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The Ecstasy of the Saints

by J.A.W. McCarthy

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I’m six the first time it happens. I’m sitting in the backseat of the family sedan, staring at the rearview mirror so I can see when my father’s big eye peels upward and focuses on me, steely grey and always watching, as he promised when I started doing this. Mom faces straight ahead, shoulders curled forward as if folding herself around the cold jets blasting from the AC. They’re busy talking about traffic or what Grandma will make for dinner or how we’ll have to atone for missing confession this weekend—it’s all the same to me. It means I can slip my pinkie into my mouth, hooking towards my cheek until I feel the silky swollen hole between my tongue and molar. As I nudge into the opening, I think of my cat flexing her paw, how her claws extend smooth and quick as switchblades as her toes curl into her palm. I’m a claw, I’m a dagger. I’m dangerous, I do harm.

The dentist said my baby teeth are making way for my grown-up teeth, and my mother says to stop messing with it if I want to grow up. But this isn’t an empty tooth socket. I nestle my pinkie all the way into that perfectly-sized little hole, down to the knuckle, lips curled around my teeth so I don’t bite into my hand. My mouth floods with saliva. Mom doesn’t turn around, and the rearview mirror reflects only my dad’s lined forehead and one wolfish eyebrow. I have to keep sliding the rough, frayed seatbelt strap down to my collarbone because it keeps getting caught under my chin and slicing into my throat.

I’m doing the thing that feels good, at the same time wondering if it feels so good because I’m not supposed to do it. I’ve heard my mom say she’s “seeing stars” when she hits her head on the freezer door handle; she said the same when she told me the story about how she met Dad. There are no stars when I feel good. Everything goes warm and heavy, then black.

When the black peels away, everything is different. The brown hills on either side of us are gone, replaced by buildings with names I’m still learning to read. The car is swinging me side to side like the Salt & Pepper Shaker I got to ride with Dad at the state fair. I accidentally bite down on my knuckle, dislodging my pinkie from its gummy burrow. A milky puff of smoke—it smells both acrid and burnt, like the time Grandma left the banana bread in the oven too long—rises from where Dad’s head and shoulders and chest used to be, the familiar shape of him collapsing into grey ash. Mom is screaming, the top of her head—fluffy, gravity-defying black spinning outward from a whirl of bleached white scalp—bobbing in and out of the rearview mirror as she strains across the console and into the empty driver’s seat, grabbing at the spinning steering wheel.

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I’m eleven when I meet my best friend. She catches me with my finger in my mouth at recess, but she doesn’t call me a thumb-sucking baby like the other kids do. As we curl ourselves into the boxwoods that border the playground, she shows me how she likes to press her thumb into her armpit and wiggle it around until her fingernail draws blood. Despite the determined set of her jaw, she looks happy when she does it. My pinkie hooks the corner of my mouth without my permission. I can almost feel the puffy, silky grab of that hole in my mouth, the firm nudge of my tongue against one side of my finger, the wet, unyielding barrier of my teeth against the other side.

I know the moment my new friend breaks the skin under her arm because that’s when her face pinches, her brows and nose and lips all pulled tight as if an invisible drawstring has been stitched through her face. But she doesn’t say a word, not even an “ouch.” I hold my breath, watching her exhale deeply after, her shoulders slumping as if all the ropes in her arms have gone gooey and slick like brownie batter slowly sliding out of the bowl. A smile unfurls across her wide mouth. I think this is how I must look when my finger finds that perfect depth, before the warm dark is pulled out from under my feet by my mother’s shrill, clipped cries for me to “stop it!” My new best friend is quiet for a long time, even after she pulls her thumb out from under her arm and we examine the syrupy red limning the crescent of her nail. No one turned to ash and we are happy. When we file inside after recess, the other kids say we smell like cat piss, but she just grins and grabs my hand.

My mom is pleased I finally have a friend, even if my new friend forgets to put her dishes in the sink when she comes over. It’s better when I go to her house; the big playroom in the basement is all ours. It’s at my first sleepover there when I show her the hole inside my mouth. She climbs onto my lap and points a flashlight into my jaws opened so wide I’m afraid they’ll stick like this and never close again. Tongue lifted, I place my finger against the meaty pucker next to my molars and my best friend shrieks a happy animal noise as the hole yawns open, reaching for my finger. I want to do the thing that feels good now, but I’m afraid. What if this time, because we’re alone together and I like her and I feel powerful, something bad happens? What if, while I’m wrapped in the warm, heavy darkness, she turns to ash?

She slides her index finger into my mouth, her other hand holding the flashlight overhead as she probes along my gums. I try to speak—I want to tell her about my dad, how he disappeared into a haze of burnt banana bread smoke, how my mother saved the car from crashing—but her knuckle nudges my tongue back up against the roof of my mouth. Her skin tastes salty and sour, enough to make the little mouth inside my mouth pucker against her touch. When her mother walks in on us, my friend tells her we’re “playing dentist.”

The next time I sleep over, she says if I’m really her best friend I’ll make a hole in her mouth like mine. She isn’t afraid of the pain, sure hers will heal smooth and pliant like the slick cradle under our tongues, and then we’ll be able to put our fingers in our mouths and float far, far away when Mrs. Timms starts droning on about the branches of government in class. This sounds good to me, until she goes into the garage and returns with a box of carpenter nails.

If I’m really her best friend, I will not be stingy. I will share what I have.

She has to open her jaws all the way, just as wide as I did, and now I’m the one on her lap, holding the flashlight, wiggling my finger around inside her mouth until I find the spot she wants, the one that will make us kissing twins. Her sounds are garbled, but she nods enthusiastically when the point of the carpenter nail finds the soft pocket beside her tongue. I don’t let go until she braces the nailhead with her upper teeth.

Her mother comes racing down the basement stairs at the sound of my best friend’s screams.

I’m dangerous, I do harm—her mother says as much as she waves her arms around, my best friend’s blood like shiny red gloves up to her wrists. They’re both screaming and crying and I’m standing back, wondering what it will be this time, if I will see flames, if my friend will get to keep her new little mouth, if her mother will eventually be impressed by what we’ve done. After warm water and gauze, though, my friend’s mother says I’m not allowed to sleep over anymore. She tells me to pack my things. She’s going upstairs to call my mom.

My best friend in the world won’t look at me. I shove my clothes back into my bag and go into the bathroom to retrieve my toothbrush. I hear heavy footsteps above me and under that, whimpering on the other side of the bathroom door. My mom will be mad I did it again, even though I didn’t. There will be no more sleepovers, no more playing dentist, and I will be alone in the boxwoods again, the only cat piss girl. At my next confession, I will stammer on about talking back to my mother and my impure thoughts—because we all have them, and as long as the priest doesn’t ask me to describe these thoughts I can be a regular sinner, not a dangerous one—and when the priest asks “what else?” I will say I’m jealous of my friend, because he will believe that. But if he keeps asking, that means he knows what I’ve done. It won’t matter that she said I had to, that she wouldn’t be my friend anymore if I didn’t. He’ll know I liked the way her gums felt under my fingers, all those smooth slick bumps cradling the secrets of her bones. He’ll know how good I felt when she wanted to be like me, have what I have. He’ll know I don’t really want that; I want to be the only one who knows about the warm heavy dark and what comes after.

Upstairs, I hear my name and “your daughter” shouted as abruptly and ugly as a brick through a window. The ceiling shakes as if she’s stomping on the floor right over my head. I feel an ache in my mouth, the familiarity of a muscle stretching, gaining ground out of more need than want. It’s a supple rubber band and my pinkie is already hooked in, knuckles scraping teeth until the silky, meaty void has swallowed me up, eager and trusting my movements, the way my hands are clean and not salty or sour, how I’m not rough and impatient because I know what to do. The darkness creeps in molasses-thick as I’m heading up the stairs. I can’t feel my legs, my feet, as the heat slides me so smoothly, so gently down its gullet. In one flex of my finger, I’m a predator, claws and teeth bared, as powerful and respected and feared as Hera and Hades combined, just like we learned in school. If my friend’s mouth doesn’t heal, she’ll know how that feels, but I don’t want her to know if we aren’t going to be friends anymore. It won’t be fair if she sees stars.

Saliva—saccharine-sweet and studded with the crystal grit of the Pixy Stix we inhaled—dribbles over my lips, down my chin. Everything goes black.

When I open my eyes, I’m upstairs in the foyer. My ex-best friend’s mom is standing in front of the little table with the telephone, except the receiver’s on the floor and it’s making that grating beep beep beeeeeeep line-gone-dead sound because she has no hands to put it back on the cradle. She’s just two columns of ash jutting out of shiny black ankle boots, what used to be her head and arms and torso swirling in the air between us, grit in my eyes now, in my mouth, and I can hear my ex-best friend coming up the stairs behind me. She’ll see the scorch marks seared up the wall, like her mother’s shadow left a jagged stain. When she realizes what’s happened, she’ll scream like my mother did that day in the car. My tongue nudges the little hole inside my mouth, comes away dry and tight from the ash. All I can taste anymore is burnt hair.

---

I’m fifteen when I get my first boyfriend. We’re both new this year, so he doesn’t know what I’ve done. The other kids have heard the rumors, but they don’t bother telling him because they think he’s weird too, with his unblinking stare and the way he saws the feet off the dead birds he finds around campus. He likes me so I like him back.

Three days a week, we sit next to each other in mass, our pinkies touching on the church pew. In class we learn about the ecstasy of the saints, but it sounds like a head wound to me, like when my mother used to see stars. We’re not supposed to call it hallucinations. It’s euphoria, the kind of pleasure that isn’t meant for mortal bodies. When Sister explains all of this, my boyfriend winks at me from across the classroom.

Mom is pleased I have a boyfriend now—she says “finally” and “normal” a lot in her phone calls to her friends. Her pride seems misplaced, but I guess since it’s not for herself, it’s fine, as long as I don’t feel pride too. What matters is she won’t have to spend her Wednesday nights in a church pew worrying her rosary until her fingers go numb anymore. She reminds me to not let my mind wander, that boys like it when you pay attention to them, when you compliment them. To her, my having a boyfriend is a vicarious satisfaction, even if I don’t feel the same relief.

It’s almost a month before my boyfriend and I finally get to be alone together. This is something I orchestrate, easily convincing him to skip choir practice so he can come over while my mom is still at work. He likes our house and doesn’t complain about the store brand soda I offer him. He knows it’s all a prelude—the snacks, the tour, the family pictures with my dad beaming the smile my mom says I inherited—a perfunctory buildup to the revelation behind my bedroom door.

On my bed, we kiss, and I encourage him to roam wherever he wants. His happy little grunts tell me I’m doing it right. Even if the other kids think we’re weird, it still feels good to walk down the hallways holding his hand, to be paired up like the normal kids. I’m afraid if we don’t get closer, he won’t want to be with me anymore and he’ll leave me for one of the other weird girls who are the good kind of weird, with their ankh chokers and devotion to eyeliner and their strings of silent cleansing Hail Marys after every blowjob. My mother will yoke me to her rosary every Wednesday if I mess this up.

As my boyfriend undoes the buttons of my stiff white uniform blouse, I tell him I want to show him something. My fingers are faster than his, probing my mouth, distracting from his under-bra explorations. I’ve learned to touch the little mouth inside my mouth only when I’m alone, but maybe this is something we can do together because he’s supposed to be special to me. I tell him I’m nervous, that he’ll be the first one to see, and this bloats his pupils into eclipsed moons, flushes his lips as wet and bright as fever sweat. My mother was wrong. I’m talking about myself and what feels good, and he’s hanging on my every movement, peering into my mouth as I unhinge my jaw and guide his pinkie to the gummy little opening under my tongue.

When it latches onto him—suctioning from ragged nail to fingertip to knuckle—he pulls back, abrupt and harsh enough to fatten my lip on his way out. The throb burns, but it’s not unpleasant; it’s a back fence neighbor to the feeling I want to show him. While he wipes his hand on his pants, I slide my own finger between my tongue and gums and let it pull me in, eager and familiar, no coaxing, no disappointment of the failed introduction. A flood of saliva washes away the salty-sour of his skin, that unwashed grit that leeched my tongue dry. Once the heat climbs up my ankles and the dark edges molasses-creep in, my boyfriend no longer looks alarmed. He looks bored. I thought it might be a turn-on for him, but he just keeps moving my other hand down to his pleated uniform pants. He doesn’t seem to notice what I like, what feels good to me.

I know that look, the expectation the same as all the not-weird boys in my class and even some of the teachers who have vowed to seal their feelings within the sanctity of marriage. He wants me to genuflect before him.

Instead, I keep my finger in my mouth while he works my other hand over the bulge in his pants. I’m swallowed, but I can’t quite disappear. My boyfriend and his certain, justified needs remind me of my mother’s words, of her insistence that I must keep his attention. I mustn’t let my mind wander. The warm dark won’t hold my hand in the hallways, won’t cocoon me in the safety of belonging.

I watch my boyfriend close his eyes as a rubbery grin spreads across his face. Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be, finding pleasure in other people’s happiness. We’re almost as close as two people can get, so I close my eyes like him and keep working both my hands in conflicting motions. In our sin we are seeking the ecstasy of the saints, and weren’t they sinners once too? This kind of euphoria is supposed to be worth all the rosaries and Fatherly scorn in the confessional booth. Soon I lose track of both my hands. I don’t think of my cat’s claws anymore because this doesn’t make me feel dangerous or capable of harm. I’m enveloped in a warm, dark, starless night.

It isn’t until I smell smoke that I open my eyes.

My boyfriend rains down around me: blonde hair, white shirt, green plaid tie, the wet-toothed grin I committed to memory, all turned to fluttering grey that dusts my hair and sticks to my lips, fills my nostrils with the stench of icy-spiced body spray gone treacly. All that’s left of him are a pair of khaki pants, scorch marks branching out from his thighs like lightning strikes across my bedspread. I ease my finger out of my mouth. I lose my balance when my other hand sinks into the hump of ash that used to be his crotch.

I clap my hands against his pant legs until they collapse into ash too. All that remains intact are my boyfriend’s shoes, which I kick under the bed. These are the cat claws, the daggers, the flexing that feels so, so good. I don’t know what it is, but I feel powerful even now, in the aftermath of what I’ve done. Like I’ve released all the demons. They’re everyone else’s problem now, not mine.

---

I’m twenty-eight when I get my first girlfriend. We circle each other for weeks in the coffee shop, her smiles of recognition widening until her fumbled compliment about my boots forces a conversation. It’s a meet-cute that makes my teeth itch even as a cascade of ice and latte pours from my cup and all over the front of my shirt. She helps me dry off under the hand dryer in the bathroom, awkwardly stretching out the hem of my shirt as I squat, her fingers brushing mine as they creep upward to pull the wet fabric away from my breasts. We’ve known each other’s faces for weeks, so she suggests we try a cocktail next.

She becomes my girlfriend so quickly, so seamlessly, that I wonder what else I missed when I wasn’t paying attention. She fills the empty space in my bed same as I fit on her couch, in her car, in her t-shirts.

When we’re alone, my girlfriend talks about religion like sex. It’s a sacred fascination for her, the challenge of blasphemy without the weight of a rosary between her fingers and a bible on her lap. She craves kisses bookended by stories about cruel nuns and the length of our uniform skirts and which girls wore their ties loose and their sleeves rolled up. I give in because she hangs on my every word. I tell her there was no playing dentist, no mother’s pride, no boy’s attention prone in the palm of my hand. No fathers, nor best friend’s mothers, nor boyfriends turned to ash when I closed my eyes. My stories are fevered imaginings of bare thighs sticking to lacquered wooden pews and getting fingered in the sacristy.

I show her the little mouth inside my mouth, but I don’t show her what I do with it. Instead, I remain neutral as I open my jaws to her, as I lift my tongue and guide her gaze to the gummy pucker that is already loosening as if it tastes the bitter neroli of her perfume. Unlike my first boyfriend, she is not aroused by the invitation of my oddity, not repulsed when it urges reciprocation. My girlfriend does not hesitate. Her fingers steeple in my bare presence. Her tongue primes for communion.

I can only call it instinct—“because our bodies know each other’s, because we share a sacred heart,” she tells me—but she knows the nudge, the stillness, the anticipation as she goes slow then all at once when the little mouth under my tongue accepts her the way animals know which humans to trust. I gulp her down greedily, from her short smooth fingernail all the way to the hilt of her palm, so fast I’m afraid I may burp her back up in my haste. Any hint of anxiety is gone as the warm dark eases over me. Unlike with the others, it’s so easy to be flattened, to be spread to every satisfying edge under her touch. My girlfriend gets all the way under my tongue and to the other side of my mouth, filling me up, turning my saliva citrus-sharp, making space in places no one else has ever gone before. She pulls loose every stitch inside of me.

But it’s too good, too fast, so I pinch her hand inside my mouth and guide her movements, lighten her touch, slow her down. She gives in to my control.

This time, I’m gone for countless minutes, danger declawed, demons drained dry, sin diluted to the dull anise flavor she leaves on my tongue. It’s not the abrupt taint of burnt hair or the smell of smoke that brings me back. The bed feels hollow, too pristine without her—that’s how I know. Ash isn’t raining down anymore, but a scent like a freshly snuffed candle lingers. When I roll onto my side, I see it: black streaks across her pillow, up the wall, angry strikes that have clawed through the sheets, all emanating out of the crescent-shaped crater her hip once made in the mattress.

I know my girlfriend would be disappointed that her body didn’t burn in the shape of the holy cross.

---

I’m forty-one when the hole in my mouth closes up. My mother—age greedily gulping her down in mouthfuls of muscle and buccal fat and time—has been insisting that I go to Sunday mass with her before it’s too late. It’s not for her she says, despite how often she mentions her friends’ dutiful daughters in their modest dresses, with their lovely singing voices and their wicker basketfuls of charm for the Father. This ceremony is for me, so my soul can be lightened with one less of my mother’s Hail Marys.

In the days leading up to my Sunday church date with my mother, I don’t allow my fingers to explore my mouth, not even when the stress drives me to seek such comfort. Though I know better, even the thought of the act coats my teeth with the mealiness of stale sin. I can feel the heavy plaid uniform skirt from my childhood chafing my thighs, the phantom of the matching necktie tightening around my throat. Under the looming eye of the Holy Trinity, cuffs and collars remain buttoned, sins ringed in purity for my mother’s god.

It’s not until we’re standing on the church steps that I give in and let the tip of my tongue trace the pilled-satin space beneath. It’s a treat to savor, a preview of the reward for my devotion. But it’s the backseat of the car again, the boxwoods again, if there had been no warm dark waiting. My tongue finds an unyielding crease, a closed door. I mumble strained niceties as my mother introduces me to her friends, panic distracting me from the struggle of smiling through questions about my job, why I’m not married, when I will have children. The little mouth inside my mouth has refilled itself with blood and veins and tissue, what those inside this building would proclaim a miracle.

Though his blue eyes are pleading to the heavens, the crucified Christ watches me all through mass. He knows my every step is heavy with the accretion of unconfessed sin. Every bead of my mother’s rosary purchased this day, and I’m squandering it worrying the shallow crater that used to grant my kind of transcendence. I focus on each nail hole in the Christ’s hands and feet, the painstakingly painted blood ringing each wound, red jewels winking over the priest’s head. It doesn’t matter that my stigmata is—was—a sullied representation, a one-person salvation.

All those prayers. All those cashbox votives lined up like guardians. A million eyes that failed to burn through the warm dark.

My mother squeezes my hand when the priest reads her favorite psalm, crushing my restless fingers as if she knows I never stopped, not even after my father and my best friend’s mother and all the others turned to ash. What she doesn’t know is that the crucified Christ is on my side. I pry my hand from hers and wave back as the Christ’s fingers wiggle their greeting to me. I watch, rapt, as his movements dislodge the nail that has pinned him to that cross for centuries, a rough-hewn dagger of black iron that drops onto the red carpet then rolls down the alter steps, all the way down the aisle, coming to a stop against the steel edge of my boot with a satisfying plink. I look around me, but everyone stares straight ahead, no disapproving eyes to spare as I pick up the nail and place it in my mouth.

My savior turns his eyes to me. He nods and opens his mouth, lifts his lacquered cherry tongue for all his saints high above the oblivious priest.

I brace the nailhead into the jagged cup of my molar. The point finds the crease. Saliva floods my mouth as I bite down. Even before the edges creep in soft and dark, I smell burnt sugar and burnt hair and the lingering anise of sweat burned away on bedsheets. I don’t have to open my eyes, not when the heat is roping my ankles in its sticky grip. I recognize the ash settling on my tongue, the ecstasy of the saints raining down around me. I know the taste of every demon released.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 965

March 7th 2025

The Ecstasy of the Saints by J.A.W. McCarthy

Narrated by

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hi folks, welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast. I’m Alasdair, your host and this week’s story comes to us from J.A.W. McCarthy and is a PseudoPod original. J.A.W. McCarthy is a two-time Bram Stoker Award and two-time Shirley Jackson Award finalist and author of Sometimes We’re Cruel and Other Stories (Cemetery Gates Media, 2021) and Sleep Alone (Off Limits Press, 2023). Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Vastarien, PseudoPod, Split Scream Vol. 3, Apparition Lit, Tales to Terrify, and The Best Horror of the Year Vol 13. She is a second generation immigrant of Thai and Slovak descent and lives with her spouse and assistant cats in the Pacific Northwest. You can call her Jen on most platforms @JAWMcCarthy, and find out more at www.jawmccarthy.com. This is a PseudoPod Original

 

Your narrator this week is friend of the shows. Dani Daly 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 the first four Escape Artists podcasts, StarShipSofa, Glittership, and Asimov’s Science Fiction podcast. Visit her on bluesky under her alias danooli.

 

So bring your hands together, because this story is true.,

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Some notes from the author.

‘I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school through the seventh grade. That meant I spent three days a week in church, plus Sunday mass with my family. I spent a lot of time staring at the ornate religious icons in the church, marvelling at the lurid colours and details, worried I was a horrible sinner when I found them almost grotesque. This story springs from that time for me, how my mind would wander into those dreaded impure thoughts and my terror that my ever-accumulating sins left me open to demon possession. It’s the boredom of ceremony, the struggle to come up with believable sins as a distraction from my real worries in Confession, and the constant guilt and fear I felt as a child for having what I now know are normal kid thoughts. Writing this story was very cathartic and fun, even if the good old Catholic guilt crept back in as I was writing. ‘

 

The catholic guilt is very, very real. I wasn’t raised Catholic, we joined the church when I was 12, but my two earliest memories of emotional responses tied to religion are seated in the exact place this story describes. I grew up in a pretty rural community so every year the Anglican church would do harvest festival, where we’d bring representative food and crops into the church and celebrate the good fortune and if you’re thinking this all sounds pretty pagan yes, yes it does and yes, yes it was.

I have a very clear memory of being in the church with my mum, helping lay out some of the flowers. I remember looking up at the titanic stained glass windows and I remember this feeling of absolute terror that something so big and so powerful was right next to me. I panicked, I started crying, and she pulled me out.

Jump forward about ten years and I find myself in the middle of the late ‘80s, early ‘90s pop boom. It’s a Sin by Pet Shop Boys hit me right in the adolescence. Not just because of the Catholicism (And my local priest was amazing to be fair) but because of that heady combination of hormones, evolution and upbringing. The first was telling me to do things, and I was doing them. The second was whispering to me that not being straight was, despite the 1980s happening all around me, not something that was a bad thing. The third was telling me, to quote Family Guy, everything I was doing was wrong and my body was pure liquid evil. So, guilt.

Still did the things I did. Just felt guilty about doing them.

That ties into the thing no one tells you about adolescence; the nihilism. That in turn was espresso’d into concentration by growing up at the back end of the Cold War. I have friends who did things they shouldn’t have because no one expected to still be alive to go to University. I have a very, very clear memory of the day I realised that was very unlikely to happen. That something so big and so powerful was no longer right next to me.

There’s a different, but parallel liberation to this story for me and it ties into the themes of trauma, reconstruction and self-construction that draw me back to horror so often. The lead has a very clear idea of who they are and who the world expects them to be. They have a distance, whether it’s seared into them by what they can do is unclear, from their actions that allows them to understand their consequences. They are, to borrow the Bowie line, quite aware of what they’re going through. The horror in the story, for me, comes from their numbed endurance of that. Oddly it doesn’t come from that ending, and the hints that surrounded by the ashes of the faith that’s done nothing but get in their way, they’re finally free. Good luck to them. Good luck to all us sinners.

 

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

 

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.

 

Join us next week for Fat Betty by H R Laurence, narrated by Matthew Hamblin. I’ll be your host, Chelsea will be your audio producer and we’ll see you then. Before we do, remember these children that you spit on As they try to change their worlds Are immune to your consultations. They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.