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The Stringer of Wiltsburg Farm

by Eden Royce

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Daddy called tobacco a quick and dirty crop. Quick because it was one hundred days from planting to harvest. Dirty because cutting the leaves off the plants released a juicy, dark sap that dried, sticky sweet, on the skin. Mud then clung to the sap, eventually drying to a thick crust that itched and flaked, turning brown skin ghostly gray.

Still didn’t keep him from sending me out in the fields.

“It’s 1949,” I told him, pouring coffee from the pot on the iron stove. “Times are changing.”

Daddy hobbled to the kitchen table with his horn-headed cane, weight on his good leg. He spat a thick wad of tobacco chaw into an old coffee cup and my stomach turned at the yeasty, sickly-sweet smell. Its juice stuck to his beard and he wiped it away with an arm.

“Times don’t change that much, Annie Maggie. Not ’round here.” He looked outside at the sun coming up over the trees, already drying the dew on the crop. “Still got leaves to cut and worms to pull.”

I shuddered. I knew which job I was going to get. One of the blades from a used harvesting machine he bought from some white man upstate had come lose and torn a gash in his leg from knee to ankle. Until that healed, he couldn’t be in his own fields like he wanted, cutting and pulling, chewing and spitting, alongside all his farm hands. Back bent to the tasks, sweat pouring off him like it was coming out of a bucket. Smiling all the while.

Because he couldn’t get out in the fields, I couldn’t keep going to school. “You had plenny schooling, gal. More’n yuh mama or me ever had.”

“I know.” I tried to keep the disappointment out of my mouth. They had worked so hard to get me here where I was: almost nineteen with a few more months to go until I could get myself a diploma, then take the county test to be a teacher myself. But that would have to wait. Daddy was hurt, mama was dead, and Jeannie had gone off and gotten married.

My sister married the first man showed any interest in her. She hated the farm, the tobacco. Said the smell of the leaves drying and the manure in the fields made her sick. Daddy heard her one time and waxed her tail for talking mess about what put food on the table and clothes on her back. Jeannie never said anything else about the farm, but she grabbed onto the first boy she saw was going somewhere out of town and held on for dear life.

Her letters came every so often, talking about her crochet and house-cleaning and selling her homemade jams at the corner market. But she never visited. One of the ladies from the church went to visit her aunt up there in Neville and said she heard Jeannie yelling at her husband for smoking a cigarette. Said she wouldn’t be in no house with a man that smoked. Kicked up such a fuss, he stomped out the offending stick and grabbed Jeannie’s arm and dragged her home.

That left daddy and me to handle everything in those hundred days. We hired croppers for the cutting, usually five men. Including daddy, it was barely enough to get the leaves cut, bundled, dried, and to market on time.

“I don’t know why you won’t marry one of these men and start having some children can help us round here. They’s good workers, each and ev’ry one.”

“Hm.”

“What’s wrong with ’em? You acting like one of ’em is Tobacco Man or somethin’.”

I snorted as I tied an apron around my waist. The Tobacco Man was a silly story croppers told to keep farm owners from having them out in the fields working at night. Betta crop while the sun shines, or T’baccy Man gon’ take you away. He like darkness. Come and cover you—and then you gone.

Never did find out where the Tobacco Man was supposed to take his victims. If he was out there in the night, maybe I should go and ask him if he’s seen my mama. I busied myself and had eggs, scrambled hard, along with day-old buttered biscuits and a few sausages on plates for breakfast. We ate in silence, daddy knowing I didn’t like him talking about marriage and kids, but still, he did it anyway. Always thinking about what would be best for the farm.

I didn’t want babies. No one I had to be responsible for. Each time I said it, he got this look of pity on his face and told me I’d change my mind about getting a teaching job. Women were changeable, he’d said. I’d learn. I’d be a good mother. But I’d seen how mama declined once that baby boy she had came out stillborn. She hollered and cried, wailed long, throat-drying warbles until her grief turned her into a banshee and she flew off into the night.

Daddy never talked about that. The night he’d held onto mama’s shaking body, clad in a floral cotton nightgown, as she screamed her pain. Soon, she started fading, getting thinner and lighter until we could see the whitewashed walls through her deep brown skin. Jeannie and I had just stared, unable to move, as daddy clutched at her, his big, rough hands tangling in her pressed hair and tearing her nightclothes. Soon his hands fell free all on their own, and mama slipped through the keyhole in the front door.

We all ran to the door and threw it open, calling to her, coaxing her to come back, but she was gone, the inky, starless night and the waving tobacco swallowing any trace of her. The next day, on my walk to school, I found a small piece of that flowered cotton beside the fields and put it in my bag. It was dusty, dirt-flecked, but I held it close to me.

Now, some eight years later, I’d managed to sew it into a quilt I kept on my bed. When I missed her, wished I could talk with her, I rubbed it, imagining her not as a monster but finally having the freedom and the peace from daddy’s demanding ways she so desperately wanted. Even though it meant my ties to this place only got tighter.

I put our empty dishes in the sink as daddy took a drink of medicine from the amber bottle a root doctor gave him. He had never been fond of hospitals. They tended to turn Negroes away, so he kept his ailments close to his chest and called on local healers when he couldn’t stand any more.

As I took off my apron and put on my boots—handed down from an old pair of daddy’s—he asked me, “You goin’ stringing when the men get here?”

Of course, I was. He wasn’t going to spend the money to hire a woman to tie up the bundles of tobacco leaves to sell when I had two good, nimble hands and a strong back. I nodded. “Gotta pick first though. Then I’ll feed the chickens.”

Daddy grunted. The medicine was already taking effect. I checked the bandages on his mauled leg before he shuffled to the sofa. “You’re a good girl, Annie Maggie.”

I picked up the tin bucket next to the door as I left. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Too good.”

The day was already blister hot and rising. The chickens in the yard warbled and clucked while they scooted around my feet. I tossed out a small handful of corn from the pocket of my dungarees, enough to whet their appetites. I’d be back with supplemental food in a while.

“You’ll have to wait for the rest, ladies. And gentleman.” The rooster stared at me with one unblinking eye, then tilted his head away as though he had better things to ogle.

I marched out to the furthest row from the house and bent to the task. Thankfully, it hadn’t rained last night or the job would be worse. Peering close to the tobacco, I reached out and grabbed a fat cutworm, then pulled it from the stalk. It wriggled in my grasp, its multitude of legs waving as it roiled. A deep brown stain of tobacco sap showed where the creature’s mouth was. I dropped it into the bucket and moved to the next one, hoping I was out early enough to mitigate the damage of the worms’ feast.

Left alone, these cutworms—caterpillars, actually, fat-bodied with stumpy legs and an endless appetite—could destroy a crop in less than half the time it took to harvest. So someone had to remove them. Pesticides were no good. They killed every other bug except these worms, which remained unharmed by the chemicals, and continued to glut themselves on the soft leaves. And those chemicals couldn’t be washed out either. The tobacco got cut, strung, hauled, and dried with no worry for the killing liquids.

We knew other farmers who had tried to do without pesticides, and what little of their crop remained after the bugs and beetles didn’t garner much at the sales. Most of the buyers swore they could taste the difference in flavor, and they didn’t like the look of the leaves, chewed into lace by the insects. Those farmers didn’t break even, and they didn’t go without the chemicals again.

Daddy usually did the pulling, his wide fingers the same thickness as the bright-green worms. He would pull three or four in succession, keeping their wriggling enclosed in his palm, before dropping them all into the bucket. He said he couldn’t even feel them struggling.

I felt them wriggling against my palm and trying to squirm through my fingers. One of them bit my hand, right where the thumb and first finger meet. The pain was at first a pinch, then it blossomed into a full stabbing that shot up my arm to my heart. I let loose a curse, yanking off the offender and crushing its body in my fingers. I threw it in the dirt, ground it under my heel until it disappeared into the muck.

For a few moments, I sucked on the wound, the metal-sharp taste of my blood strong. Out here in the middle of the ripening leaves, the worms were all I could hear. The symphony of thousands of mouths chewing, devouring the tender leaves, surrounded me whenever I was out in the fields. Moist snapping, followed by the scent of wet leaves, musk oil flowers, and manure-rich dirt. At times like this, I understood Jeannie more than I would ever tell her.

I pressed my lips together and went back to my task, pulling off the destructive cutworms one after the other, moving backward down the row of plants. Their softness hit the bottom of the tin bucket with a sick clunk. Pulling until the clunk turned into a gentler plop, meaning the worms were piling up, plump bodies cushioning the fall of their brothers. Soon, they’d be able to wriggle toward the lip of the bucket and out, determined to get back to the plants and feed.

They get addicted to it, one cropper named Ray Earl told me when I first started helping daddy after mama left, as a young girl about ten or so.

“Them worms get used to that t’baccy, you know. Gets to where they won’t eat nothin’ else, even if ya gib it to ’em. They do anything for that there weed.” Back then, he was about the age I am now, barrel-broad in the chest with legs that looked too skinny to hold him upright. He slipped a piece of cut cane between his lips and sucked. “Dat’s why you neber gon’ see me wit none of it.” And I didn’t. Every evening after the croppers had their meal, most of them sat on the porch outside with a piece of leaf from the day’s cuttings. The men were filthy, covered in dark sap dusted over with mud and muck, but still they sat wiping spittle from their chins and yacking away until dusk, their chewing loud as the worms.

Ray Earl would get his pay, thank me and Jeannie kindly, then head off to wherever it was he lived. He’d be back the next morning, ready to work. He was the one who told me about Tobacco Man.

I laughed to myself as I pulled more of the destructive worms. I’d believed every word he’d said. Looking up at him, seeing his rough brown hands darkened even further by the clinging sap and edged with a line of powdery ashiness on the knuckles, fascinated me.

Know why you ’posed to wait ’til sunup to start with t’baccy?

I shook my head, pigtails bobbing.

‘Cause that’s when T’baccy Man go to sleep. Don’t want him catchin’ you, huh?

I’d screamed a little, and he turned serious eyes on me. Don’ worry, Annie Maggie. He aine gonna git you s’long as I’s here.

I think I’d been a little in love with him then. But he must’ve gotten killed in the war soon after because he never came back to our farm after that harvest. I’d forgotten about him and his story. Strange how things come back.

The bucket was about a third full. I hefted it in one hand after wrapping a dishtowel around the handle to protect my hands. After so little time in the fields, my hands had gotten soft, unused to the hard labor of daddy’s harvesting. I trudged back to the house, leaning slightly as I balanced the weight of the bucket full of wriggling worms. Some tried to crawl away. I shook the bucket, jostling them so they tumbled back down to await their fate.

Back in the yard, the chickens swarmed me, tuck-tuck-tucking the food call to each other, somehow aware that I was pulling today instead of Daddy. I shook the bucket, sprinkling the worms in a narrow line through the middle of the brood. The birds pounced, scrabbling for the bloated worms, their toenails scratching the work leather on my boots as they rushed to glut themselves.

One of the birds, a frizzle hen, was scratching in another part of the yard. I went over to look and saw a dusty square of cloth. I shooed the black-feathered bird away and knelt to look at what it had uncovered. A red felt bag tied with coarse twine—a mojo hand. I backed away, almost dropping the bucket. I was no root lady, but I knew what to stay away from.

I peeked inside to ask daddy, but he was snoring on the sofa, fast asleep from the pain medicine. No help there. I saw some of the workers coming toward the house, the younger boys who came with their daddies to work the crops, their slim fingers pinching off the tobacco flowers as they began to grow. Some boys were given small knives to cut away the stunted, unproductive leaves, so the larger ones could flourish.

One brown boy stood near the water pump in the yard, getting a drink, and I called to him.

“Young man,” I asked. “You know where Dr. Beetle lives?”

He looked at me with a frown, his pouty little mouth dropping water. “Dat root man? Yeah, I know.”

Of course, most of us did. Conjure healers were the only medicine we had sometimes, except for the granny remedies that were shared between us to cure the most everyday ailments: sick stomachs, heat stroke, women’s heavy monthlies. Plucking leaves, boiling tea into tonic, healing poultices for cuts and scrapes—it was big business. The one thing croppers didn’t have to worry about was flies and mosquitoes. Insects couldn’t abide the smell of the sap.

“Please get him for me,” I said, already reaching into my pocket for payment for his quick feet. I handed him a coin and a piece of peanut candy I’d made, wrapped in waxed paper. “Tell him I found something.”

The boy looked at me while he unwrapped the candy. He popped the square into his mouth, then turned and took off, running for all he was worth through the dirt and empty wooden poles standing upright in the fields.

I sighed, knowing those empty poles were down to me to fill. I walked to the nearest one in my borrowed boots, pulling a roll of string from my pocket. I tied together the stacks of leaves the cutters had left, then hung them on the poles for the wagon to gather, keeping an eye out for Dr. Beetle’s arrival.

---

The short, thin man chuckled when he saw the mojo hand in the yard. “This what your hen scratch up, eh? Who you trying to get?”

I never messed with magic, making it or buying it, and I told him so. I was going to school, so I wouldn’t have to live my life worrying about who was laying tricks on me or hexing my family. Teaching was a suitable job, and I’d send money to daddy whenever I could, but these fields full of their caterpillar worms and black sap-coated superstition wasn’t for me.

“It’s a protection mojo. Nothing wrong with a little help now and then.” He looked up at me through his blue-lensed sunglasses and adjusted his hat to shade his eyes. “You could use some help, ain’t that so?”

“No, thank you. Daddy will be up and around soon, and things’ll go back to normal. All we have to do is get through this harvest and sale. We’ll be all right.”

“No shame in asking for help, young lady.”

I bristled at his tone and the words themselves but held my poise. “You’re right. When I need help, I’ll surely ask for it. I called you here today, didn’t I?”

Dr. Beetle folded his frail arms across his bird-like chest. He looked directly in my face for long moments, making me uncomfortable with seeing my refection in the blue lenses. “That you did. You getting along, then? Got enough workers?”

“We’re managing all right.”

He ran his tongue, pink as trout flesh, over his bottom lip. “Uh huh. How’s Jesse?”

“Daddy’s fine. You can go see him if you like. He’s inside.”

With a nod, the doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and headed for the house.

“What do I do with this thing?” I pointed to the dusty, worn pouch in the dirt. The chickens had finished feeding, but were giving it a wide berth.

Halfway in the door, he turned back. “Bury it right back where it was.” I frowned. “Why? Nobody here needs protecting.”

“Now how would you know that, Annie Maggie?” He stepped the rest of the way in the house and shut the door.

I grabbed a sturdy chicken feather from the ground and used it to pick up the bag. I carried it to the drying shed and dumped it into the fire.

---

That night, a wet mouth met mine in the dark. Smoky, slick-soft flesh slid across my body and I rose to meet it, pressing deeper into the tender recesses. It was like no other kiss I’d had, not from any of the croppers, not from the other girls at school who liked to pretend they were kissing each other to practice for when a boy wanted them. This was a feast, falling into a nothingness made of our tongues and mouths. The night prevented me from seeing anything, and I reached out, sure it was a dream, only to feel the stiff brush of leaves under my fingers. I heard breath—felt it—my own and another’s, huffing soft bursts of heat in the chilled night. I tasted sweetness, felt the tiny, welcome pain as teeth nipped at my lips.

I tugged on the leaves, tough as fabric in my hands, wanting to be closer, to feel this swirling madness, this ache pulsing low in me. From a distance, I heard my name, whispered at first, then louder until it rang out, breaking the daze I was in. I sat up in the darkness, shuddered at the cool dew seeping through my nightgown. Lights went on in the house upstairs, first one, then a long time later another. Daddy was moving around on his own, calling for me.

“Annie Maggie!” Daddy’s voice called again, rising with his fear of not finding me.

When I put my hands to the ground to push myself up, leaves clung to my sticky palms. I yanked them off, jumped to my feet, and raced for the house. I made as little noise as possible getting in, still unsure how I’d ended up outside in the fields. We kept a mirror on the wall right inside the door to stop ghosts entering. As I passed, I caught a glimpse of my reflection.

My hair was wild, loosened from the braid I wore it in to sleep. But what made the cry wedge in my throat was the dark brown stain covering my mouth. I reached out and brought my sticky, dirt-covered fingers to my lips, wincing as they made contact. They came away coated in cedar-red, the color of blood and sap. My lips stung.

Daddy let loose a string of curses when he saw me. “Answer me when I calls you, girl. You think you too old for me to whip, but—” His voice died when I turned to face him, and a sound like a wail from behind a pressing hand escaped. Eyes round as moons, daddy backed away, hitting his side against the buffet table, hard. He didn’t even flinch, not even as fresh blood began to seep from the previously white bandage on his leg. Not until I started toward him.

He held his walking cane out to stop me.

“What you been out in them fields doin’, girl?” As I tried to stammer a reply, he answered for me. “Out there rolling around with that . . . thing?”

“What thing?”

He slammed the cane down on the hardwood floor, and I jumped at the sound of cracking wood. “Don’t play wit’ me, girl! You know good and damn well what I’m talking ’bout.”

I shook my head, then tried to smooth out the snarls in my hair, managing to make the tumble of straight and coiled strands worse. My fingers trembled, and I winced as I drew the damp sleeve of my nightgown over my mouth to wipe away the blood and sap.

Daddy’s eyes were shining, full of held-in tears. He turned his head up to the ceiling and trails of water ran down his cheeks.

“No, no, no!” he shouted. “I lost Marie to that thing, and I damn sure ain’t gonna lose my child to it.”

I didn’t know if his words were for me or for himself or for God, and I didn’t care. “What about mama?”

He looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. His lips quivered, and he let out a whimper.

“She left, Daddy. She left that night ’cause the wailing called her, and she had to go. The grief was too much because she wanted a boy baby so bad.”

Daddy shook his head. Tears flowed freely down his brown face, leaving streaks of salt white.

“No, what?”

He didn’t answer me, but I heard him babbling. Mercy and Jesus were the only words I could make out.

“You might as well tell me.” I stepped forward, but he moved away from me, back down the hallway toward the stairs. I pursued, knowing what I looked like and not caring. Not anymore. “Tell me, Daddy! About mama—what happened?”

“You was only a child. You and your sister.”

He leaned back against the wall, slid down it to thud into a sitting position on the floor. Behind him, a smear of blood from the soaked bandage stained the whitewash.

Fury rose in me, burning the back of my throat and filling it with the taste of smoke and ash. My voice pitched up, rising, shaking the framed pictures of me and Jeannie that stood on the table. “Now, Daddy!”

“She couldn’t have no boy child. Just you girls. I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t let her rest until she had one.”

The taste of tobacco sap rose in my mouth, sweet and smoke green, familiar as a lover’s kiss.

“If she couldn’t have a boy, I tol’ her . . . I tol’ her she could find somewhere else to go. To keep the farm going. To carry on the Wiltsburg name.” His words came thick and fast, trying to explain, to get me to see.

All I saw was red.

With one wave of my hand, I swept the pictures from the table, glass shattering at my bare feet.

“I thought you loved her!” My scream shook the boards of the house. From far away, I heard a wail, full of lonely fury.

Daddy seemed to rally at that, losing some of the fear that had crept into his face. “I loved her! It was her that step out on me!”

“What?”

“After she gone, I saw that boy baby. Ain’t look nothing like me.” He spat the words out like he would a plug of chew that had lost its flavor. His shadow flickered and grew behind him. “Looked same as that ol’ cropper thought he was too good to stay ’round after meals.”

“Roy Earl?”

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach, the taste of bile and green tobacco rose, sour-sweet. I stepped forward again, the shards of glass biting deep.

“Yeah, yeah. I showed him that boy, told him I knew . . . I knew what he was doing with my wife.” Dark spittle dribbled from his chin, but he didn’t bother to wipe it away. “I put both of ’em in the ground that night. Both of ’em.”

I watched the shadow grow denser, deeper. The smell of the tobacco leaves grew, weeping out from that dimness.

“That’s why I set that mojo hand. Protect you from me. You and your sister.” His leg wept openly now, the red blood darkening to a syrupy brown. “It didn’t hold.”

“Dear God,” I whispered. “You’re him. You’re Tobacco Man.”

His eyes rolled, whites stark against his skin. His words were back to a babble as the shadow covered him, cloaking him in smoky darkness. “Best for the leaves. Best for the farm.”

“Stop.”

“Boys stay. Girls leave. Boys . . .” “Stop it, Daddy.”

“Best boys. For the farm. Best boys. Girls don’t—”

“Shut up!” I screamed, the wail opening my mouth larger than should be possible. Cutworms poured from my lips, plopping and plunking down to the hardwood floor, their segmented bodies writhing and rolling to right themselves. My scream cut through the still night, waking the chickens, who joined my wail with their insistent, fear-ridden cackle.

The worms swarmed toward my daddy, crawling over each other in a desperate attempt to reach him, mouths already working, chewing. His shadow pulled away from the wall and swam over him, cloaking his body in heavy dark. Leaves rustled, wet with dew and something denser that dropped to the floor in fat plops.

Daddy shuddered, but he didn’t try to get away. He knew who had come for him. And I knew what that buried nation sack had been for. My throat was dry, raw, and still I hollered. The worms fell faster, more than I’d ever seen in my life. They reached the tobacco-scented shadow covering daddy, and they pulled, tore at it, chewing . . . always hungry. Always chewing.

I could see through my transparent skin to the swarm of bright-green creatures on the floorboard, gnawing. Another wail came from across the fields, and the sound of mama’s voice brought tears to my eyes.

My wail stuttered to a stop, and I fell against the banister to the second floor, panting. I held onto it as I walked upstairs to my room, avoiding the crush of writhing cutworms feeding on their favorite meal. I slept.

When I came down the next morning with my bags packed, daddy didn’t ask where I was going. He just looked at me, diminished from his usual upright stance and nodded.

“Bye, Daddy.” I walked away, down the front steps and across the fields, to the bus stop that would take me into town. I didn’t look back.

I learned he died a few years later, and I returned to the farm to sell it off. Jeannie said she had a husband and three kids to look after, but she would do her best to attend. I had his body cremated after harvest and sprinkled his ashes over the tobacco fields he loved.

For the last time, I took cord from my pocket and tied up stacks of leaves and let the bank have the proceeds from the sale. The farm itself, and all the equipment, I sold before returning to my starter home and my own classroom of kids. Jeannie never made it back to help me tie up the loose ends, but she happily took the check I offered.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 893

November 17^th 2023

The Stringer of Wiltsburg Farm by Eden Royce

Narrated by Tonia Ransom

Audio Production by Chelsea Davis

Hosted  by Alasdair Stuart

 

Hi folks! Alasdair here. As you’ve probably heard us talk about, EA is in the middle of our first end of year fund-raising campaign. We’ll recap the details and ways you can help at the end of the episode.

 

(MUSIC)

 

Hi everyone and welcome to PseudoPod, this amazing story is part of our 2023 Anthology and Collection Showcase and comes to you from Eden Royce.

This story was originally published in Vastarien and was reprinted in the 2023 collection Who Lost, I Found.

 

Eden Royce is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, and PseudoPod. She has written articles for Writer’s Digest, The Horn Book Magazine, and We Need Diverse Books.

 

Her debut novel Root Magic is a Walter Dean Myers Award Honoree, an Andre Norton Nebula Award Finalist, an Ignyte Award winner, and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner for outstanding children’s literature.

 

Hollow Tongue, her first adult horror novella, will be published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in 2024. Find her online at http://edenroyce.com/

 

Your narrator this week is friend of the show and goodest of humans Tonia Ransom. Check out Nightlight and Afflicted, two of the best horror shows out there for just some of their amazing work.

 

Now, get home before night time. Because we have a story for you and we promise you it’s true.

---

The visceral language of this story is what grabs me first. ‘Moist snapping’ is a wonderful, terrible phrase but the line I really love is ‘When I need help, I’ll surely ask for it’. There are years of exhausted competence behind those words. A lifetime of being more than good enough and more than capable for everyone other than the person you need to see you. It’s so many unique types of horror tied together; prejudice and sexism and small town horizons and familial obligation versus familial actuality and all of it weighing you down and all of it always ALWAYS there.

 

But that’s only the first stage of the horror in this story. The claws you don’t feel sink in ar ethe ones in your flesh from birth. The familial horror here is a double-edged blade that cuts everyone around it. The older generation are incapable of understanding there is something, anything else and the horrific damage they do is excused in the name of continuity, of safety. The farm is all. They’re just women. It doesn’t matter. They’ll understand when they’re older. All polite lies written in someone else’s blood.

 

And just as you see those claws? You realize what the truth is. That the other predator here is hiding in the shadow of the one hiding in plain sight. And most horrific of all? It’s here to help. It’s an opportunity to do something, anything else. It doesn’t care about tradition or expectation. It just wants to feed and you, at last, have something to feed it which isn’t your future.

 

What else do you do in that situation? What can you do? And here’s the one that stays with me? Does it matter?

 

Fantastic work from all, thank you.

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We rely on you to pay our authors, our narrators and our crew, and to cover our costs. We’re entirely donation funded and this year that’s changed in some very exciting ways with becoming a registered US nonprofit. We’ve launched our first end of year campaign to raise awareness about all the new ways you can help us out including workplace giving and employer matching, donor advised funds, and lots more. And if you pay taxes in the US, you might be able to claim a deduction. Check out the short metacast on escapeartists.net for more ideas, and how to get in touch if you think of something else that’s more meaningful to you.

 

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Not only do you help us out immensely when you subscribe or donate but you get access to a raft of bonus audio.  You help us, we help you and everything becomes just a little easier. Even if you can’t donate financially, please consider spreading the word about us. If you liked an episode then please consider sharing it on social media, or blogging about us or leaving a review it really does all help and thank you once again

 

PseudoPod returns next week with Thirteen Ways of Not Looking At A Blackbird by Gordon B. White, read by Elie Hirschman and again audio produced by Chelsea and hosted by me. Then as now it will be a production of the Escape Artists Foundation and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license. And PseudoPod wants you to remember how it feels, don’t you? All that desire scorching you straight through. Feeling like you’re penned up in a small-town cage, jailed by cornstalk bars. Knowing, just knowing, that you’ll be stuck in that quiet little town forever if you don’t take a chance.