Archive for Stories

ARTEMIS RISING 5

PseudoPod 638: ARTEMIS RISING 5: A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar

“A Strange Heart, Set In Feldspar”  was first published in the anthology Abandoned Places (Shohola Press), published in March 2018

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Show Notes

“I go back to visit Sweden pretty much every summer, staying in my parents’ summer house in the northern part of the country. Mining, and specifically mining for gold and copper, really shaped the economy in that part of the country, and this story was partly inspired by an old abandoned mine site we visited one year. It’s also inspired by the way the land in Sweden rises by about 8 mm every year, and has done ever since the ice melted after the last ice age. It’s a phenomenon called “post-glacial rebound” that causes visible changes in the landscape over time, and means that the coastline was in a very different position centuries and millennia ago. Ultimately though, this story was inspired by motherhood, by the way it binds you to your kids in ways that can be difficult to understand and express.”

Please consider supporting this Kickstarter for a new collection of short stories by Tim Pratt.

Revisit his stories here on PseudoPod:

597: Fools Fire

205: Gulls

172: The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft (with Nick Mamatas)

123: Bone Sigh

…plus oodles more on our sister podcasts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar

by Maria Haskins

Beneath

Alice is kneeling in the darkness, breathing hard, heart thumping behind her ribs.

The kids are gone. She feels it in her cold flesh and aching bones, as surely as she felt them being pulled out of her body at the hospital when she gave birth to each of them all those years ago.

She calls their names anyway: “Anne! Lisa! Eric!”, but they don’t answer.

The guide is nowhere to be found either, but she doesn’t really want to think of him anyway, that smile turned to lips and teeth, the way he shook his head when she asked for help before he sunk into the darkness without a trace.

The tunnels of the old mine seem to throb and twist and shift around her, like the intestine of some strange, gigantic animal; she has to reach out and touch the rough walls on either side to steady herself and stop the world from lurching.

What now? (Continue Reading…)

ARTEMIS RISING 5

PseudoPod 637: ARTEMIS RISING 5: White Noise

“White Noise” was previously published in the April 2018 issue of Anathema: Spec from the Margins 

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Show Notes

“Despite its speculative content, I wrote this story to illustrate the complexities of the immigrant experience. In these current political climes, it’s important to recognize how many people struggle to be heard and understood in more ways than one. My family and I are first-generation immigrants from Taiwan, and growing up I frequently witnessed other people making fun of my parents’ accents or simply ignoring them because they didn’t “sound American”. “White Noise” is my attempt to bring that experience to light, and if it comes with a ghost baby, then so be it.”

White Noise

by Kai Hudson

“It’s a hearing aid,” Nina says, with a careful smile.

Robert frowns at the little device on the table. It’s innocuous-looking enough: a silver teardrop roughly the size of his thumb—not brown? Aren’t hearing aids brown?—with the clear plastic tube part that wraps around the shell of the ear. It looks delicate, and expensive.

He wants to smash it to bits.

(Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 636: Hag Ride

“Hag Ride” was originally published in Steamy Screams from Blood Bound Books (2011), then in the author’s collection Spook Lights: Southern Gothic Horror (2015)

Content warning:

Spoiler

Body horror, sexual violence

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Hag Ride

by Eden Royce

Frieda stood in the kitchen’s dull light with a chopping knife clutched in one hand. The dinner on the table lay untouched, ice-cold and bathing in congealing fat. Her cinnamon coloring disguised the angry flare of heat in her cheeks. Still, she knew yelling wouldn’t get her husband’s attention, so she forced a calm tone into her voice.

“Why aren’t you staying for dinner? I made your favorite.”

“I told you, I got to go out.” Henry came out of their bedroom, buttoning up his good shirt and tucking it into slacks she had taken her time to iron that morning. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 635: Last Week I Was Esther

PseudoPod 635: Last Week I Was Esther is a PseudoPod original.

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Last Week I was Esther

by Deborah L. Davitt

Last week, I was Esther. I remember her plump face, pearl earrings, and huge handbag, stuffed with treats for her grandchildren—as stuffed as she was inside, with sweetmeats and perfumed memories of the postwar years. I’ve tended to pursue older people for a while, with their minds full of experiences. Dementia patients don’t work, though. When I’m them, I’m even more confused as to who I am, than I usually feel.

And then we get hungry again. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 634: Flash On The Borderlands XLVI: The Accursed and the Monstrous

PseudoPod 634: Flash On The Borderlands XLVI: The Accursed and the Monstrous is a PseudoPod original.

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Show Notes

“Ecdysis” was previously published at Kaleidotrope (Spring 2016)

“Viens Jouer Avec Moi” and “End of the Line” are Pseudopod originals.

Music credits for “Viens Jouer Avec Moi”:

Spoiler

Minor Key Music Box – Freesound.org
https://freesound.org/people/Pogotron/sounds/60832/
https://freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/33210/
https://freesound.org/people/GoodListener/sounds/322823/

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“End of the Line”:

Spoiler

“In the summer, my daughter and I rode our bikes to the library. She sat on the grass while I returned some books. It only took a moment, but when I came back she was gone, and my heart dropped. I called out her name but couldn’t find her. I shouted louder and she appeared from behind a bush where she was looking at bees. For that brief time however, I felt a terrible, visceral fear. It made me think of how a parent might respond if their child disappeared unexpectedly. Just as she had gone looking for bees, I began to imagine a story where something nefarious tempts the child, spiriting her away and leaving just enough of a lure for the parent to ignore rational thought and to follow her.”

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Ecdysis

by Kurt Hunt

narrated by Hollis Munroe

Only one rule: do not speak to them.

Even when they crawl into your room at night, their claws gripping the floorboards — do not speak to them. Even when their breath is hot on your tightly closed eyes, their double-jointed elbows braced against the headboard above you — do not speak to them. Even when they chitter about their loneliness — do not speak to them. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 633: Hippocampus

“Hippocampus” was first published in Terror Tales of the Sea, edited by Paul Finch

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Show Notes

Narration is by Peter Bishop, courtesy of Christopher C. Payne at Journalstone. JournalStone is a small press publishing company focusing on horror/science fiction/fantasy in the adult and young adult markets.

This story can be found in Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors. These terrors range from the speculative to supernatural horror, encompass the infernal and the occult, and include stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell.

Hasty for the Dark is the second short story collection from the award-winning and widely appreciated British writer of horror fiction, Adam L. G. Nevill. The author’s best horror stories from 2009 to 2015 are collected here for the first time.

The author’s thoughts can be perused here:

Spoiler

I was intrigued by the idea of producing a horror story without characters: a relationship between the reader and an anonymous narrator, with the latter mimicking a roving camera. This roving point-of-view was, in effect, showing the reader a form of found footage: footage of a place in which something terrible had happened. All that was left for the reader was the aftermath and the evidence: the horrors. The reader becomes a witness at a crime scene; the horrors occurred before the story began. This creates a story that only the reader can piece together within their imagination. So instead of using characters as a vicarious medium, I would just show the reader the raw footage with no middle ground. I found this form could not sustain a story much beyond two thousand words and I chose for my subject a vast but derelict container ship. From our local shores and coastal paths, I watch these Leviathans cross the horizon all the time, on their way to Plymouth. Despite their size they have small crew complements. As a location for a horror story, and in my process of getting the sea and coast deeper within my imagination, a container ship was just the ticket.

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Hippocampus

by Adam L.G. Nevill

Walls of water as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountainsides, over frothing peaks and into plunging descents. Across vast, rolling waves the vessel ploughs, ungainly. Conjuring galaxies of bubbles around its passage and in its wake, temporary cosmoses appear for moments in the immensity of onyx water, forged then sucked beneath the hull, or are sacrificed, fizzing, to the freezing night air.

On and on the great steel vessel wallops. Staggering up as if from soiled knees before another nauseating drop into a trough. There is no rest and the ship has no choice but to brace itself, dizzy and near breathless, over and over again, for the next great wave. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 632: The Harbour Master

“The Harbour Master” first appeared in Ainslee’s Magazine, August 1899 and was included in the fix-up novel In Search of the Unknown, which is available for free download through Gutenberg.

Content warning: Use of insensitive racist term (“darkie”) and ableist stereotypes

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The Harbour Master

by Robert W. Chambers

Because it all seems so improbable—so horribly impossible to me now, sitting here safe and sane in my own library—I hesitate to record an episode which already appears to me less horrible than grotesque. Yet, unless this story is written now, I know I shall never have the courage to tell the truth about the matter—not from fear of ridicule, but because I myself shall soon cease to credit what I now know to be true. Yet scarcely a month has elapsed since I heard the stealthy purring of what I believed to be the shoaling undertow—scarcely a month ago, with my own eyes, I saw that which, even now, I am beginning to believe never existed. As for the harbor-master—and the blow I am now striking at the old order of things—But of that I shall not speak now, or later; I shall try to tell the story simply and truthfully, and let my friends testify as to my probity and the publishers of this book corroborate them. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 631: The Last Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)

“The Last Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)”, originally appeared at The Dark, and won the 2017 Sunburst Award for short fiction.

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Show Notes

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The Last Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)

by A.C. Wise

  1. Sperm whale tooth, lampblack

The first scene depicted is the whaling ship Henry Charles Morgan, beset by a storm. The waves are stylized curls, the wind traced as spirals battering the masts and tearing the sails. A series of dots arranged diagonally across the image stand in for rain. The lampblack is worked most deeply into the ocean bearing the ship up and tossing it around. The ship itself is second in darkness, with the spirals of wind touched most lightly, giving them a ghostly feel. Spaces of blankness within the waves suggest the presence of hands, shapes of absence rather than definitively carved things. It is possible the artist meant to metaphorically represent the storm, the ocean as a malignant force actively trying to pull the whalers from the ship and cause them to drown. (Continue Reading…)