This PseudoPod episode is narrated by Linda Hamilton. You know, she plays Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise? THAT Linda Hamilton. She doesn’t just read the story or animate the dialog, she brings a cinematic quality to every line for the duration of this 30+ minute episode. It’s a real delight.
But what is an Oscar-worthy performance without something memorable to perform?
“MEAT” by Xander M. Odell is unforgettable. (Continue Reading…)
As this was originally published as a novelette and a bit long for an episode of PseudoPod, staff turned this into an abridgement project to see if we could trim out some of the fat and keep the core of the story. What is presented is the abridged text we’ve edited.
Dear John,
If a fifteen years’ friendship means anything to you, come at once.
My whole future is at stake and you’ve got to come and help. It’s a very very queer thing, and Jonquil and I don’t agree at all about it. I wish to heaven we’d found the box earlier and had more time to argue it all out.
Come and see us through it.
Rafe.
May 27th, 1938.
Ping-ping-ping-ping.
The incessant chiming underscored the cabbie’s music and the occasional blare of a horn. Theresa wondered what the hell it was as she braced herself. There were no seatbelts in the back of the taxi. Hopefully, wedging herself tight between her luggage would work just as well.
The taxi casually swerved within inches of a looming truck. Theresa’s foot jammed down on an invisible brake pedal. “Christ! Careful!”
The Malay cabbie twisted in his seat. “Ah?” A grin split his face, showing teeth stained yellow with tobacco.
Brake lights flashed in front. (Continue Reading…)
“Three Years Ago this May” was my attempt to write a short story with a strong finish. Both Jack Ketchum’s “The Box” and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory” inspired the tale. The question at the center of it all is how do we go on without the one(s) we love.
With her hundred miles to hell
There was a woman who the spiders fell in love with. You knew her in high school, but you weren’t friends. She was plainish. She still is.
But that didn’t matter to the spiders. They thought she was beautiful. It was something about her hair. It’s long. She’s never cut it, and it’s very blonde. A spider saw her waiting for the bus one day, and it fell in love just as it was laying its eggs. When its young hatched and ate their mother’s corpse, they also ate that love. (Continue Reading…)
Though the author is a professional photojournalist and has covered many car crashes, all characters, events, and organizations depicted in this story are fictional.
Wesley had beaten the cops. It happened sometimes, but not often. So he quickly pulled onto the shoulder, leaving his car running and the door open, grabbed his camera off the passenger seat and leapt out, determined to make the most of his good fortune.
The drivers looked to actually still be inside their vehicles this time.
He needed this. The supposedly epic car fire his editor had ordered him all the way out to Port Orchard to shoot had been a bust, nothing but a torrent of smelly smoke pouring from under the hood of an old VW van in a diner parking lot and some geriatric hippie telling annoyed firefighters, “It’s never done anything like that before!”
“Final Girl Theory” is a fictional story about a fictional, cult-classic movie called Kaleidoscope. The narrator is addressing the audience with a high level of knowledge about the film. At first, it’s almost documentary-like in tone but later, this changes.
John Meagher’s reading is perfect- he has an urgent, almost excited way of engaging with the text that demands rapt attention.
The author, A.C. Wise, does an amazing job with the descriptive language as the narrator translates, cinematically, what is happening on the screen. The specific details like how many minutes into the opening scene we are, lend themselves to the authenticity and believability.
The audience immediately forgets this movie is not real. (Continue Reading…)
Tim Rinneman had never met a lock he couldn’t pick. It was his expertise, his pride. And his curse, as it had become a compulsion he could not resist. He grinned as he worked at the front door of his latest target, hidden in the night shadows of the porch. He had cased the joint for nearly a week, established it was occupied by a lonely but wealthy-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, who went drinking at the Blakeley Hotel every night from seven until around nine. Easy mark.
The lock barrel turned and Tim let out an almost silent, “Yes!” He slipped his lock picks back into the pocket of his dark grey jacket—everyone knew you didn’t wear black to be camouflaged at night—and pushed the door open. His wool cap was low over his brow and a grey bandana masked the lower half of his face. Tight, rubber surgical gloves kept his fingerprints private. (Continue Reading…)
“Step Down, Step Down” is a PseudoPod original
“Snip Snip Snip” is a PseudoPod original
“My Guests” appeared in a slightly different form on the SFF Chronicles website
Step Down, Step Down: “I’ve always been fascinated by the tradition of murder ballads that are still sung and passed down where I live in the southern Appalachian mountains. The haunting songs call out from that murky territory where good and evil, beauty and cruelty mix to be reinterpreted and made into something both ancient and new.”
“Snip Snip Snip” was inspired by ‘The Finishing Line’.
“My Guests”: “This story emerged after I read an article about termites titled ‘A giant crawling brain’. It talks about how the termite mound could be considered a composite animal, with constructed lungs, a warrior caste immune system and the workers as mouth and blood supply. I tried to write it a few times, but I could feel my subconscious still chewing on the idea. Eventually, properly masticated and probably digested by a symbiotic fungus, the story emerged on its own. I don’t normally work like that.”
A fantasy the way it could. A picture of us in a dream.
You’ve heard the ballads of young women murdered, drowned down by the river banks. I am one such maid.
He asked me once to be his love
He asked it two and three
I ne’er knew my answer would
Be the death of me.
Sometimes we are killed by brigands. Other times by a cruel sister. But most often by our lovers. We are always rosy-cheeked and demure. We die beautiful and tragic, and our murderer sings his lament from the gallows. He regrets it, but he had no choice. Fate drove his hand. Perhaps he even placed a posy in our cold grip as a we lay among the long grass.