Archive for Stories

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PseudoPod 128: Bone Mother


Bone Mother

by Maura McHugh


The house tilted. A thighbone rolled off my kitchen table and clattered onto the floorboards. I cocked my head and waited for a warning. Silence. It was still sulking.

I whacked its bony walls with my hawthorn stick. “Out with it!” I said.

“A man approaches, you withered old crone!” The floor trembled with irritation.

“A fine house you are! Allowing a stranger to sneak up on me.”

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PseudoPod 127: The Garden and the Mirror

Show Notes

For the follow-up to this story, please check out “The Mother And The Worm”

and then proceed to “Nourished By Chaff, We Believe The Glamor”, part of the Trio of Terror.


The Garden and the Mirror

by Tim W. Burke


She asked me, “Will you teach the secrets of the soul and flesh?”

Her eyes glowed like onyx in the gaslight. Her skin seemed translucent, but the young man fidgeting beside her on my drawing room sofa was paler still. His fine suit and shirt sagged on him; the cadaver in him emerging.

The young man blanched at her boldness, “My wife has always been an enthusiast for mysticism. Back home in Atlanta, we tried homeopathy, faith healing, and God knows how many quacks. But the tumor grows. My fevers are getting worse. I can’t even travel home because my head aches –”

“Mr. Alecsandri,” the young woman, Olivia Spalding, leaned to me, “Our friends here told us that you cured their little boy of consumption.”

“I remember the case. I taught the boy to banish it.”

 

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PseudoPod 126: The Ashen Thing


The Ashen Thing

by Paul Mannering


I dropped the half-eaten turkey on rye back on my plate and stared darkly at the new wheel-chair ramp, a big yellow exclamation mark visible from the sidewalk. Warning! Freak in Residence! Imagining the whispered concerns of our new neighbors was fuel for the fire of my self-pity. I was so lost in my gloomy fantasy that I did not notice the first tapping until it became a knocking, and then a scrape. As if someone had hit the wooden deck under my wheels and then dragged a hands worth of nails along it. I glanced around; Tammy had not re-emerged. I looked down. A glint of something wet. Something like an eye or wet flesh, staring up from the darkness under the deck. I twisted the steel rims under my hands and adjusted my position to look again. The thing was gone. I listened, and for a moment, I heard a sound like a wet blanket dragging on dirt, then Tammy re-appeared and the sound was lost under her footsteps and sigh of satisfaction.

“You done?” she asked, indicating my abandoned plate with one moisturized hand.

“Yeah, thanks,” I was still turning the fragment of a moment over in my mind. I had seen an eye. Someone was under our house. Crawling in the dust and dirt, under the decking, under the floors, slithering around the concrete pilings, the ducting of the central heating that terminated in black metal grills in our floors and doing what? Listening? Searching for a way to break in?

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PseudoPod 125: The Interview


The Interview

by M.C. Norris


“With eight years property management experience under your belt, I really see no reason to fax over your resume. Tell you what, I’m wide open this morning. I need to run an errand, pick up a few things for the interview, but why don’t you just come on down to Grisholm’s Corporate Towers and we’ll have a quick chat?”

“Right now? I mean … sure, I’d love to meet with you. But what time were you thinking?”

“I’m thinking eleven o’clock. And when you get here, Becky, just come on down to the basement. I’ll be waiting.”

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PseudoPod 124: Scavenger

Show Notes

Sponsored by CONTAGIOUS, by Scott Sigler.


Scavenger

by Jonathan Kuhn


No end in sight. He tossed aside the empty water bottle, now useless. One bottle left. Two more liters. But in this heat, that wouldn’t last long.

Maybe if he could pace himself. But he couldn’t. Because every second he wasted, it was growing closer.

It moved slowly, awkwardly jerking itself forward with each step it took. A moderate speed was enough to stay ahead of it. But the man had to rest eventually. And it didn’t.

Sand slipped under his feet as he scaled the next dune. This one was much steeper than the others, forcing him to rest halfway to the top. Perhaps it, with its one arm and poor coordination, would not be able to climb up. The top could mean safety. But this was only hopeful, foolish thinking. He knew it would find a way up. It would not stop until it had him.

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PseudoPod 123: Bone Sigh

Show Notes

Sponsored by CONTAGIOUS, by Scott Sigler.


Bone Sigh

by Tim Pratt


I sit at the table and work on my bonsai scar. I press the silver head of the meat tenderizer into my left thigh, stippling the skin. I do not feel pain; I scarcely feel the pressure. My nerves are dead, there on my left thigh, where I grow my scar. Matches, hot needles, knives, and time. I tend my scar, I do not control it. Skin and muscle are unpredictable– this is not like painting a picture, carving a piece of wood. The flesh knows its own logic, the bruises come strangely, the healing proceeds unevenly. I collaborate with my flesh.

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PseudoPod 122: Let Them Bleed


Let Them Bleed

by Lilah Wild


Stosh wore his sneakers as he walked along the incoming tide, let cool water ooze over his toes. It was awkward, squishing along in the wet sand, but he didn’t want to risk stepping on a broken seashell or a needle. His shoes were already filthy, not much left for the water to ruin.

He swept his eyes over the beach, scanned among piles of trash for Liddy. Instead he spotted a skinny figure running his way.

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PseudoPod 121: Blood, Snow, and Sparrows


Blood, Snow, and Sparrows

By Joshua Alan Doetsch


Desdemona used to trace the stars with her finger, connecting the dots, naming her own constellations.

I call upon her name.

Desdemona.

I call her name when I want to remember.

Desdemona — who gave me thirty-one birthdays when I had none. Desdemona — who laughed and made snow angels on rooftops because the snow there was cleanest, the closest to Heaven. Desdemona — who made an angel of snow and blood in the dirty street on the day I lost her.

I remember this, now, as Zeek struggles in my arms, anger and fear evacuating his body in crimson spurts, and my smile dislocates my jaw. Zeek with the shroud-eye, one eye glaucoma clouded, said it was his evil eye, said he could hex a body with a stare, cast a pestilence. But, see, I knew better. I knew it was Zeek’s dirty needles that killed the kids. And the night collapses with primate shrieks as Zeek tries to lift his bloody gun and . . .

Freeze.

Too far.