---

The Grave of Angels

by Erica Ruppert

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Corra Martin, last child of her family line, insisted that I bring her home as a condition of our marriage.

And home, for Corra, would always be Holyoke where it stood on the high cliffs above the sea, exposed beneath the wide murky sky. The town had been all but deserted for years now, as all the coastal towns were. But she had been away for years, and longed for it. I had no deep roots, and wondered at her insistence.

Once we reached its crumbling outskirts I understood. Her family was woven into the fabric of this town. Streets were named for the Martins, and the businesses on them as well. Martin Hardware, Martin Dry Cleaners, Martin Street Market. All of them were shuttered, though, the influence of her family as diminished as the town itself.

No one went to the seaside, any more.

But we did. Corra was dying, and it was her wish. She wanted to be buried with her family. As we drove over the long, broken two-lane road that stretched across the lowland marshes toward the rising hills, Corra kept up a steady chatter of anecdotes and half-slipped memories.

Her mother had been the last living sibling of three, Corra rambled, and the only one to marry and have children. Her father was a mystery to her, unmentioned and unrecorded. Corra had had a brother, once, but she believed he had died in infancy. She never knew him. She thought he might be buried here. Her mother was, in the family crypt. Her uncles, dead before she was born, had left and never come home. How much of what she told me was objectively true, she couldn’t be certain. But she told me her history as she had learned it.

As we drove I watched her pinched, animated face. It was luck that I had even met her. But it was also luck that nurtured the disease in her lungs, stealing her breath and wasting her away. Sometimes she said it felt like something twisting inside her, coring her out. She had become almost Victorian under her illness’s weight, washed out and slender to the point of consumption. Yet her will to return to Holyoke was strong.

Corra stopped talking as we turned onto the long driveway to the house, her concentration at once and entirely on the property.

I wondered how what she remembered compared to what we saw. The family home was a large, plain two story affair, with faded blue vinyl siding and sagging gutters. Its lawn had become overgrown and brown, the driveway encroached by weeds and sand. Shaggy boxwood and yew shrubbery hid the lower parts of the wide front windows. The house breathed emptiness.

I pulled up in front of the garage. Corra got out of the car and jogged up the front steps. As I followed her I could see a light burning on the porch, dim in the daylight.

I was surprised the old house still had power. A note pinned to the front door read in wide block letters, “Generator on below. Cellar doors open for air. A.G.”

Corra pulled the paper free of its pin, crumpling it without thinking. She shoved it in her pocket as she reached for her keys.

“Who is A.G.?” I asked.

“Anna Gorney,” she said, distracted, as if she thought I should have known. As she struggled to turn the stiff lock she explained.

“Another old family in Holyoke, the Gorneys. They have always helped us.”

And then with a sudden click she unlocked the door and went in without me.

---

I carried our bags in while Corra wandered through the house. Her footsteps sounded from above me as she moved through the upstairs rooms. From the entrance way I could see into the living and dining rooms. They were clean but shrunken with oversized furniture. Family photos hung on most of the walls. I went into the living room to examine one of Corra, very young, with a woman who was probably her grandmother. The shape of their faces showed their kinship.

I turned away. There was nothing else of particular interest. This was a house much like I’d grown up in, comfortable but drab. I paused to consider the blank black window of the television screen. It had been years since anything had been broadcast. I didn’t really miss the content. I missed the community.

As I stood there reminiscing I heard the low thrum of the generator in the basement. Cutting across the steady sound, though, was a scraping noise like rocks sliding across each other. I found the cellar door in the kitchen and made my way down.

As I descended the painted wooden steps I expected to find a finished space, a playroom or a den. But Corra’s cellar was dug out of the cliff’s raw rock, rough, brown and layered. The floor had been leveled with painted cement. Part of one wall exposed a vein of black basalt in the native rock, honeycombed with what looked like burst air bubbles. The holes were full of shadows in the overhead light and glistened with damp. The grating sound seemed to come from the holes, but the noise faded as I leaned in to listen.

Then any subtler sound was drowned by a deep, hollow booming from far beneath me. I started, before I realized it was probably the sea clanging in some half-submerged cave. These cliffs were riddled with caves worn out of the rocks. I wondered how long it would take the sea to tear them down.

My mind was too busy. I went back upstairs to find my wife.

---

We settled in.

On the days she felt strong, Corra showed me the town as she remembered it. The first time, before we turned back home, she brought me to the edge of the overgrown cemetery where her family had built a small chapel over the family tomb. It was hardly larger than a garage, but its walls were black basalt and its shape suggested the gothic without indulging in it.

Like an archaic family joke, the Martin chapel was dedicated to that joyless ascetic, Saint Jerome. Corra didn’t know why her family had chosen him, though she suspected it was his bookish qualities that had drawn her ancestors.

Even though the chapel was abandoned, the engraving over the doorway remained intact: Quid futurum est esse iam coeperit.

“Begin now to be what you will be hereafter,” Corra said softly, as if it were a prayer itself. She turned to me with a history lesson. “Jerome favored the buried places, when he was young, to see the martyrs’ bodies and relics for himself. He felt that seeing those sacred bones would absolve him of his earthly sins.”

We went inside, and Corra showed me the door to the Martin tomb, and the stairs that led down to the graves. The stone walls leading down were as pocked as the walls of her basement. She asked if I knew of the Fosse Ardeatine, near Rome, near the catacombs Jerome haunted in his youth. I did not then, but I learned.

---

When Corra rested, which became more and more of each day, I went exploring.

I knew there were other people still in town, but I saw only fleeting evidence of them. Holyoke had contracted. I could not see the town as Corra did. I had no memory to fill the gaps.

The main street was a wide stretch of abandoned stores, windows intact, merchandise fading in the weak sun. The municipal building was empty in these strange times, as was the unlocked, partially stocked grocery store, and a church whose denomination escaped me. Here and there I could see the blue flicker of fluorescent lights where, somehow, electricity still flowed.

On the far side of an overgrown park I found the library. It was without power, abandoned as the rest of the town’s infrastructure. The doors had blown open in some storm and the vestibule was clotted with mud. But the books had been left mostly alone. The main rooms were bright with the grey light that poured through the large, streaked windows.

I searched through the stacks until I found the books I needed, thick with dampness but intact. I collected layperson’s science, paleontology and geology and archeology. I dug out books of folklore and myth. I grabbed a few science journals I thought I would understand.

I lugged my finds back home with me, where the light was constant. I had little else to do but read.

I read all the nonfiction first, answering the questions Corra had raised. And then I dug deeper into folklore and myth, back to the Greeks and their buried gods, and the gods they stole and renamed. It was all there, scattered like fossil bones, fragmentary, incomplete, but clear enough. Clear enough.

The urge to burrow deep into the belly of the earth has been with us as long as we have been human. The Neanderthals who buried their dead a thousand feet deep in the Bruniquel caves must have felt the tug, and the butchers who stumbled into the Fosse Ardeatine.

But our history is also haunted by the convergence of elemental forces, the earth and the sea. And so the Celts made sacrifices in the ocean-washed caves in the Moray Firth. And divers at the Eagle’s Nest drowned in the depths of the earth.

Those places are gone, now, lost. But something deep calls us, and always, always, we find a way to answer.

---

The days dragged on. One Gorney or another made sure the generator ran, and that some kind of food was left on the doorstep for us. I walked, and I read. Sometimes I spent time with Corra. I would help her down the stairs and we would walk as far as the chapel. But the damp air weighed her down. She had so little energy left. My company seemed to exhaust her.

As Corra grew weaker she grew less certain of her family’s ways. We stopped our trips to the chapel. She would no longer bear looking down that long stairway into the dark.

She became obsessed with her impending death. She grew demanding, pressing me to promise I would not bring her to her family tomb. She wanted her body burned, and the ashes taken to the high peaks above Holyoke and thrown to the wind. She did not fear dying, not the great swallowing void of not being, not even the relentless pain of the process. She dreaded the thought of being sunk into the earth. She feared what would become of her after.

I promised her anything, to keep her still. There was so little of her left.

---

Soon enough Corra passed beyond any comfort I could offer. Her skin had been golden, once, before fading to its present dull brass. The fever that rode her gave her sunken cheeks a lying flush, lent her eyes a false brightness. But she was wasted into a barely-fleshed scarecrow, her arms and legs sticks inside her clothes.

“It’s moving in me. Like worms. It hurts,” she told me, her voice a ghost. “Go find the Gorneys.”

I left her and stepped out into dusk. I took the car, glad the neglected battery still held a charge. I drove until I found the Gorney’s house by the electric light shining through its windows. The front screen door was propped open. I knocked on the doorframe.

Dishes clinked inside the house. Water ran. I heard low voices but could not catch the words. At last an older woman came to the door, trailed by a tall young man.

“Are you Mrs. Gorney?” I asked, suddenly uncertain.

“Anna,” she said. “And Anthony.”

She showed no surprise at my appearance.

“It’s Corra,” I said. “She’s dying.”

Anna Gorney shrugged. “That’s why she came home.”

I was jarred by her bluntness. “Please. You’ll help with the arrangements? She wants her ashes scattered over the sea. Are any funeral homes even still open?”

She looked at me with what might have been pity, or scorn.

“We’ll do what we have to,” she said. “Go home. We’ll come.”

“Thank you,” I said, and gladly left the Gorneys behind me as I drove back to the house.

I went upstairs, into the comfort of the light. Corra had curled up on her side, her face to the wall, whispering steadily of burning and flight. Her faded voice went on for hours. I sat with her and listened. Her words were a jumble, noise without sense. Eventually she stopped speaking at all, and very late that night she died, gasping from the pain.

---

The next morning, the Gorneys appeared on the doorstep. Their knocking broke the spell of silence that held the Martin house. I let them in.

“She’s dead,” I said by way of greeting.

“Yes. I know,” Anna said. She and her son brushed past me and went up to Corra. I stayed downstairs. They knew what they were doing. I didn’t question how they knew.

They came down after a short while, with the long bony length on Corra’s corpse carried over their shoulders. Her body was wrapped in a grey cloth as fine as spiderweb, and so clingy I could see the hollows of her eyes. Anna must have had the cloth in her bag. There was nothing like that in the house.

“She can’t go down, yet,” Anna said. “We have to make things ready for her.”

I roused. “She wanted to be cremated. She doesn’t want to be put in the ground.”

Anna stared at me, her eyes hard.

“They all say it. Her mother said the same thing, and her grandmother too. I’ve tended them all at the end.”

“Oh,” I said.

Anthony stood quietly behind his mother.

“People get scared when they’re dying. But she knew what she really wanted. It’s her responsibility. It’s why she came home.”

“Oh, but,” I said, and stopped. I wanted to follow Corra’s wishes, and I wanted her to be safe with her ancestors, away from this strange, decayed world. I wanted to not be caught here, without her. I didn’t yet understand. The machinery moved on without me.

“We’ll leave her in the parlor until it’s done,” Anna said.

I nodded, tired, not willing to argue. Corra was dead, and it didn’t matter. I did not think it through.

They lay Corra on the long couch facing the blank television. From another hidden pocket Anna unfurled another long length of fabric, this one spangled in silver, and draped it over my wife’s dead form. She bent to smooth it, and I saw her move her hands in a way that suggested the sign of the cross. But it was not a cross she drew there, over Corra’s quiet heart.

Anna straightened and looked at her work, then nodded to me. “Come, Anthony,” she said to her son. And they left me alone.

I spent the night in the parlor with Corra, glad of the electric lights that cast back the shadows. Nothing moved in the house. The only sound was the thrum of the generator below. Even so, I imagined my wife might still be breathing inside her shroud. I thought I heard a soft, wet motion. I thought I saw something slide beneath the wrappings, working them loose. But the faint exhalations were only the beginnings of decomposition, relentless even in the cool night. I moved my chair back from her, and eventually fell asleep. I dreamed of Corra, on a pyre that would not kindle.

---

Anna Gorney did not come back to the house for two days. She and her son had opened up the Martin tomb and cleared the neglected passageway to its end, and then dug a new niche into the soft, honeycombed stone for Corra’s swaddled remains.

By now Corra had begun to stink plainly of decay. A thin, vile liquid stained the fine cloth of her shroud. But Anna Gorney and her son did not flinch away from lifting her again to carry her to the chapel. They walked at a stately pace and let me trail behind them. I could hear them whispering roughly to each other. It might have been a conversation, it might have been a song. I did not listen closely enough to tell.

Instead I wandered along and gathered an armload of lilies from the untended gardens along the way, carrying the blooms instead of helping to bear my wife. When we reached the chapel I had to crush the lilies against my chest to open the door for the Gorneys. They passed me with their burden, and for a moment I was truly left outside of it, outside the chapel, outside the ritual, outside the cloistered history of my wife and the town.

Overwhelmed, I followed them in. They had already descended the steps to the tomb, and I hurried down to see them set my Corra in her place.

The heady smell of the lilies was cloying in the narrow confines of the grave, but not strong enough to mask the rot. I lay the bright flowers at Corra’s feet and tried not to breathe too deeply. I wondered how guilty I should be, that I hadn’t insisted on burning her. I looked for the Gorneys, but they had gone up, leaving me to whatever rites I would do. But I did nothing. I could not believe my Corra had been reduced to this.

And yet, I still suffered the niggling doubt that she was not truly gone. The words carved over the chapel’s door fed my imagination. Begin now to be what you will be hereafter—but when does now begin?

---

Every day I went to visit her, a lone pilgrim in an empty town. The Gorneys kept to themselves, their duties fulfilled. If anyone else still called this town home, they kept to themselves as well. I saw no-one. Just as well; I did not need the pressure of contact.

Every day I let myself into the chapel and descended to her. Every day the distance seemed a few yards longer, the slant of the floor steeper, the air warmer and strangely flavoured with salt. Every day I brought her fresh flowers from the gardens running to seed, lilies, roses, phlox, all sweet and suffocating in the close stone channel but never fragrant enough. Her silvery shroud grew dark with stains as she withered inside it. I marked how she changed, how the clinging wet fabric revealed a new form inside the old. She had been my wife. As long as she remained in the riddled stone crypt where her family was, she would be.

I entertained wild thoughts built on myths, of magically bringing her back. Of her wanting to come back. Of her loving me enough to make her way out of that consuming darkness.

Every day I walked slowly down the long spiral, to Corra, my Eurydice, to tempt her back into the air. But I am not Orpheus. I could not persuade her to follow me even a little way back.

---

Today, after two weeks of invariable routine, I needed to change. I left the house and gathered what weedy flowers still bloomed, but I did not turn immediately toward Corra’s familiar tomb. The day was cool and grey, with a wet breeze coming off the cooling ocean. Summer was reaching its inevitable end.

I walked into the wind, toward the edge of town where the land fell away into the sea below. Scrub grass gave way to bare pitted rock. The wind became a force on the cliff’s edge, blowing my hair back. I looked for gulls, but there were none to see.

The ocean below was as milky as jade, its shush and rumble masked by the wind streaming past my ears. I felt smothered in the sound of it, separated from what was left of the rest of the world.

I finally turned my head away from the wind’s direct path, and could finally hear the sea. But there was no human sound, no bird cry, no noise of something alive. The air moved. The sea churned. And the sky hung like dull silk above it all, rippled and weighted by something behind it.

I had never realized how alone I was, before that moment. Not just from Corra’s death. From the world’s.

Nothing, in the end, is sacrosanct. We die. Traditions are misremembered or forgotten. There is no way to stop it happening, with lives as brief as ours. There are gods we shall never see, because we no longer remember how.

I threw my handful of flowers into the sea. They scattered and drifted in the wind, tumbling down the cliff face before falling bruised upon the water. It didn’t matter. It meant nothing to me once it was done. I was no part of this town. I didn’t belong here, to this tradition. Not with Corra gone. I didn’t belong to her, either. Not any more. I watched the waves swallow the flowers down.

And then the sky ripped open, the grey fabric of it shredded by profound light, and in an instant the roar of thunder followed. The smooth clouds flexed into stormy masses, muscular as a cat.

I cringed. Mine is not the only memory.

With the first slap of rain an attention bore down on me, the attention of something that had no measure of its own strength and no concern for mine. I fled from the wind and the terrible sky, driven back into town by the storm.

---

The muddy streets of Holyoke were empty but for me. the rain stung like splinters and the wind was a lash. I should have run back up the hill to the house, but the sky knew where I was. The chapel was closer.

I wrestled open the door beneath the inscription and escaped the swarming rain. Saint Jerome’s words were no longer any comfort or hope. Even beneath the stone roof I felt exposed.

As I wiped water from my face I realized that someone sat on the step to the altar. My skin tingled as the hair on my arms lifted in fear. In the foggy grey light the person seemed misshapen and blurred, human only by suggestion. Then lightning flashed and the figure stood up, coalescing into Anthony Gorney.

“What are you doing here?” I said before I could stop myself.

He shrugged. I realized I had never heard him speak.

Then Gorney opened the door to the tomb for me, and gestured that I should go down. Lightning crackled, lighting the passage and first few steps with blue radiance. It seemed as if the light flowed down the worn stone, seeped into the cracks and was absorbed by the darkness.

Gorney gestured again.

“All right,” I said. “I’ve been here every day. Of course I’m going down.”

I reached into my pocket for the flashlight I carried, glad I had put in fresh batteries. Gorney did not move aside as I passed, forcing me closer to him than I ever wanted to be. He smelled of old, wet things, like mold on cloth. I didn’t look at him, but I heard his rough breathing in my ear as I stepped down.

I passed the first turn in the stairs when fear closed my throat. The long winding tunnel smelled of earth and salt. The myths I had read swarmed in my imagination.

Before I could turn back I heard the door slam shut, the key grind in the lock, the retreat of footsteps across the chapel floor.

“Gorney!” I yelled, but I was ignored. I heard the outer door to the chapel bang closed. Then I heard only the dim, distant rhythm of rain on the high chapel roof.

I was sealed in with my wife, and all her kin.

My flashlight cut the dark, drawing out the shadows. I did not bother to try the door behind me. I had opened it enough times to know its weight and its well-oiled machinery. I went down, as I was meant to.

The corridor ran on longer than I remembered from all my previous visits. As I went deeper it was not the reek of the grave but the rank stench of the sea that laded the air. I passed the dozens of niches I always counted on my way to Corra, each with its pile of dust. This time it struck me that the names over them, all the names I could read, were female.

The tomb spiraled down and down, screwed into the earth. I had a sense of the corridor turning on itself, like a Moebius ring, like Oroboros. At times it seemed as if I were climbing, but gravity pulled strangely at me and I had to fight against it to move on. At other times a step would bring a sickening lurch like the drop of an elevator, but the rock remained firm beneath my feet.

The sides of the corridor glistened, dank with seeping water, and the air grew increasingly hot.

When I finally reached the end of the corridor I expected to see the shadow of my Corra in her ragged shroud, as slumped and empty as I had left her yesterday. But she was gone, her niche vacant. I cast my light around, looking for signs of some terrible prank. Dropped in the dust was her dismembered hand, half-open, cupping nothing, the skin tight and pulling the bones together. The index finger extended in a weak curve to point further down the now-elongated corridor, deeper into the dark.

She was down there, moving in the earth. I knew it.

---

I followed her direction. The tunnel continued as far as my light would show it.

There were no more niches, just pitted, black rock walls. It is the same rock as the chapel, and the intrusion in her basement. It is the same rock that underlies the deep sea itself, born there at the rifts in great molten upwellings that flow slowly away to reshape the rest of the world in their time.

These black walls should have been smooth and solid, the roots of the world. But they were as pocked as limestone. The corridor rustled with the sound of sand on sand. I blamed my own footsteps. The smell of salt here made me choke. I cannot imagine how far down I have travelled.

---

And then I realized that my flashlight was not the only source of light in the depths. Ahead of me I could just discern a pale, bioluminescent glow spilling up from an even deeper place.

The floor sloped down gently. I stepped down into the light.

Corra sat in state in the grotto that opened before me, a damp velvet cushion beneath her, her shoulders draped in silver cloth. Fungal things bloomed around her in a strange bounty, waving delicate yellow filaments in the bloodwarm, still air.

Her bones had been stripped of all soft flesh, and polished until they shone like pearl. I saw with some surprise how narrow and shallow her jaw was, how wide set her eyes. Her bones had changed down here, or living flesh had hidden these deformities. Now they were bare, a truth revealed.

But her eyes—the sockets were not empty after all. Like a heavy tide a luminous jelly rolled up to fill them, shimmered and focused and saw me. For too long I could only meet that alien gaze, struck dumb by the spark and fade of those viscous depths. It was like looking into the night sky, or deep water. And then, she recognized me.

The tendons that held her bent jaw to her skull creaked and slithered as she opened her mouth. A hiss of a voice slipped out. The moist grating sound grew louder all around, and slippery vermin came from every crack that could hide them. One slithered over my shoe and clung to the leg of my pants before I shouted in gross fear and kicked it away. It was a pale grey thing, limber and slick and primitive, one of the things that scraped through the rock, making passage for what still would come.

The myths and folklore have lost so much in translation. The raw edges of our need for burial has been rubbed to dullness by time.

There are elemental places that demand to be opened and then appeased. Like other caves, like other catacombs, the Martin tomb was one. The Martins opened it willingly and answered the call with their own blood. There were benefits to their sacrifice.

Beside my Corra is an empty throne carved out of the grotto itself, black and ancient stone worn smooth by countless grey bodies sliding across it, decorated with a lattice of crumbling bones. The seat is too high for a human, too angled, too deep.

Even further beneath us I can hear a huge, even, booming sound, like an ancient bell, like waves against a hollow rock wall. The constant slithering of the grey things stops. They retreat into their many, many holes.

Corra is not my Eurydice. No. She is Persephone, queen in the dark. And I am not her king.

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 885 for September 29th, 2023.

The Grave of Angels, by Erica Ruppert

Narrated by Rhianna Pratchett; 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 The Grave of Angels, by Erica Ruppert

This story first appeared in Vastarien in June 2021.

[This story has a content warning for death of a partner: if that’s going to be difficult for you, give this one a miss. We’ll be back soon, we promise]

Now, we’re bringing you this particular story today because September 30th is the feast of Saint Jerome. Jerome was a scholar who’s best known for his translation of the Bible into Latin. He is, naturally, the patron saint of translators and librarians. And I should mention someone else who does translations: our very own Shawn Garrett. He’s been working at PseudoPod for 15 years this year – what a milestone! Plus, it’s his birthday on September 30th, too. Happy Birthday AND happy anniversary, Shawn!

---

Author bio:
Your author this week is Erica Ruppert, who lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and too many cats. Her novella, Sisters in Arms, was released in 2021. Her short stories have appeared in magazines including astarien, Lamplight, and Nightmare, on podcasts including PodCastle, and in multiple anthologies. Her collection, Imago and Other Transformations, is out now. When she is not writing, she runs, bakes, and gardens with more enthusiasm than skill. Find her on Facebook at Eruppert.923 or at www.nerdgoblin.com.

Narrator bio:
And our narrator this week is Rhianna Pratchett who’s worked in most entertainment fields, but is probably best known for her award-winning work on games titles such as Mirror’s Edge, the Overlord series, Tomb Raider and Lost Words: Beyond the Page. She also works in film and television: she is co-director of Narrativia, the multimedia production company who control the rights to the works of Sir Terry Pratchett, her late father. She wrote the Fighting Fantasy novel Crystal of Storms and her latest book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being A Witch, co-written with Gabrielle Kent, is due to be released at the start of November.

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

---

ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story.

Erica had this to tell us about this piece:
“This story incorporates many of my recurrent themes–rituals, religion, the end of the world, and did not end up where I thought it would when I began.”

I love the symbolism in this story. It has a dream-like quality from the start, and if you poke around in dream interpretations and symbolism, one thing that comes up is that shops and shopping can represent choosing between options. The opening of this story, which describes the decaying town: Martin Hardware, Martin Dry Cleaners, Martin Street Market – all of them shuttered – made me think about this idea. There are no more choices: everything is closing, coming to an end.

And of course, there’s the booming, echoing sea, in the background too. The ocean has always represented hidden things, secrets. Coldness. Darkness. That’s why we like it so much at PseudoPod, after all. And then we have the references to Jerome, eventually to become the Saint of translators and librarians, and who, we’re told, felt that seeing sacred bones would absolve him of his earthly sins.

“Begin now to be what you will be hereafter,” says the Latin engraving over the chapel. And this is a turning point: the suggestion of cycles, of things ending, but also starting again. Every year for the last few years now we’ve bought a pot of caterpillars from a company called Insect Lore. They start tiny, barely specks, they eat and grow, eat and grow… and then they crawl up to the lid of the cup, hang there and become still. There’s one last flurry of movement before they form their chrysalid, and in that moment the caterpillar loses its caterpillar head, before becoming sealed in, its old body liquifying, and then slowly reforming into something… new.

This story reminded me, very much, of that process. Although here, of course, what emerges is not a pretty painted lady.

Masterful work, and a beautiful narration.

---

What did you think of The Grave of Angels, by Erica Ruppert? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us. 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 do that then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or talking about them on social media. Speaking of which, we now have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.org. 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.

While we’re here, I just want to give a little shout-out to GigaNotoSaurus, who publish one “longish” fantasy or science fiction story every month. They need your help. Go to giganotosaurus.org to find out more. Thank you.

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 A Wonder of Nature, In Need of Killing by V.G. Campen, narrated by Sevatividam, guest-hosted by Marie Lestrange, and produced by chief audio tentacle, Chelsea Davis.

And just before I go, PseudoPod, and Ursula K. Le Guin, know that:
You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb.

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