt from the formless black of dreams. I still awaken at night crying out for safety and, finding myself alone, I hide in sheets, attempting to assuage a cold shivering that refuses to leave my bones. I have given my account to countless others in desperation, but still I know not restful sleep. I pray that in this inked telling I may concretely free myself from this memory, though I admit any faith I once had has long since left me, abandoned me in that lake those eleven years ago, never to return. Korta Ves.

Read by Cayenne Chris Conroy

Eddie had the little .22 semi-automatic that we used for shooting rabbit and squirrel, and I had Daddy’s .30-06. It was his favorite deer gun, and he would have tanned my hide if he knew I had it. That day wasn’t the first time we’d come down to the creek to shoot. We didn’t do it all the time, because sometimes the guns cracked so loud that our neighbor across the creek, Mr. Davenport, would hear and call up Momma. Most times, we shot on the bank of the creek, setting up dirty beer bottles – leftovers from teenage parties. It was our land, and we kept it fenced, but a fence never did mean much to a kid of any age.

When we got to the ghost house, Eddie didn’t want to go any further. He didn’t start fussing, but he started dragging his feet, covering his Keds with dust. I wasn’t in the mood to fight with him, so I just kept walking. Faced with being alone in the woods, or with his big brother at the ghost house, Eddie came on along. I wonder, sometimes, if he knew something. If he had some sort of feeling about what was going to happen. It’s the kind of thing that can drive you crazy. If you let it.

Read by Ian Stuart

I’ve ‘ad loadsa bad jobs in my day, but this ‘un’s the worst by a mile. Trompin’ aroun’ in the boneyards at midnight, diggin’ up dead folks wi’ a wooden spade, breakin’ open the caskets wi’ a mattock, an’ haulin’ ‘em up an’ out by the heads. Christ.

‘E’s the boss, is Wolfe. Been at the game a long time, compared ta me, an’ ‘e ain’t like ta let me forget it. Big fella, shaped like a barrel, face all red an’ puffy from too much drink. “Ya’d drink too, ya’d seen what I seen,” ‘e always tells me, as if I don’t drink.

Read by Jaron Cohen

Every July Dad would put me on the Greyhound, wave a hearty goodbye, and shout, “House’ll be hollow without you!” Then I’d clamber up on the seat to hoist my bag onto the rack and listen as he pounded the horn in his rusty old pick-up. This year that parting call sounded more forlorn than ever. To my early-adolescent mind, Dad was becoming increasingly odd and worryingly isolated. Lately, I’d woken at night to hear him talking to Mom. The next day he would confess to me how much he still missed her.

“This year…” I told myself. “This year I aim to catch me a Hay Devil.”

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