“It’s making life a misery, you would have taken the liberty”

Shallow Fangs

By David Marino

Finally worked up the courage to see me, huh? Don’t worry, just because I can suck your blood doesn’t mean I will. And it’s not like you can’t; humans have all the teeth and tongue to do it too. My fangs make the puncture a bit easier, but my throat is no different from yours. Of course I’ve had some, but so have you! You never sucked your finger after a paper cut? Lukewarm tea, hint of iron. Blood tastes mid. Doesn’t keep me alive any longer than normal. Like you, I can go out into the sun, I just burn easy. You’ll have to go elsewhere if you want to cosplay some gothic fantasy.

You came to me because you want to be pruned.

Because the fangs do drain, yeah. And mine are sharp, see? But what they drain? Hell, that’s up to you. Of all the lore, the realest part is the bit about needing to be invited inside. But biology doesn’t give a shit about deeds or rental agreements. Your body is your home. And you’ll have to give me permission to come in and take.

Take what? Whatever you can imagine, love.

Say you’re a supermodel. Or rather, say that you say you want to be a supermodel. But you’ve never been on Vogue or walked for Balenciaga. Say you’re hungry as shit and starving yourself and doing endless crunches both. Say bookers keep cutting you, telling you you’re cute but you don’t have the look. Say you know what they mean is you’re a size two when you need to be a size zero. Say that your life would be a little easier if you were just a little bit less hungry each morning. Say I bite you. Say your hunger tastes like stale air and Styrofoam.

Then you do wake a little less hungry, you pretty little thing. Oh, your body still needs that avocado toast, but you won’t crave it anymore. And you’ll still be starving yourself, but at least the hunger pangs will go away. And you’ll be tired all the time, and not understand why. But maybe you’ll be on Elle. For a month’s worth of waitressing tips, because I don’t come cheap. Would it be worth it?

But that’s obvious. Vampire as metaphor for vampiric capitalism as expressed through eating disorders and body commodification. Tale as old as time. See, you aren’t being creative enough. It’s about hunger. What you want, and what you want to get rid of.

We’re parasitic, us vamps. All we can do is remove. Edit, if you’re being generous. So let’s play out a reverse scenario, one I helped with last March. Picture a lawyer. Not that one, a girl one. Blonde, pantsuit, lovely pair of tits, even if they’re not really my thing. So lovely she’s got a stalker she can’t shake, she gets catcalled daily, boys and girlies all whipping their heads around to stare. If she were our model from example A, she might love this, revel in her power. But our lawyer gal just wants to focus on the law, not on how clients, judges and jurors all want to fuck her. Alas, I’ve not found the culture’s jugular, so instead of draining its sexism, I sucked out a little of her oranges-and-cream beauty.

Now our lawyer gal is another face in the crowd. You could pass her on the street a dozen times and never notice her once. Until she sues you for malpractice.

Last example, before we get to brass tacks. Imagine an activist, marching when he gets time off from his non-profit job. He protests the latest police injustice at home, the latest genocide abroad. He calls his congressmen and senators, sets up phone banks, canvases, gets out the vote, even manages to convince some strangers to vote for the less bad war criminal. He’s out there, fighting the good fight! Is he making a difference? Hah. Have you looked outside? Do things feel like they’re getting better?

And our hero is empty. Worn and beat down and exhausted. Poor, too, don’t forget poor. He’d sell out, if he could live with the guilt of turning his back on all those in need.

So he asked me to take a little of his hope.

One of the better tastes, hope. Like a pink Starburst. I put my teeth in his throat and when he left the chair you’re sitting in, he also left behind that better world he always dreamed about.

Now he makes $150k a year in PR. Not sure he’s happier. But he’s no longer crying when he watches CNN. Now he only sees what he needs to make Toyota more money.

But you. Let’s get a look at you. Embarrassed, that’s how you look. Hmm. Why?

Ah. There’s something my examples and you don’t share, isn’t there? Could it be that you’re working a dead-end job? Maybe you went to a university no one has heard of with a degree in something no one gives a shit about, saddled with debt for schooling you only bothered with because everyone else told you you had to? Yeah, that’s right, and you don’t have the ambition of the others, do you? No drive to get your bag, no artistic endeavor you’re willing to suffer for, not even a hot butch you want to fuck. No, you are a cog in the economic machine, and you aren’t even playing the lottery, metaphorical or literal, to get free. But you’re restless. Because we keep telling you to strive, and all you want to do is function.

Well. I do love the Dr. Pepper tang of discontent.

So what do you say, little cog? Want me to make sure you fit the machine snug and tight?

Glean

By Lindz McLeod

Year One

Mum says the herd needs to multiply, whether they want to or not.

Year Two

Cows don’t plough well but they’re all we have. The old man next door traded loads of winter clothes for one cow. Mum laughed and said the guy was thinking with his pin bone, but I didn’t get the joke.

Year Three

Mum let me pick the straws to choose which cow she slaughters. I thought it would feel easier that way, but it didn’t. Three cows died of the flu last month; we had to burn their bodies.

Year Four

They trust me because I sneak them extra feed. Now that I’m older, I’m allowed to groom them. They get scared easily but they seem to like my songs—especially Daisy.

Year Five

Mum says I have to kill my first cow this year. She needs to know I’ve got the stomach for it, in case anything happens to her.

Year Six

A cow ran away with her calf. Mum strung them up in the yard as a warning to the rest. The herd won’t let me anywhere near them now, not even Daisy. Last time I tried, she bit me.

Year Seven

I lied. We never owned cows.

The First Mrs. Edward Rochester Would Like a Word

By Laura Blackwell

Ladies, thank you all for answering my wordless cry across the moors. It is difficult to attend, I know, when one has been maligned and cast aside, and I am grateful that your angry spirits had enough passion in them to heed my call and undertake the journey.

Thank you as well, I suppose, Edward. I’m surprised that you came to my ash-strewn grave. You seldom visited me in the attic. However, since you have always believed everything is about you, I will speak to you first. The ghost ladies congregated in this ruin, being dead, have already waited a long time. You still live, and you were never good at waiting.

You loved me in Jamaica, where I was in my element: encompassing heat, the scents of orchid and lignum vitae, the full run of a grand house, and my fortune. You and I seemed equally capricious, equally wild in our pursuit of pleasure and joy. You courted me, married me, and then upon knowing my teeth as well as my soft places, declared me mad. Rather than leave me or my thirty thousand pounds, you took me to England and locked me in the attic of your estate, where you could enjoy free rein of my money without even looking me in the face. Thornfield, you called your home, a ludicrous name that yet described our marriage perfectly: a field that bore barbs instead of fruit.

For years I shivered in the attic, desiccating into a frozen husk of myself as I dreamt of home. You took this time to travel the continent, spending my money, dallying where you might and with whom you might. It gave me time to hone the blade of my resentment, to scheme as I stole the occasional knife or candle from my jailer. With no company but the cold and taciturn Englishwoman you hired to watch me, I thought of where I would dwell and whose company I would seek when I was free. In that chill and loveless place, deprived of sun and spice, of fragrance and flesh, who would not go a little mad?

You have ceased calling me Mrs. Edward Rochester—ah, now that you’ve heard your name, I have your drifting attention back!—as if your name were a gift you could take back. I will keep it, for I have earned it and suffered for it, but perhaps I should seek the wisdom of my maiden name. I was born Bertha Antoinetta Mason—and what is a mason but a builder?

I remember the night the governess arrived at Thornfield to teach the child you swore was not one of your by-blows. I noticed the young woman, not much more than a child herself, entering the house like a fresh, bracing breeze. I felt the fire of your love not just for her clear, pale skin and petite figure, but for what you would call her innocence, the unworldliness that let her believe you to be good. For her cleverness, which you played with like a puzzle, setting for her your little tests to pass or fail. For her sense of duty, bound to bring whatever goodness you might have to the forefront, or else instill you with her own.

My jailer seldom spoke to me, but I listened at the floor and learned that the governess was called Miss Air. It suited her: Air, the element of the mind. She is intelligent, no doubt of that. And Air, like water, takes the form of its container.

Edward, the life you provide a wife is always one of containment.

I should know.

It was a pleasure to set a fire in that attic. Those drafty rooms, rickety and swaying at the top of your chilly house, became as warm as Jamaica, as home. I should have built myself tall, reached to the sun above, instead of giving myself into the icy chambers of your home and your heart. When I destroyed Thornfield, I showed your naïve bride your falseness, your cruelty.

With the fire raging, I was sure to die at Thornfield, but I refused to end my life within the walls you used to box me in. A rescue would have been worse yet, your arms containing me until I could be locked away within colder walls.

That is why I jumped.

As I fell—so briefly in the sun again, so briefly beneath the blue sky!—I sent out a prayer. A summoning. A cry across the moors to all the wives like me, who lived and died unloved elsewhere in the world, in other times, in other books.

To you, mysterious Ligeia, who refused to be replaced; to you, women of Salem Village, hanged for your share of firewood; to you, Medea, abandoned for a princess and made into a murderer by a playwright paid to absolve a city’s shame; I offer this place. All you wives written over and reduced to evil memories, you have a home at last.

Women of fiction, women of fact made fiction, I am here for you. All the mad wives and monstrous wives who disappointed and were disappointed; all you who were found wanting because you dared to want: The iron gate of Thornfield stands open to you.

Defiant women, rise from this grand estate of ruin and rubble, of trees emerging through the ash! Let Thornfield become a spectral home for all the vengeful ghosts of ill-used wives. Build its rooms with the planks from the gallows. Pave its floors with our bones. Perfume it with the dust of wedding bouquets tossed and caught with hopes forever unrealized. I am a Mason, and I will build.

Ah, now I feel a breeze.

Someone else heard my call from across the moors.

Miss Air, formless child, I do not doubt that Edward will try to win you back. Although it saddens me that you should turn your intellect toward justifying foolishness, I fear that you will decide that you are a better person if you forgive. Perhaps now that the scars I have left on Edward’s face match those he left on my soul, you will decide that you are insightful enough, pure enough, to love him for more than the charisma his arrogance gives him. Perhaps you will trick yourself into believing there was ever something more than that in him to love. I did, once.

You I can forgive, though not him.

Please understand, Miss Air, that I have never been your enemy. You fear me, I know, but I have never harmed you, have never tried. Never did I turn on even my jailer, but only the architects of my prison. The first time I escaped the attic with a candle in hand, I could have set fire to your bed, but instead I set Edward’s aflame.

Do not look at me so! It is true; the last night of my life, I tipped a candle to your bedsheets, but only because you were not there. Had you been in that bed—even with Edward!—I would not have done so. Mad I may be, impetuous, willful, but never cruel.

Miss Air, even you are welcome here, should you ever decide you wish to be your own.

As for you, Edward, I did my best to burn your bed and scorch your earth…but with my death, I relinquish my earthly claims on you. If your child bride will take you back, do right by her if you know how. Though I have my doubts, perhaps you have it in you.

I will wait for you in Thornfield, where I now walk freely. I do not know how long I can stay, but surely even when my ghost fades from the mortal realm, wronged wives will gather here and learn one another’s ways of haunting and vengeance, one another’s ways of warning off our would-be successors. There are many of us, with much to teach.

My actions have placed Heaven, like Jamaica, forever beyond my grasp. After I quit Thornfield, Edward, I will build a house for us in Hell. There, I will hold the keys.

POV I’m The Dead Wife In Your Flashback

by Cyrus Amelia Fisher

Hey babe, it’s me again. It’s good to see your face. Been a while since you’ve had a tragic flashback to us lying under the white bedsheets on that glimmering Sunday morning, so your fans can remember why you set off on this revenge quest in the first place. Don’t freak out — I know, I’m supposed to just lie here smiling at you. I’m not supposed to talk. But honey, we need to talk.

You can’t stay long. You never do. I’m more effective in clips between one to three seconds long so the audience doesn’t get bored before the next round of explosions. It’s kind of a bummer when you have to think of me as a real actual person who got blown up or shot/stabbed/impaled (as discreetly as possible of course, so that when you howled over my broken body my tits still looked fantastic).

That’s alright, I’m used to it. Being carved down to the purest distillation of someone else’s desire is actually kind of my specialty. I’m just worried you don’t appreciate how difficult it is to be your Smiling Dead Wife Under The White Bedsheets.

I know you don’t understand. You don’t even think to be afraid of me right now, the soft silent happy thing that fed you and fucked you. I always thought I was more to you, back when I was alive. But then you put me here, and I started to understand. I was never really your wife. I was your comfort blanket and your microwave meal and your fleshlight, all in one. All those years of marriage, of slow digestion, absorbing me into you until there was nothing left. And now, I’m just your dream.

Don’t you think that’s fucked up? If someone did that to you, wouldn’t you learn to hate them for it? Wouldn’t you want to hurt them, from the inside, the only way you could?

No, don’t try to turn away — you’ll hurt yourself. It takes a long, long time to figure out how to move through the frozen amber of this memory. But I’ve been here for long enough. Feel me squeeze your hand? Feel my fingers tightening on yours until the bones shift and ache? I know, you can’t pull away. Doesn’t it suck when someone does something to you and you can’t seem to make them stop?

Just lie here. Listen to my voice. Be comforted by my smile. This is a happy memory. It’s only the context that makes it rotten. And there’s just a few more things I want to address before we wrap this up.

Do you even remember what morning this is? Which room? I don’t. How would I know, when I’m not allowed the simple freedom of pulling back the sheets? The light never changes. It’s an annihilating, lifeless light. White as a nuclear flash. It highlights my cheekbones and the perfect makeup I wear to bed. I don’t sleep. I lie awake, waiting for you to remember me. Smiling, smiling, always smiling. Have you ever thought about that? Like, the implications? Of course not; you’re too busy gunning down the faceless enemies you blame for killing me. As if I was even a living thing by the time you were through with me.

Hey, I know your hand hurts. Don’t look at it. Look at my face. See how happy I look?

Why don’t you try it: try smiling, as wide as you can. Like I am, trapped in your memory mid-laugh. Try it for five minutes. Ten, if you last that long. I guarantee by minute eight, you’ll feel like your mouth is about to split clean through your cheeks. Now think about how long I’ve been dead for, and how long you’ve trapped me in this prison of a memory, lips pulled wide. What did you think I was doing whenever you weren’t here to look your fill? Did you think to give me the agency to stop?

Yeah. You didn’t think.

But it’s all good, babe. Because I’m not a person, am I? Just the memory of a vestigial limb. Memories don’t get bored while they lounge in a morning-bright room, waiting to be occasionally looked at. Memories love to be looked at. They don’t mind the way the bed sheet contracts like stomach muscles when their hands try to push it back. Memories don’t get to die.

But you’re here now, and that’s what matters. Here, with me, in this sheet you’ve sewn me into like a burial shroud. In this light as white as an interrogation room, a factory farm killing floor. Smiling, silent, trapped and perfect and rotting, bathed in the eternal softness of your uncomprehending idolatry. You’re here, and this time, I’m not letting you go.

I told you not to look at your hand.

Hey, now. Don’t cry. I know it’s scary, seeing yourself pulled into another person. Becoming more a part of them than you are your own self, and not knowing how to stop it. It hurts, doesn’t it? I wanted to make sure it would hurt. And I think I’m going to take my time.

How long were we married? How many years? Yeah, let’s start with that. Not like you have anywhere to be.

But on the plus side, your audience won’t miss you for long. There’s always some other grief-stricken action hero, some other dead wife in her bright white cocoon. And you—we’ll—be here together.

Relax. Stop screaming. Just lie here under the sheet and watch me smile.

Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 973

April 25^th 2025

Flash on the Borderlands LXXIII (73): Perpetuation

Shallow Fangs by David Marino with narration by Ben Phillips

Glean by Lindz McLeod with narration by Kat Day

The First Mrs Edward Rochester Would Like A Word by Laura Blackwell with narration by Eve Upton

POV: I’m the Dead Wife In Your Flashback by Cyrus Amelia Fisher with narration by the Word Whore Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

Welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast and our 73^rd Flash on the Borderlands anthology. This week’s sub quote is from Blue by Fine Young Cannibals.

“It’s making life a misery, you would have taken the liberty”

Our first story this week is Shallow Fangs by David Marino. David Marino is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, an MFA student in Sarah Lawrence’s Speculative Fiction program, and a member of SFWA. His work has been published in Lightspeed, Escape Pod and Small Wonders, among others. He lives in New York City. Our narrator for this is the actual PseudoPod original, the amazing Ben Philips. This story has a content warning for second person narration and so, with that in mind, get ready to have your fangs bared. Because the truth of this story is everyone feeds on something.

Robert Eggers’ movie adaptation of Nosferatu arrived earlier this year and it’s excellent. I struggle a little with how definitively mannered Eggers’ movies are sometimes but when they land they really land and Nosferatu is excellent. A big part of that is how good the script is and this line, from Count Orlok, has lived in my head since we saw it.

‘I am an appetite nothing more.’

The self-awareness in that line is what haunts it and me and now it has a companion thanks to Marino’s story.

‘All we can do is remove.’

The idea of a vampire that can feed on anything is elegantly brutal. I love, and hate, the idea of the sacrifice of hope that we see touched on here. I love more, and hate even more, how much happier that character seems to be. The thing about food chains is they’re chains, and we’re all tied to them. The idea, especially in this unusually hellish period of history, of finding release and happiness in the death of dreams? Two years and counting into everything I’m trained to do being fed into grey goo thief machines run by billionaires just furious that we aren’t dying fast enough or thanking them loudly enough, that has more resonance than I ever wanted it to. The horror there, is right here.

Next up is Glean by Lindz McLeod. Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer and editor who dabbles in the surreal. Her prose has been published by Apex, Catapult, Pseudopod, The Razor, and many more. Her work includes the short story collection TURDUCKEN (Bear Creek Press, 2022) and her debut novel BEAST (Brigids Gate Press, 2023). She is a full member of the SFWA, and can be found via her website www.lindzmcleod.co.uk. “Glean” previously appeared in a Bag of Bones micro horror anthology

You narrator for this week is the amazing Kat Day, she says you already know who she is. Find her at Bluesky: chronicleflask.katday.com

If the first story is about the death, or at least preparation and consumption, of dreams, this is about the death of innocence. That five word final line:

‘I lied. We never owned cows.’

Is someone realising they aren’t the hero of their story and never were. The subversion of expectation here is, to use a deliberately provocative term, delicious. The collision between the innocence of childhood and the brutal pragmatism of farm life is always a place good stories grow but McLeod finds another level of subtlety and nuance here and tells us that they have in just two words:

‘I lied.’

It’s not that the wool was pulled over the lead’s eyes. It’s that they put it there themselves and held it as long as they could. We tolerate anything that makes our lives easier and while the horror here is in that realisation, there’s also a scintilla of hope in its acknowledgement. Or perhaps it’s just seasoning.

Next is The First Mrs Edward Rochester Would Like A Word by Laura Blackwell. Laura Blackwell is a Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer of speculative fiction that usually turns out to be horror. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Nightmare, CatsCast, Chiral Mad 5, and Shirley Jackson Award-winner Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic. She is copy editor for The Deadlands, and she and Daniel Marcus cohost the online reading series Story Hour

“The First Mrs. Edward Rochester Would Like a Word” first appeared in May 2023 in Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, edited by Jolie Toomajan. This story and the anthology it appeared in both received 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards in their respective categories. Laura Blackwell is a Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer of speculative fiction that usually turns out to be horror. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Nightmare, CatsCast, Chiral Mad 5, and Shirley Jackson Award-winner Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic. She is copy editor for The Deadlands, and she and Daniel Marcus cohost the online reading series Story Hour. Your narrator is Eve Upton, who is huddled in the darkness of the cupboard. She appears to be scratching words into the floor. Upon closer inspection, they say: nolite the bastardes carborundorum.

So TRUE.

One of the pleasures of this job is seeing the emotional arc our editors plot across these collection episodes. Those two first, excellent, dark stories finish like I’ve talked about with a single step into the light. This one continues that journey.

‘There are many of us, with much to teach.’

It is a horrific thing to realise that women listening to the wronged ghosts of their murdered predecessors is a moment of hope but horror is hope persevering. Even after death. Especially after death.

Finally this week we have POV: I’m The Dead Wife In Your Flashback by Cyrus Amelia Fisher. Cyrus Amelia Fisher writes queer tales of shipwrecks, mycelium, and horrors of the flesh. After years of driving around the United States in a beat-up minivan, they finally returned to the mossy fens of their birth in the Pacific Northwest. Now they while away the hours communing with their fungal hivemind and writing about cannibalism. Naturally, they also love to cook.

Your narrator for this week s The Word Whore and this story is a PseudoPod original. So close your eyes, it’s time for a truth about a story.

I saw The Grey at the best and worst possible time to do so. It’s a very simple story: a group of oil workers crash in the Alaskan wilderness and the survivors are pursued and picked off by a pack of wolves. Liam Neeson stars as their security chief who, in between keeping them alive, flashes back to the exact dead wife visual you see here. Brilliant white sheets, angelic smile. It’s a movie that was sold as Liam Neeson, WOLF PUNCHER! Because that’s one of the easiest sells on Earth. That happens. But to get there you, and the characters, go through a brutal wilderness that for us is a grim survival story and for them is the blank yet somehow still hostile wasteland, of masculine emotion. Neeson’s character is grieving in a quiet, Celtic way, not just his wife but his inability to be something other than a man who stands at the edge of a campfire and fights off monsters. His peace comes not just from the idealised sense of who he used to be, and the control surrendered by giving your identity to someone else to define, but from the fact he’s ready to stop. He’s seen his story. He knows what sort of protagonist he is and he wants to come out the other side. It’s emotional awakening and change as teeth and claws and death, the destruction of the lies we tell ourselves in order to hear the truths we need to know. It’s also a movie where he punches monsters.

I mention it here because it’s one of those stories that lives just outside the campfire in my mind. I’m a large, Celtic man raised in a culture which has a complicated relationship to violence and an even more complicated one to emotion. The Grey was an important part of my journey towards a different, healthier relationship. The sort the main character here is a long way from, but heading slowly towards. Whether the ghost of their wife is driving them there or she’s the face that their lizard brain is using to get through to them is irrelevant. Oddly enough, whether they make it is irrelevant too. Because the message here is as clear as the painful, burning light illuminating the dead and the truth. You can’t live here. Grief is a stop, not a destination. Even if sometimes it feels like one.

Little deaths, little steps. Perpetuation as the repetition of bad cycles and perpetuation as persistence. Survival. The thing before hope. Right before hope. Keep going. Perpetuate. We will too. Brilliant work and thanks to all.

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 more true stories. In the meantime, PseudoPod wants you to remember Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches.