Remember Veteran’s Day, Nov 11.
We crawled forward. My hand pressed on a face jutting from the mud. I turned away and forced myself not to vomit.
A shell ruptured the earth nearby. Mud hammered over me. I bit my tongue to stop myself screaming. I rubbed the mud from my face.
When I could see again, I realised my men were no longer in sight. Panic took me. “Wait,” I whispered. “Wait.”
No one answered.
If you are reading this, we must’ve done it. I’m going to tell as much as I can. You newspaper people will have to clean up the spelling. Going to have your work cut out for you. Make it pretty for the front page. Crazy thinking something I write is going to be on the front page. That’s the Lord working in His mysterious ways again. Got to type it out. When I write it out longhand it looks like Chinese. Just have to hunt and peck as best I can. Can’t write no more. Hands shake too much. Nerve damage. All of us got it now.
Reading and music by W. Ralph Walters
She would not be able to fly, of course, but he had run the simulations carefully, had seized his achievement in the animated projections of the contact-lens computer screen that nestled against his natural eye. She would be chased to the cliff’s edge just like all the others, but when she arrived she would not tumble graceless to the stones. She would spread wide those gossamer-green constructs of his genius and for a few precious moments that wind would fill them and she would glide until the weight of her body broke the fragile bones of the living apparatus that held her aloft. Then she would fall like a wounded bird, like Icarus as he plunged, spinning, downwards from the sun. In a tangle of broken wings, she would carry all of the terrors and tortures that he had perpetrated against her down to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
An intermittent brightness from above allowed Shelby a study of her captor’s lumpish face that seemed more pockmarked with each new illumination. Standing near, the man stank like raw sewage. He polished off what remained of a sandwich, licking brown grease from stubby fingers that somehow remained filthy.
Shelby struggled against the knots at her wrists and those inside her stomach. Attempting some semblance of composure she breathed deeply, filling her lungs. It didn’t help much. A rotted smell imprinted itself inside her nostrils. Near her, shelves housed a grotesque assortment of stinking pumpkin heads, maybe a dozen of them reduced to disintegrated lumps surrounding the room, one-time jack-o’lanterns whose carved smiles had long since decomposed.
Fighting the urge to gag Shelby focused outside where the black ink of the Atlantic heaved in the darkness. Distant lights of the Jersey shore towns glimmered like painted stars, but nearby no lights shone. Rotating from a pedestal above, a huge beacon scoured the circular room. Its single ray flittered upon the ocean’s whitecaps and exposed a beach that turned to marshland, impossible to traverse. A small boat had been dragged away from the surf, its tracks upbeach indented in the sand near a small shed. The bastard had removed the outboard, probably locked it inside that shack. He had tendered her to this middle-of-nowhere light house, as isolated as it was remote, dragged her to its lantern room to fuck her and then kill her.
Or maybe he would kill her first, and then . . .
Shit . . . oh shit . . . breathe . . .
Musical production by Toby Chappell — now available for your podcast soundtracking needs. Ask him while he’s feeling generous.
Each night I have the same dream. I am sitting on a white donkey and a noose fashioned from strong Asian hemp is tightened around my throat by six laughing women. The smile fades from the tallest woman and she leaps onto a hickory tree and scampers along a stout limb. Carla’s sister tosses the rope to the tall woman who knots it about the limb. I lean forward and shield the donkey’s eyes. A cowgirl removes a derringer lodged between her breasts. She places the weapon against the donkey’s head and shoots. The donkey falls and my body swings in the thin night air of the third moon of the fifth planet from Being, the blazing star.
Wikipedia has a nice picture of a baobab tree you can gaze upon to enhance your listening experience, if only to give you an idea of the size of the thing. (At least it’s there at the time of this writing — with Wikipedia, you never know.)
“You are a thief,” the native translator repeated. “There are two things my people say about the tree god. The first is that no one who steals from him goes unpunished.”
Heglund’s eyes narrowed. “And what is the other?”
Callala looked at the dirt floor inside the priest’s hut. His voice was quiet. “They say the taste of a man’s blood stirs the heart of Tu’a Halaita. After a single bite, he will have no satisfaction until the whole man is eaten.”
The secret to growing a man-eating plant is the same as it is with any plant: you must enrich the soil.
Read by Sheila Unwin
The sisters sat in the back seat, bundled up against winter, as the car idled in the driveway. Julie hunched low, staring at the seat in front of her; Emma slumped against the opposite window, staring at the snow that blanketed the world, staring at her friends, lying silently asleep.
“You’re such a freak,” Julie snarled. “You’re always causing such problems. Why can’t you just be normal.”
“I’m hot,” Emma croaked.
“Well, it’s like thirty degrees out there, have at it,” Julie said, and unclicked Emma’s seat belt.
Emma bounded from the car and ran to join her friends, feeling the refreshing rush of snow on her face. They cheered as she rubbed the ice into her skin, feeling weight lift from her lungs. She breathed in the cold deeply, and became more alive: she noticed the tang of pine in the air; smelled the dirty heat of the car’s exhaust.
She felt a deep hatred for her sister rise. Her friends felt it too. They didn’t need to be told what to do.