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How to Win a Dance Contest During an Apocalypse (In Nine Easy Steps!)

by Gwendolyn Kiste

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Step One: Find the perfect location. After all, you can’t win a dance contest if you don’t know where to go.

You see the dance floor for the first time when your parents are checking in at the hotel.

“They said on the radio that there were rooms left,” your father is arguing with the concierge who is staring back at you blank-faced from behind the desk.

“There are rooms,” the man says slowly, “for all the good it will do.”

Nearby, there are people huddled on the floor of the lobby. Some of them are sobbing. Some of them aren’t saying anything at all, their wide-eyed expressions looking liable to crumble at any moment. You try not to stare at them. Instead, you gaze through the cracked front window, but all you can see are sullen mountains looming all around you and skies that have gone bright red as blood.

Next to you, your older sister Annie is pacing back and forth, twining around your mom and dad like a nervous cat.

“When are we going home?” she keeps asking, even though it’s clear from the tremble in her voice that she already knows there’s no home left.

After the skies started looking like a crime scene, and you heard the first reports about the things coming up out of the earth, your family fled in a hurry, a few outfits stuffed in a duffle bag, all your hands shaking. For a while, there were sirens blaring in the distance in your neighborhood. You thought that was the worst of it. Then the sirens stopped. You never realized until that moment how the scariest sound in the world is silence.

“Come on,” your father grunted at you, before he started driving, with you and your sister in the back. In the passenger seat, your mom gripped an old paper map, her knuckles gone white, as she gaped down at the tangle of interstates and pretended she could read it. She kept telling you not to look out the car windows, but that didn’t stop you from seeing the carnage out of the corner of your eye. Bodies twisted on the strange and slimy roads, smoke rising from crashed cars and crashed corpses.

It all happened so fast that nobody even knew why. But then again, does anyone ever really know why terrible things happen?

You were in the car for almost two hours, headed nowhere in particular, when an announcement came on the radio about the resort up north, saying it was one of the last known safe havens in the region.

“It’ll be okay there,” your mom promised on the trip, and you had to bite your bottom lip to keep from laughing. As if anywhere has ever been safe.

So your family arrived here to the middle of nowhere, to this little resort nestled in the Poconos, a place where people used to go to escape the rigmarole of their lives. Now people are coming here to escape everything. The red skies and the rising tides, and the strange humming that seems to grow louder by the hour.

As the other people in the lobby keep weeping, the sound of their grief-stricken voices like a rusted nail against a car door, you break away from your parents and your sister and the never-ending argument with the front desk.

At the far end of the lobby, you notice a darkened doorway. You hesitate, thinking maybe you should go back to your family. But when you turn to look at them, you realize they haven’t even noticed you’re gone. You laugh under your breath and wonder why you would expect anything else.

With your chest clenched tight, you pass through the doorway. Inside, it’s nothing like you expect. You figured it would be a barroom. Instead, it’s a dance floor, the kind that every resort like this used to have back in the olden days when poodle skirts and ponytails were all the rage. This is nostalgia incarnate, and it’s oddly comforting. You always thought you’d find somewhere like this, a place with a twist contest or some other silly dance competition. Movies promised you that future, didn’t they? A chance for you to focus and practice and make the most out of one moment in your life. A chance to prove yourself. But then again, movies promise a lot of dreams that never come true.

You’re eighteen years old, and your whole life was supposed to be getting started. But then the world up and decided it was going to end instead. It doesn’t seem fair, but nothing ever does.

At the edge of the dance floor, there’s a blur of shadow, and you jump back.

“Hello?” you ask, your voice splitting apart.

The figure moves forward, just a couple steps, and you realize it’s a girl. She’s about your age, her dark hair in her eyes, a tight white t-shirt worn through at the collar. She stares back at you, something quiet sparking between the two of you, and you suddenly can’t help but smile. With your skin humming, you part your lips to say hello, but from behind you, there’s a gruff hand on your shoulder.

“Come on, Bettie,” your father says. “They’ve got our room ready.”

“All right,” you say, defeat simmering in you, and when you turn back, the blur of a girl is already long gone.

---

Step Two: Pick the right partner. (Side note: Please remember this might be the most important step of all.)

The next day at the resort, when all the faucets start to run an unnaturally eerie cornflower blue, you wander downstairs alone, anything to escape your parents who insist on hollering at each other about everything that’s ever gone wrong in their lives.

You’re almost to the front desk when you see her. The girl from the edge of the dance floor.

“I’m Bettie,” you say with a bright smile, as a stranger runs sobbing across the lobby and disappears out the revolving door, never to be seen again.

But you pay the stranger no mind. You just keep watching this girl. Her worn-out combat boots and worn-out blue jeans. She takes a step closer to you.

“I’m Kelly,” she says with a shrug, as if names hardly matter anymore. That might be true, but you’re still glad you know hers.

She’s nineteen, a year older than you, but it feels like she already knows everything there is to learn. Where to go at the resort and where to hide and all the secrets the universe has hidden from you.

“Why do you think this is happening?” you ask her, as if she’s an oracle.

“You mean the end of the world?” She scoffs. “I don’t know, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

For the rest of the morning, the two of you explore every hidden crevice of the hotel. Shadowy hallways and service corridors and an empty ballroom. Outside, you dip your toes in the algae-veiled pool and skip down the uneven stone path toward the precipice of the mountain where nothing but darkness awaits you.

“Where’s your family?” you ask, and Kelly just shakes her head.

“They used to work here,” she says, “but they’re not around anymore.”

She keeps staring into the darkness, and you know without a word where her parents went. It’s where the woman in the lobby went too. Where all of you might go before this is all over.

When the darkness becomes too much bear, you sneak back into the resort. In the abandoned industrial kitchen, where the staff used to gather in their puffy white chef hats, you manage to scrounge up three cans of peaches and a stale bag of Rold Gold pretzels.

“This will keep us alive for today,” Kelly says, grinning, and you think how you never want this day to end.

It’s late afternoon, and you’re walking together through the lobby, laughing about nothing in particular, when your mother spots you together.

“What are you doing?” she asks, yanking you by the arm.

You break away and reach out for Kelly, but she only turns away.

“I’ll see you around, Bettie,” she says and disappears toward the dance floor.

With your heart in your shoes, you follow your mother back to the hotel room where your father is pacing back and forth, and your sister’s playing Angry Birds on her phone. Only Annie could make the apocalypse seem so banal.

“You shouldn’t be hanging out with that bedraggled-looking girl,” your mother says as she settles down on her bed. “You need to have higher standards than that.”

Annie snaps her tongue, her gaze never leaving the screen. “Does Bettie have a girlfriend?”

The question oozes with spun sugar and arsenic, and you do your best not to sneer.

“That girl’s not like us,” your mother keeps saying, and something tightens like barbed wire in your chest. She acts like Kelly comes from the wrong side of the tracks, but how can there even be a wrong side of the tracks now? Especially when there’s only this place left?

At night, your family sleeps in two narrow twin beds, and you’re expected to share with your sister, but you just stay up until dawn, huddled at the window, gazing out at the emptiness yawning beyond the mountains.

You can sense it, the way the earth has already devoured everything else. It’s hungrier than anybody realized. And it’s been waiting a long time for this.

---

Step Three: Do your best warm-up.

You don’t see Kelly the next day or the day after that. Your heart constricts in your chest, and you wonder if it’s over before it even began.

On Wednesday morning, somebody with binoculars says they can see tentacles creeping across the tops of the mountains in the distance, but you don’t listen to them. After all, tentacles would be a welcome addition to this place, and you doubt anything welcome will come your way now.

In the evening, as you stand in line for a handful of meager rations—a mini box of Sun-Maid raisins, half a serving of generic Cheerios, whatever else the staff could scrounge up from the backrooms—you keep searching all the faces, desperate to find her.

“You’re looking for that girl, aren’t you?” your mother asks through gritted teeth.

At this, Annie lets out a sharp laugh. “Maybe those tentacles dragged her off,” she says, and you want to wipe that tight smile off her pretty mouth. Your sister could always say the cruelest things in the sweetest ways.

As the families gather in haphazard circles to eat their rations in the lobby, you creep off, still searching for Kelly. When you finally see her outside loitering by the pool, you start toward her, but she backs away a step.

“I’ll only cause problems for you, Bettie,” she says.

“That’s not true,” you whisper, but the lie tastes like ash, because you both know she’s right. Still, it doesn’t stop you. You linger together here, whispering to each other, pretending you have a future. It’s not until your mother’s voice bellows into the darkness that you squeeze Kelly’s hand and scurry away.

As you head back to your hotel room, her voice echoes in your mind.

I’ll only cause problems for you.

You shake your head, because everything’s causing problems now. The whole world is gobbling itself up. The only thing that seems right is her.

The only way you feel like you might escape is with her.

---

Step Four: Choose the perfect song.

While your mom and dad are meeting with the other adults in the ballroom, everyone screaming and carrying on about what to do next, you wait until your sister Annie isn’t looking before you slink away downstairs.

You find Kelly on the dance floor, swaying in the silence, the overhead speakers long ago gone quiet and sullen. You join her, the two of you twirling together, making up the moves as you go.

You close your eyes and tip back your head, thinking how this isn’t so bad. The truth is you aren’t as disappointed about the apocalypse as you expected to be. It seems like something that should really ruin your day, ruin your entire life even, but instead, you feel blasé about the whole thing. Like of course, the world is ending when you’re only eighteen. How else did you honestly think this would turn out?

You only wish everyone else would calm down about it. You loathe the way they’re acting, your parents and your sister and the other adults who are hollering at the sky, day and night, as though someone up there is really listening. As though someone up there really cares.

For what it’s worth, you gave up on that hope years ago. Maybe that’s why you’re not freaking out now. You aren’t expecting the cavalry to ride in and save you. You’ve never expected anyone to save you.

But then you glance at Kelly on the dance floor, and if anything ever looked like salvation, it’s her and that impish grin, her hands tucked in her pockets, one combat boot coming undone.

She reaches out to take your hand, and together, you keep dancing to music nobody else can hear.

---

Step Five: Choreograph your routine.

The next day, you spend all morning huddled in the corner of your hotel room, watching your parents argue, as you figure out precisely when you can get away. It will have to be later today, and you’ll have to be quiet when you sneak off. Your family’s more restless than before, but they’ve settled into a pattern, whether they realize it or not. Fight all morning with each other in the hotel room, fight all afternoon with the other adults in the ballroom, and then pass out from exhaustion right around midnight. (You’re also fairly sure your mother squirreled away some of her expired Seconal, so that’s probably helping with the sleeping part.)

All you have to do is wait.

Outside, the skies have gone a deeper crimson, and you smile a little, thinking how it reminds you of your favorite lipstick. A cream shade called Blood Ties. You were in a rush when your family left the house, which means you’ll never wear that color again. But maybe you don’t have to, since the world outside is wearing it for you.

Across the room, your mother is sobbing and hitting your father in the chest with barely clenched fists. She goes on and on about how you should have headed south, not north, everybody knows that, and now you’re all trapped in this resort with no way out.

You breathe deep and tell yourself again: all you have to do is wait.

It’s afternoon when your parents finally head to the ballroom to meet up with the other adults. As though anybody here has the right to call themselves an adult. They seem to think the solution to your problems is to scream or sob louder.

“We need to leave now,” someone inside the ballroom hollers.

“No, we need to figure out how to fortify this place,” says somebody else.

It will go on like this for hours, so you leave your sister in the lobby, her gaze set on her phone, the battery life waning.

“Heading to see that girl again?” Annie asks, her poisonous voice tracking you.

“Heading outside for air,” you say.

Annie lets out a cruel laugh. “Tell the air I said hi.”

Today, you find Kelly on the roof, watching the way the mountains seem to be creeping closer.

“I don’t belong anywhere,” she whispers, but you shake your head, your hand on your arm.

“You belong with me.”

She never asks why your family hates her. She can probably guess all the different reasons. Besides, you don’t have much time left. Together, you return to the dance floor, where you sit together, inventing a plan. Inventing a way out.

“Where will we go?” you ask.

Kelly shrugs. “Anywhere,” she says. “For however long it lasts.”

Sorrow twists in your belly. It seems pointless to run away when there’s no world left to run to. But then you stare back at Kelly in the shadows, and you think how maybe this will work. Maybe you’ll escape.

Maybe you’ll be together.

When you get back to the hotel room, your parents are waiting there.

“Where were you?” your mother asks, her arms crossed, a sneer on her face.

Your father shakes his head, his arm looped around Annie who beams back at him. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” he asks.

More like the right kind of girl, he means.

You settle down at the window, gazing out at the abyss waiting there. “I’m sorry,” you say, but you don’t really mean it.

---

Step Six: Practice, practice, practice.

You meet Kelly every afternoon for the next week, the two of you hiding wherever it feels safest. Huddled on the edge of the dance floor or in the industrial kitchen or by the blackened swimming pool, swirling with strange shapes that almost look alive.

The two of you avoid the ballroom altogether. The adults are getting worse, getting angrier. A fistfight broke out at yesterday’s meeting, with shattered glass and shattered faces. It ended with everyone carrying out a pair of bodies and tossing them into the darkness at the edge of the mountain.

“I told him not to throw the first punch,” your father muttered, but you wouldn’t make eye contact with him or any of the other parents. Afterwards, somebody claimed they spotted the tentacles near the stone path, but when the others went to look, there was nothing there but shadows.

“They won’t stop,” Kelly whispers, and you tighten your hand around hers, because you know she’s right. It won’t be long now. Either the darkness outside will come for you, or your own family will.

There are distant murmurs in the mountains, the voices too arcane to fathom, and you try not to listen, afraid of what you might hear. Instead, you watch the horizon, the way that the red is in reverse now, as if the sky is bleeding upwards.

You keep making plans—for when you might leave, for where you might go.

“There could still be a way through on the road,” you say, but neither of you is sure you believe that.

Kelly, however, won’t give up easily. “We can try the road,” she says, resolve hardening on her face. “And then we can try the mountains. My parents kept some maps behind the front desk. I’ll look at them.”

And with that, Kelly guides you to your feet, and you dance together in the lobby, in full sight of the world, your bodies moving slowly, your arms wrapped around each other. You close your eyes and wish that somehow this moment could last forever.

---

Step Seven: Prepare at a dress rehearsal.

The next evening, you meet her on the dance floor at midnight. Voices from the ballroom carry in to greet you, the sound of them like razors in your back.

“They’ve been at it all night,” you say, and Kelly shivers.

“I found the maps,” she whispers. “We have to leave soon, Bettie.”

You decided on tomorrow night. You make all the plans. For how you’ll scrounge up some food, for how you’ll pack light but smart, for how you’ll be together and that’s all that matters.

As the parents start to shuffle out of the ballroom, their heavy footsteps echoing through the hotel, you stand up, ready to retreat to your hotel room. But then you stare across the empty dance floor, melancholy bunching up inside you.

“It’s silly,” you say, “but I always hoped I could be part of a dance contest at a place like this someday.”

Kelly exhales a defeated laugh. “But isn’t that what this is?” she asks. “Isn’t life just an overlong dance contest?”

You laugh too, and you think suddenly about kissing her, about what that would feel like, about how the world would stop and be okay, even if just for a moment. But then your mother’s voice rushes in from the lobby, calling out your name, and you turn away instead.

“Tomorrow night,” you whisper, but it sounds like a thousand years from now.

---

Step Eight: On the night of the performance, don’t let your nerves get the best of you.

You wait until it’s dark. Until you think you might be safe.

You meet Kelly in the empty lobby. Your duffel bag is quivering in your clenched hand. You left most of your clothes. That way, your family might not suspect what you’re doing, where you’re going.

“Are you ready?” Kelly asks, and you start to say yes when you see them.

All the shadows closing in on you. At first, you’re certain it’s the darkness from outside, but then you hear your sister’s hateful giggle.

“I saw you,” Annie says, emerging right in front of you. “You didn’t think I was paying attention while you were packing that bag. But we know what you’re doing.”

Your mother is right next to her. “I told you to stay away from that girl,” she says with a sneer.

You swallow hard, barely able to catch a breath. Your arm looped around Kelly’s, you search the crowd for a reasonable face but find none.

“They thought they could leave,” someone says. “But nobody leaves now. Not unless you’re ready to fall into the darkness. Is that what you want, girls?”

“Please,” you say, backing away, but it’s too late. They’re closing in, scowls etched on all their brows. They chase you and Kelly across the lobby, and with your heart in your throat, there’s only one place left to go.

Back to the dance floor. Back to where this all started the first day you arrived.

You keep running, Kelly at your side, but they’ve got you cornered in an instant, and there are so many of them, your family at the forefront and all the angry faces behind them looking for someone to blame.

You grip Kelly’s hand, and the two of you press your backs into the far wall. This is it now. There’s nowhere left to run.

“I’m sorry, Bettie,” Kelly whispers and closes her eyes. Her parents’ maps are in tatters on the floor, your family’s feet ripping them into shreds. The figures are everywhere at once, and you know you should be afraid, but rage suddenly rises up the back of your throat.

“Stop,” you seethe, and you feel it churning inside you. Something primordial. Something unfamiliar.

Something you welcome with open arms.

There’s a rumble in the floor beneath you, and it happens all at once. The tentacles crashing through the earth and bursting out of the wall next to you. They’re thinner than you expected and even a little slimier too.

Your parents and sister and all the other families stand frozen, their mouths gaping, but you only watch, understanding everything. About how this was the world’s destiny. But it’s not your destiny. Because you aren’t like them. According to your mom and dad, you’ve never been the right kind of girl. Now you smile, because at last, you’re ready to be the wrong kind of girl instead.

“Go on,” you whisper, and the tentacles listen.

The screaming lasts for a while, even longer than you expect, but that’s okay, because after all, nothing lasts forever. When it’s over, and the tentacles have slithered away, the dance floor is stained red, and all the voices of your family and the other families have dissolved in their torn-out throats.

You keep on smiling, because for the first time, you relish the silence.

---

Step Nine: With no other contestants left, take the trophy by default. Take what’s rightfully yours.

You and Kelly are the only two here now. Maybe the only ones left in the world. This should scare you of course, but you shrug, because you realize that might not be so terrible.

Kelly runs her fingers across the broken wall, still glistening wet from the tentacles. “The world’s really over,” she says, and you can’t help but let out a sharp laugh.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

At this, she grins back at you, her hair in her eyes, her one combat boot still coming undone.

Together, you’ll head for the road tomorrow. Maybe the tentacles will let you pass. Maybe they won’t. Either way, it’ll be worth trying.

But that’s not until the morning. For now, you clear a spot on the dance floor, wiping away the slick blood with your bare hands, kicking your sister’s phone across the room into the shadows where no one will ever retrieve it again.

“I love you,” Kelly whispers, and you kiss her, the two of you wrapped together in the dark.

And with the world crumbling to ash, and a bevy of bodies at your feet, the two of you dance together to a song no one else can hear.

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 881 for September 1st, 2023. 

How to Win a Dance Contest During an Apocalypse (In Nine Easy Steps!), by Gwendolyn Kiste [KEE-st]

Narrated by Ibba Armancas [IH-ba AR-man-kus]; hosted by Kat Day with audio production by Chelsea Davis

***

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Kat, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and this week we have How to Win a Dance Contest During an Apocalypse (In Nine Easy Steps!), by Gwendolyn Kiste  

This story is a PseudoPod original
[Content warning if needed]

Author bio:
Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Haunting of Velkwood. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor Nightfire, Titan Books, and The Dark. She’s a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Premios Kelvin and Ignotus awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com or on Instagram: at gwendolynkiste 

Narrator bio:
And our narrator this week is Ibba Armancas,
Ibba Armancas is a writer/director with PBS in Los Angeles. When not scheming up new audio or video projects,  she can be found practicing Italian rapier and attempting to learn hockey.

And now, we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true. 

***

ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story. ~~~

Gwendolyn had this to tell us about this piece:
While I’m a horror fan first and foremost, I’m also a big aficionado of coming-of-age films and romantic comedies, especially of the 1980s. I’ve always thought that many of the films of that era have a sort of existential horror vibe, even if you have to look closely to find it. So I wrote this story to be an apocalyptic, sapphic take inspired by the likes of Dirty Dancing and Footloose with two unlikely characters from different sides of the tracks falling in love. All with a healthy dose of cosmic horror and tentacles of course. 

I was delighted when I read these notes, because the first thing I said when I read the story was that it put me in mind of Dirty Dancing. Dear listener, I am quite old, and I remember when that film first came out in, ahem, 1987. I was admittedly a bit young to see it in the cinema at the time – this was before the 12A rating existed in the UK and here it had a 15 certificate – but it wasn’t too long before I managed to watch it at home on VHS. Back then, I was mostly drawn to the music and the dancing – it’s difficult, I think, not to fall a little in love with both the spectacular and much-missed Patrick Swayze and the gorgeous Jennifer Grey – but having rewatched it recently it’s remarkable how the film’s themes of coming of age, inclusivity and speaking up for what’s right stand the test of time. 

And so it is in this story. “That girl’s not like us,” says Bettie’s mother, unable, even at the literal end of the world, to let go of her sense of superiority. “How can there even be a wrong side of the tracks now?” wonders our 18-year-old protagonist. Indeed. What do you do when you know that it’s all about to end if not find someone to watch it end with? Find the perfect song and practice. Practice dancing, practice surviving.

“Why can’t you be more like your sister?” wonders her father later and Bettie, wisely, mentally dismisses the question. What is the point of comparisons like that? What matters but to be yourself, as fully and determinedly as you possibly can? 

We always promise you our stories are true, and the truth is the world is ending. It’s always ending – not one of us lives forever. The price of life is death. The only fiction here is the tentacles. Probably. Seriously, this whole story is a sharp reminder that, sometimes, we need to let go of things that don’t truly matter and, instead, choose to live fully and love fearlessly. Dance to a song that no one else can hear. Or, maybe just one other person can hear. Tell that person that they’re important to you. Ask them to stand at your shoulder as you both stare down what’s coming. Because you know what, even if things don’t quite work out, it’s always worth trying. Always.

A truly beautiful piece of work from Gwendolyn Kiste.

And by the way, this isn’t her first publication at PseudoPod. If you’d like to hear more of her work, check out episode 864, All the Ways to Hollow out a Girl, or 679, The Woman Out of the Attic.

~~~

What did you think of How to Win a Dance Contest During an Apocalypse (In Nine Easy Steps!), by Gwendolyn Kiste? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.
~~~

Now before we get into the usual end bits, there’s something that we want to mention that affects all of us: Amazon is ending their Kindle Publishing for Periodicals Program this month, a move they don’t seem to have publicised widely to readers. Kindle subscriptions have been, for some time now, the most convenient way of getting most magazines and this hits small publications – many of which gave us our first writing starts – very hard. Fantasy Magazine has already announced that it’s closing and many magazines are on a knife edge. So if you possibly can, please take the time to visit the websites of your favourite publications and find other ways to support them. They all have something. We can make a real and genuine difference: to the markets you’ll save now, to the new authors who’ll get their break in them, to the readers who will see themselves in a story that otherwise would have had nowhere to go. Short fiction is the fertile soil in which speculative fiction grows, and it is in our power to save it. Thank you.

And on the subject of subscribing, PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners. We pay everyone, and we’re very proud of that, but it relies on your generosity. As always, if you can, please go to pseudopod.org and donate by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you can’t afford to then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, tweeting about them, or generally making a noise on whichever form of social media seems the least awful this week.  By the way, we now have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.bsky.social. And if you like merch, Escape Artists has a Voidmerch store with a huge range of hoodies, t-shirts and other goodies. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet. Check it out!  

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

Next week we have See That My Grave is Kept Clean by Josh Rountree, narrated by Kyle Akers and produced by chief audio tentacle, Chelsea Davis.  

And just before I go, PseudoPod knows that it is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life. 

GNU Terry Pratchett. 

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.