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“What once was pleasure now’s pain for us all (In my heart only shadows fall)”

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Summer Night

by Robbie Banfitch

---

The dark called out in the shape of them—dark coming out of the dark and toward him and even the green of the trees seemed black through the sick-yellow shine of the streetlamp. His mind went deaf and his head went down like a beaten wolf and the ground glistened beneath his blue shoes as the men approached and barked coldly at him.

Their eyes floated the blackness, called somewhere beyond this horror and to another; a hell long and worn and old; grey-choked air splashed with hot blood, and the women cried there long into the night and dawn took their sound and drowned it with screeches of pigeons and blaring horns and walls of howling pain falling down and down and down upon them.

He handed over his cigarettes and wallet and phone as told, and did so calmly and knowing his death was upon him and feeling stupid for being under this tree on this night at this hour, and miles of silver revolver stared him down and time seemed distant and a separate thing altogether. Suspended; fly after fly after fly in a web, over and over again and into the trap, twitching and twisting and wrapping themselves in thickening cords and dying, one after the other, unending, and so he chose stillness and even stillness choked him. How stupid. To die.

The revolver bashed the face of the other boy. The boy he was kissing moments before. Kissing under the dark green leaves of the tree under the streetlamp and its glow below the black black black of the sky and for some reason he thought of stars and lips and his mother weeping, hunched above his wooden casket and losing her mind over her remaining years as she clawed to stay strong and have hope even in the reflection of his spreading blood, though she would fail and her god would wither and die in her mind decades after its birth there, and his friends would eventually ignore her and feel pity and sadness as they moved on with their lives because they were stronger, and they would think of him from time to time as they shot whiskey at the bar or saw wolves in a film or a painting or a book. And photos of him would, over the course of years, conjure smiles rather than the deep sadness they knew so well.

The robbing was done and the killing was to begin. He knew this because he had nothing left to give and his pockets were flat and the men were empty and stupid and cold—two voids before him holding shining weapons with more guts than they. He wished his pockets were deeper and that he’d never stopped dancing under the lights and that he’d kissed the boy under the spinning ball among his friends and strangers and kinder men. The whiskey had not yet soured on his tongue and there was a hint of sweetness from the boy’s lips, and he thought of the peach tree in his grandmother’s yard and how the sunlight grew it long after she’d passed and would grow it longer still, its branches forever-reaching. He remembered the boy who left the bar weeks before in another city on another night and wondered where he was buried and if his body knew it was just a body and if it was possible for a corpse to be lonely. He thought of all murdered boys as reduced to their final thoughts—flickering wholes and halves hanging in the air over bloodied earth; perched in time, forever dying.

Turn around, they said—and he knew this was the time it would all become what he thought it was, and real. He felt the bullet slam and shatter the back of his brain and heard the roaring upswell of sound before the silence, which enveloped all of him and ended his story like it always had and always will, for all men.

He had felt this death in a hundred dreams before, so he knew this story before it was ever written, and he would know it again until knowing went black and somewhere there was peace amid the stillness of his bones.

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Chosen

TJ Price

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What we did: was it a crime, if we couldn’t remember it? There was guilt enough. Shame, too. Enough to be particulate, the way it hung in the air of the town. Every glance collided, skittering gazes caroming off of one another. Was it you?

Was it me?

---

The golden child, we’d called him, even before he was chosen. Supernaturally favored. Straight As and on the football team, too. Kind, generous, civil-minded. “Too fine a soul to last too long in this world,” a teacher was quoted on the news, after it happened.

After they found him.

They weren’t supposed to find him, but they did anyway. The way these things go.

There was a choice to be made, and we made it. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things. Opportunity, gold-flecked and radiant, knocking at the door. And that’s all we know. We don’t know how the price was paid, nor the manner in which the cost was exacted, only that it was. Nonetheless, the body was found, so naturally we assumed that one of us had done it.

Nobody confessed. Nobody had even an inkling of what happened that night. Memory ended at half-past eight for everyone in the town, a gaping abyss like a dreamless sleep until past sunrise the next day. The police searched for clues, for anything that would lead them to some kind of explanation, but there was nothing. For about twenty feet around the golden child’s desecrated corpse, the field had been turned to a charry ash. They might as well have been looking for clues on the surface of the Moon. Eventually, evidence-starved, they acknowledged the circumstances and pled anomaly to the grieving parents.

“Extraordinary circumstances,” said one.

“Deeply apologize,” said another.

“Hearts and souls,” said one more, hastily adding to the uniformed chorus.

Flashbulbs and microphones intruded from out of town once the media got wind of the strange circumstances surrounding the body, even beyond the mystifying lack of memory and the burned circle. The body had been found with no identification, no wallet. As young as he was, he had yet to be entered into any kind of fingerprint database.

And no one could remember his name. Not Dr. Hildare, the local doctor who delivered him.

Not even his own mother and father.

They searched and searched for his birth certificate, for school records—any documentation outside of memory that might deliver up his name, and yet there was nothing. He had existed, the golden child, their son, they insisted. They had the photographs to prove it. The golden child smiling. The golden child bathed in sunlight, teeth burnished white. The golden child, as though by reverse alchemy, turned back to dross and clay, turned nameless. The nameless boy.

One night, while sitting at their silent dinner, the father comments how the word “boy” is only one letter away from the word “body” and breaks down weeping, inconsolable, for hours. The mother’s face wrinkles, shrivels. Her eyes are dark pits. She grinds her molars. She tastes blood and does not know why.

In the morning, the police find their bodies in the family car, parked idling in the closed garage. Dead by poisoned air. Just like falling asleep, they say. Between them, on the bench seat, is the urn containing their beloved son’s ashes.

It could have been them.

The whispers are urgent, hissed from lips that purse, struggling to believe that what’s been said is true. The myth catches like a wildfire. It was them, it was them!

But too late! This is all yesterday’s news. A brief item, below the fold. The Town & Local section.

STILL-UNIDENTIFIED MURDER VICTIM’S PARENTS FOUND DEAD

The town, after being invaded and scrutinized, shocked by the glaring light of national attention, receded into the shadows, licking its wounds. Bruised and battered, we crept back into our lives. The skin of our houses throbbed at night, as if sunburned.

That it was a crime remained certain; whether or not we were criminals—all of us, or just one of us alone—remained a mystery. Many of us moved away—those that had the means to—determined to flee the invisible spectre of guilt. Some have not returned.

Those of us that remain go on with our lives. The school year is back in session. It is fall, and the trees shed leaves, molting and sibilant, over the heads of those who pass beneath. The seasons turn, and eventually the memory of the golden child dims, tarnishes. Had he been so golden, after all? We convince ourselves that he must not have been, to have been chosen. And though we know a deal had been struck, somehow, we do not know what the prize was, at the end of all that cost.

It must have been worth it, we murmur in our beds, tossed and turned with nightly disruptions from the invisible turbulence in our dreams. We wake in the mornings, assured that something must eventually go right, holding onto a rope as it frays, grasping at each slendering thread.

Eventually, we stop looking. We empty our cheated hearts one morning in the spring, heaving a town-wide sigh of disappointment. Perhaps we will never know. Perhaps we will not know until after we, too, are gone, rendered nameless as well by the certain erosion of memory.

To stave off the guilt, we forget. Someone from out of town, from Away, purchases the plot of land where the golden child’s body was found, razes it, builds a house.

We forget. The cankers of guilt heal. We stop looking for the prize.

But the children—ah, the children since then have all been so beautiful, all the lucky ones born after the grievous death of the golden child. How brightly they smile!

Yet Lord, how dark their eyes are—so full of misgivings, so full of doubts…

It is almost as if they know something that we cannot.

---

The Encausting

By Christi Nogle

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I came to the seaside to find myself, to finally become the person I was meant to be.

I work mornings in a stuffy little gift shop just off the boardwalk and nights in the crafter’s mall. It’s scary to clean in there at night, but it feels good to be scared. I feel alive, like I just woke up.

Appetite’s better than ever. The food court pumps out Thai food and fish and chips and thin-crust pizza. Indian food, Mexican, everything fresh and hot. There’s a gelato stall, a stall that sells nothing but macarons.

I’d never eaten a macaron before I came here, not to mention tiramisu, sushi, crabmeat.

I’m making friends. Not at the gift shop but at the mall. They’ll eat with me if I’m not too hidden away in a book. They’ll persuade me to go to a bar and we’ll complain about our lives. It’s fun, I guess.

The Jeep’s still running, still getting me through the tourist traffic. The cars make last-second turns and brake hard. Pedestrians cross like ducks in tie-dye, staring at their phones in the middle of the road.

But days off are what I live for. I lie on a blanket on the beach reading trashy used paperbacks and dozing in and out. I walk for hours, pick up my things on the way back.

I bought maroon sheets, and there are soapy flakes on them in the mornings, like when you peel a sunburn, only I haven’t gotten a sunburn.

One morning Sam, the guy from the fish and chips stall, is in my bed with a sour look on his face.

“What is all of this?” he says.

“Sunburn,” I say, but he must see it can’t be.

Work soon, so I rush to the shower. I step out and begin drying, but the wax balls up, ropes up, sticks to the towel. I sigh, start a hot bath, dig under the sink for salt scrub and a loofah.

Sam comes to kiss me goodbye, and on impulse, I throw off my towel and back him into the bedroom. While it’s going on, I feel the wax just flowing out of me. Sam doesn’t ask, but he sees. He feels it on him. He won’t be back here.

---

The crafter’s mall ought to have been torn down long ago, but things seem to get left alone out here.

I stack the chairs and wash the main hall floor and do the first-floor bathrooms, which are a nightmare. Wind whistles through unseen cracks. The floor feels unsteady, upstairs and down. I work fast and come out into a dark, empty street, hoping the Jeep will start.

I have too much fear, and I think about what it might signify. I always expect something to jump out at me, but what? Am I guilty for being so selfish, coming out here? Expecting punishment?

It’s a rush to get something to eat and some sleep, shower and find something decent to wear to the gift shop. It’s exhausting to watch the shoppers put the little glass baubles back in place. It’s exhausting to smile for four or five hours, and then the day feels ruined after that.

If I have the morning off, I sleep in and when I wake, all of my skin is tight and greasy. It creases and flakes. When I wrench myself into a sitting position, the surface of it breaks off my hips and knees. I take a piece of it in my fingers. The skin where it’s broken off is red and mottled.

My pores are clogged, too. I get a magnifying mirror, hoping I can push out the plugs before I break out even more. I’m crying while I cake on my foundation.

It’s getting worse, coming faster.

I learn to dissolve the wax in olive oil and scrape it off, as the Greek athletes used to do. They’d squeegee the oil off their bodies, and old ladies would use it because it was full of their youth and virility.

---

One morning it’s thick enough to peel. The little vellus hairs on my jaw come off with a searing flash of pain, and my scalp is held in a tight wax cap. I pour olive oil on it and scrub like I’m shampooing, eye on the clock because I’m supposed to be at work. The oil and wax on my scalp make such a pulpy mess I cry.

I shampoo with the oil until I have no more oil. I follow up with dandruff shampoo, rinse, repeat. I make it to work with wet hair, but the next day I have to quit the gift shop. It’s too hard to get presentable.

I keep cleaning for a while after that, holding my face as far back as I can in my sweatshirt hood. The wax is building up in the daytime now, and the people all avoid me – or I avoid them. I can’t say which.

I can’t say for sure that I raise my eyes to theirs, ever.

It takes a week to finally pry away from the crafter’s mall. After they stop calling, I feel better again for a time. Three or four times a day I drive to the little apartment. I remove the greatest part of the wax, drive back out to the beach. And then I start bringing my bottle of oil and spatula to the beach. You can de-wax just as well in a bathroom stall.

And then I stop driving home to sleep.

And then I run out of oil.

The Jeep was ticketed sometime. It was towed sometime later while I wasn’t watching. I’m not watching anything anymore. The wax has filled in around my eyes. It doesn’t hurt. It feels safe. Like a wrapping. It feels right. I want to stop making it crack, and so I must be still. I lie on my blanket and let be what will be.

---

The Njogel

By Rob Costello

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I looked up from my book that night to find the Njogel peering down at me through my bedroom window, his black horse’s nostrils exhaling whorls of blue fog into the frigid air. I kicked away my blankets, sat up on my heels, pressed my fingertips to the glass as if to reach through it to caress his muzzle. In the moon glow I caught sight of my own reflection. The snow light had turned my skin pale blue, and for a moment I thought I must be staring at my own ghost. But no, not yet, though I knew that’s why he’d finally come for me, that reaper of the deep I’d longed for on so many terrible nights without you.

You see, baby, after you were gone, I researched him for months in all the books you left behind. I learned what I must do when he came for me. I tried all the recommended ways to call him. The dream chants. The whispers into the wind. The small creatures sacrificed on the riverbank. But for so many nights he disappointed me, until I’d almost lost hope that the old, tired magic would even work anymore.

But here he was, finally, and instead of feeling bitter that he’d made me wait for so long, the reflected me who gazed out with wonder at the water horse come to carry me to the bottom of the cold, dead river merely looked relieved to finally be going.

And what of the Njogel himself? His coat was the inky black of drowning in deep water. Though the night was calm, a phantom gale lashed his mane like seaweed caught in an angry riptide. The muscles of his neck and flanks rippled with raw power, yet his eyes were not fearsome at all, merely glazed and cloudy like that of a dead thing washed up on a desolate shore. He neighed a thunderous greeting to me, and the walls of the trailer quivered like a storm-lashed hull. Then he swept his broad horse’s head in an invitation, and my aching for you carried me out of my bed and into the living room, where I was bathed in blue light from the television.

Mama laid sprawled like a crime scene in her recliner, her hand still glued to the rim of an empty China teacup that hadn’t seen tea since before Daddy died. She’d tried to “talk sense” into me many times after you were gone. She grew concerned over my obsession.

She said, “Boy, let the dead bury their dead.”

She said, “My God, don’t end up like me.”

But these were just empty words. We both knew we mourned our ghosts with our whole bodies and souls. It was in our blood, and I could no more stop burning on the inside for you than she might will herself sober.

Haunted was what we’d become.

It was then that I noticed that the left side of her robe had come undone, exposing a crumpled wad of brown-bag breast. I moved to cover her with an afghan, but the Njogel battered his muzzle impatiently against the trailer, pitching it into such a violent shimmy that I had to leave Mama to her indecency and hurry outside.

The night air struck me breathless. A rime of frost crusted the trailer’s metal walls, which glinted like stardust in the moonlight. A breeze rattled the silvered bones of the trees, carrying with it the stench of the rotting river bottom. The Njogel strode toward me, his eyes fixed upon me, luring me toward him, turning my naked skin to gooseflesh. He neighed again, and the sound of it sent an electric pulse coursing through my body. He scratched at the frozen ground with a backward-turned hoof, and then bowed his head in fealty and knelt before me.

I approached him slowly, wincing as icy pebbles bit into the soles of my bare feet. Yet the Njogel remained still, perhaps fearing I would bolt at any sudden movement. But although he was huge and menacing, mightier than I could’ve imagined, I was not afraid. Why should I be? The only thing I had left to lose was the very thing I’d called him here to take from me.

When I finally bent forward to whisper my request into his ear, the whole world hushed as if leaning in to eavesdrop. “I am Samuel Amon Williams,” I said, my voice as calm and fearless as all the books had instructed it to be. “I give you my one true name of my own free will. And now you must do for me what you’ve come here to do. Take me to him. Take me to the boy I love. Take me to the bottom of that cold, dead river, so that we may be together again.”

But baby, when I twisted my fingers into the Njogel’s icy mane to mount him, he just melted into nothing in my grasp.

His body vanished, gone.

All I was left holding onto in that barren moonlight was your soft, black peacoat.

I wear it sometimes now when I’m alone. It helps me to think of you as you once were. It reminds me of what we had back then, how beautiful you were, how tender with me, how strong. Of course, I can’t let anyone see that I have it. How could I explain? I read the police report, the witness statements. How you were wearing it when those animals chased you onto the bridge, screaming “Faggot” and “Spook” and “Devil lover.” How they cornered you, kicked you and beat you, sliced your poor naked throat and then hurled your battered body into the cold, black river.

But it doesn’t even smell of your blood anymore.

Not of wet or rot or the stink of the river bottom.

Now it smells only of you.

Of your incense. Of your sweat. Of your dollar store shampoo.

It smells of your smile.

Sometimes I sleep with it draped over the top of me.

Sometimes, late at night, I carry it in my backpack down to the river bank. Once there, I lovingly unfold it from the bag. Then I strip naked, slip it over my bare shoulders, and stride boldly into that bitter black water.

The slime and silt at the bottom suck at my toes. The wind whips the waves into a frenzy. Moonlight cascades down from the inky sky, catching in the Njogel’s mane like stardust as he emerges from the deeper water to greet me. Then he lets me clamber onto his mighty back, and with a thunderous bray that shatters the night, together we ride, ride, ride …

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 955

December 27th

– Flash on the Borderlands LXXII (72): 2024 Anthologies and Collections Showcase

Summer Night by Robbie Banfitch

Chosen by TJ Price

Narrated by Brent Lambert

The Encausting by Christi Nogle

Narrated by Dani Daly

The Noggle by Rob Costello

Narrated by Justin Riestra

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

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Welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast. This week’s story closes out 2024 for us and is the big finish of our 2024 Anthologies and Collections Showcase. Our signature quote for this is:

“What once was pleasure now’s pain for us all (In my heart only shadows fall)”

By The Style Council and our first story is week is by Robbie Banfitch. Summer Night was first published in the 2024 anthology Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror. So, focus on the stars, only on the stars. It’s a quiet night, but not for long, and that’s true.

 

‘And photos of him would, over the course of years, conjure smiles rather than the deep sadness they knew so well.’

This line is a knife that cuts everyone. It’s a lie. The sadness never quite leaves when you lose someone, even if you lose them in less horrific ways than this.

It’s the truth. When I was a traumatised 18 year old trying to deal with being faced by mortality way too early, I clung onto Henry Rollins’ spoken word performances. Rollins was big and clever and funny and furious and COOL. I wanted to be all those things. I realise now that, even then, I was. A big part of why I gravitated towards Rollins was that he’d lost his best friend early too, through murder rather than terminal illness. But the pain was familiar, and seeing someone else experience it helped. What helped more was, years later, when I saw the man perform live. He spoke at length about his friend. He was funny and kind and healed and he hadn’t noticed. Because that’s the final cut. You hurt for so long you don’t notice when it fades. The smiles come. But the horror of not being there to see them? That never fades. And huddling around that guttering light in your final, too soon, moments is something no one deserves.

Our next story this week is Chosen by TJ Price, which was first published in the 2024 anthology Howls from the Scene of the Crime TJ Price’s corporeal being is currently located in Raleigh, NC, with his handsome partner of many years, but his ghosts live in northeastern Connecticut, southern Maine, and north Brooklyn. He is the author of a novelette—The Disappearance of Tom Nero—and also has work in Nightmare Magazine, pidgeonholes, The NoSleep Podcast, as well as various anthologies. He can be invoked at either tjpricewrites.com or via the blue bird @eerieyore. Failing that, one can make a circle of chalk on the floor, stand in the center, and burn a photograph of a loved one until all that remains is ashes. Then, listen for a murmuring from within the walls. Leave your message after the sound of the screb.

 

Our narrator is the amazing Brent C Lambert. Brent Lambert is a Black, queer man who heavily believes in the transformative power of speculative fiction across media formats. He resides in San Diego but spent a lot of time moving around as a military brat. His family roots are in the Cajun country of Louisiana. Currently, he manages the social media for FIYAH Literary Magazine, worked as Senior Programming Coordinator for FIYAHCON, and co- produced with Tor.com an anthology titled Breathe FIYAH. He has work published with FIYAH, Anathema Magazine, Cotton Xenomorph, Baffling Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He can be found on Twitter @brentclambert talking about the weird and the fantastic. Ask him his favorite members of the X-Men and you’ll get different answers every time.

 

So, remember. If you can, that this is true.

 

STILL UNIDENTIFIED VICTIM’S PARENTS FOUND DEAD

 

That’s the show, right there. That single line is a perfect fractal diamond of horror. It make sense until it doesn’t. It looks plausible, like a real sentence. It’s like biting into a sandwich and tasting water. Listening to music you can taste. Something massive approaching and breaking the world as it goes, but not quite letting us understand what it is.

But then the diamond turns again and you see that all the supernatural elements are doing is magnifying that voice that whispers in every small town, looking for someone to hate. Someone who’s different and in a town like this, ‘too nice’, ‘too talented’ and ‘too successful’ all count as different. A sacrifice not for a boon but for the status quo, one just barbed enough to not let its exit wound heal. One every kid who follows knows, even if they can’t say why. The rage of our first story, the powerlessness, combined with the arc of history. Heading, not towards justice, but towards reckoning. Remarkable work on both stories, thanks to all.

 

Next up is The Encausting by Christi Nogle. The Encausting was first published in Seaside Gothic and reprinted in the 2024 collection One Eye Opened in That Other Place

Christi Nogle’s short stories have appeared in Pseudopod, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Nightscript III and are forthcoming from Black Dandy and The Arcanist. Christi teaches college writing and lives in Boise, Idaho with her partner Jim and their dogs and cats.

Your narrator this week is Dani Daly. Dani is a jack of many trades, master of none. But seeing as she loves the rogue life, that’s ok with her. You can hear stories she’s narrated on all four Escape Artists podcasts, StarShipSofa, Glittership and Asimov’s Science Fiction podcast and you can contact her on Twitter @danooli_dani if you’d like her to read for you.

 

Now, rise and shine and time to be okay. Ignore the heat, ignore the sensation. You’re fine. It’s the truth. You’re fine.

 

You can take more than you think you can. You are tougher, braver, kinder and stronger than you know. So am I. We are infinitely more capable of doing the hard things than we think we are, because we’re so terrified of the hard things that they live rent free in our heads long before they actually happen. That means when they do finally get here, it’s almost a relief. But it also means that while we can deal with them, the small things take us out. Wax falling us off piece by piece.

Encaustic art mixes pigments with hot wax and that process, so beautifully described here, can be interpreted in two ways, both locked on that final scene. The first is that this process is one of destruction, of being overwhelmed. What doesn’t get frayed off by trauma we pick off in an attempt to convince ourselves we’re okay when we could not be further from that.

But I prefer the other way of looking at it. That the final scene here is the first scene in what happens next. The grief consumes you, and eventually the grief always consumes you. But it never destroys you. Pigment marks you but doesn’t mark you everywhere. The wax fades, you get back up, in a different shape but you always get back up. You won’t want to, and that’s the horror. But you will, and that’s the hope.

 

Our final story this week is The Njogel by Rob Costello. Rob Costello (he/him) writes contemporary and dark fiction with a queer bent for and about young people. He’s the contributing editor of WE MOSTLY COME OUT AT NIGHT: 15 QUEER TALES OF MONSTERS, ANGELS & OTHER CREATURES and author of the story collection THE DANCING BEARS: QUEER FABLES FOR THE END TIMES. His debut novel, AN UGLY WORLD FOR BEAUTIFUL BOYS, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in 2025. His stories have appeared in The Dark, The NoSleep Podcast, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Hunger Mountain, Stone Canoe, Narrative, and RURAL VOICES: 15 AUTHORS CHALLENGE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT SMALL-TOWN AMERICA. An alumnus of the Millay Colony of the Arts, he holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has served on the faculty of the Highlights Foundation since 2014. He is co-founder (with Lesa Cline-Ransome, Jo Knowles, and Jennifer Richard Jacobson) of the R(ev)ise and Shine! writing community, and he lives in upstate NY with his husband and their four-legged overlords. Learn more at: www.cloudbusterpress.com & www.revise-and-shine.com. You can also find Rob on Instagram and TikTok @cloudbusterpress.

The Njogel was first published in the 2024 collection The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times. “The Njogel” (pronounced: Noggle) is one of three original tales in author Rob Costello’s debut dark fantasy collection, THE DANCING BEARS: QUEER FABLES FOR THE END TIMES, published by Lethe Press. Inspired by a mythical (and lethal) water horse from the folklore of Orkney and the Shetland Islands, the piece is about coping with grief and how sometimes the only way to survive grief is by surrendering to it. This story will also appear in the forthcoming MORE FEY anthology edited by Steve Berman for Lethe Press.

Your narrator for this story is Justin Riestra. Justine works on a critical care unit and writes gross stories. He’s currently working to get a website up.

 

So make your deal, look the truth square in the eyes, because it’s time.

 

For me, this and the previous story exist in conversation with one another. The notes I made for it were:

 

Grief as a friend

Mourning as kindness

Or feeding

 

All of that can be true. Late last month was the 27th anniversary of my best friend’s death. For years, the survivors gathered on the anniversary to incompetently revel our grief away, to rip the wound open so we could heal better next time. He was no age at all and he died and that’s an injustice that the first story here seethes with.

But that first story, and the line I quoted from it is something close to what this time of year always feels like. The horror of his loss tempered by the love for his presence. Like Rollins I healed and I didn’t notice I had for a long time. He’s not forgotten, and he never will but the encaustic nature of his loss is more behind me than ahead. I know that’s a luxury. I know that’s a kindness. I know I’m grateful for it. I know it’s not enough. But it’s what we have and the key to this story for me is the tacit acknowledgement of that. Grief as a friend, acknowledging nothing it can do is enough. Mourning as an act of memory and kindness. Grief as a hunger to be fed, but never too much. Ride with your grief, if you can. I’ll try too.

 

What a remarkable set of stories. Thanks to all.

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PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 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.

 

We’ll see you next week, and next year(!) with The Old Lady by Eleanor Scott, audio produced by Chelsea, narrated by Kat and hosted by me. Until then, PseudoPod wants you to remember “Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “Yeah, okay, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it.” Being good is complex and beautiful and hard.” Be good. We will too. And we’ll see you next year.