Archive for Stories

PseudoPod 479: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Like Dolls

PseudoPod 479: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Like Dolls is a PseudoPod original.

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Show Notes

Like Dolls started as a meditation on the other side of the ‘wailing on your grave’ subgenre of folk music, such as I Am Stretched on Your Grave and The Unquiet Grave. Not only is Like Dolls a Pseudopod original, but also the author’s first professional publication sale. PseudoPod couldn’t be prouder to introduce you to this author.

Like Dolls

by J. Lily Corbie

I am awake. Through the trappings of a funeral and the clods of earth raining upon me, I am aware. When my father kneels at my headstone and calls me his willful girl, I hear him. When Meredith weeps and lays poppies on my grave, I know. When they are gone, I am at rest.

The dark is absolute. I know my eyes are open–curious fingers encounter the wet resistance of eye, feel the brush of eyelashes with each blink. I suffer neither thirst nor hunger, and though my chest still fills and empties, I want for nothing. I am somnolent, content with my eternity.

Only Bastian’s voice interrupts my peace.

At the service, he threw himself across my coffin and wailed. He wasn’t mourning–he was claiming my funeral with his grief. Now he lays himself along my grave. He weeps and he laments, and I feel his weight through earth and wood. I am reminded, time and again, that not even my death belongs to me.

PseudoPod 478: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Jay’s Place

PseudoPod 478: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Jay’s Place is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:49 — 17.1MB)

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Show Notes

Not only is Jay’s Place a Pseudopod original, but also the author’s first professional publication sale. PseudoPod couldn’t be prouder to introduce you to this author.

Jay’s Place

by E. Lee Vicar

The road looked like it was there by accident. Turnoff so steep it felt like driving straight into the trees. Houses set far apart, hiding suspiciously at end of long dirt driveways, husks of cars crouched on their lawns. These were not the kind of people who made friends with their neighbors, but that was all right for now.

His place was second from the end of the street, a rocky oval where lost souls could pull a three-point turn and get back to the interstate. The house looked like it was built more recently than its neighbors. It was a little too narrow for its two stories, but the siding was all attached and the roof hadn’t yet shed any asphalt tiles. Jay examined it critically from the end of the unpaved driveway. Even this late in the evening, he had to shield his eyes against the fierce glare of the sun.

“No one’s been in there for a while,” said his brother, “but I just got it inspected and the inside’s actually all right. Hot water works, electricity’s not gonna kill you.” He leaned against his truck, boots crunching in the gravel.

“What’s it need done?” Jay asked.

“Well, once the yard is cleared out, I figure we’ll fix up the porch. Windows are okay but the screen door needs replacing. The rest is for you to figure out. Once they demo that dump next door, I think we may have a chance of selling.” He gestured to the neighboring property, barely visible behind a tangle of underdeveloped trees.

PseudoPod 477: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Bug House

Bug House was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1980. It won second place for best short story category in the 1981 Locus Awards.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:54 — 45.3MB)

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Bug House

by Lisa Tuttle

The house was a wreck, resting like some storm-shattered ship on a weedy headland overlooking the ocean. Ellen felt her heart sink at the sight of it.

‘This it?’ asked the taxi-driver dubiously, squinting through his windscreen and slowing the car.

‘It must be,’ Ellen said without conviction. She couldn’t believe her aunt — or anyone else — lived in this house.

The house had been built, after the local custom, out of wood, and then set upon cement blocks that raised it three or four feet off the ground. But floods seemed far less dangerous to the house now than the winds, or simply time. The house was crumbling on its blocks. The boards were weatherbeaten and scabbed with flecks of ancient grey paint. Uncurtained windows glared blankly, and one shutter hung at a crazy angle. Between the boards of the sagging, second-storey balcony, Ellen could see daylight.

PseudoPod 476: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Black Hearts

PseudoPod 476: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Black Hearts is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:21 — 26.4MB)

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Black Hearts

by Shannon Peavey

Alma carried the worm-fork and Lewis carried the knife. They didn’t speak and had not spoken since the morning, fifteen miles back through dry grass and bare dirt and the click-chatter of insects. Dust rose around their ankles and the sun beat hot on the napes of their necks.

When they dropped over a rise and hit bottom, Lewis stopped and nodded and Alma took the worm-fork in both hands. It was a heavy thing, its grip worn smooth by her palm. She raised it shoulder-high, breathed once, and slammed it down into the ground.

She didn’t know how Lewis decided on a place — what made that stretch of plain any better than the miles they had passed before it. Long miles, leading a horse too laden with jars and bags to ride. They were somewhere south of Nampa, days out of Boise, and she’d been gone from her home for more than a year. The land was different, here. The ground packed so hard she had to lean all her weight on the worm-fork to get it to stick.

They’d been only children at the start of Lewis’s great journey, but no one would call them such anymore.

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PseudoPod 475: The Toad Witch

The Toad Witch originally appeared in Tales of Witchcraft in 1991.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:22 — 17.5MB)

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The Toad Witch

by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

I began life in 1950. Until then, everything was darkness. Afterward was suffering and beauty. How could 1 not become a masochist? By the age of four I had learned to mistrust everyone, a good philosophy. If one expects something terrible to develop out of even pleasant events, one may also expect consolations at moments of travail; and even I must delude myself from time to time, succumbing to the disease of sentiment.

People who are essentially cheerful annoy me. When they are finally bent and deaf, they are suddenly surprised. They find out their lives were pointless falsehoods; that it’s all nearly over, and for what? When in the end they are completely disillusioned they seek forgiveness from everyone, for they had always been oblivious to the obvious things, to the suffering around them. They are sorry for having insisted nothing was ever all that bad. Destined as they are to so much disappointment, they merit our sadness more than our disdain.

As for those of us daily anguished, we need not be pitied. The world constantly reinforces our perspective. We may nod our heads like true sages. We are impervious to disillusion, knowing as we do that worse is yet to come.

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PseudoPod 474: Mr. Hill’s Death

“Mr. Hill’s Death” was first published in The Dark Magazine and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2015. “The English assignment in the story is based on a project I used to give when I was teaching high school. The idea for the short story came to me when a student showed a video of a car wreck to illustrate the word ‘tragic.'”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:36 — 15.6MB)

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Mr. Hill’s Death

by S.L. Gilbow

Mr. Hill’s death is posted on YouTube. You can’t actually see him. Just the back of his sunflower yellow convertible, top up, cruising along a two lane road. The fifty-second clip, taken from a dash cam in a following car, seems rather ordinary at first, and you might think you were watching a typical drive through a wooded countryside. That is if the clip weren’t titled “Tragic Car Wreck.”

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PseudoPod 473: Sack Race To The River

“Sack Race To The River” was first published in issue 3 of Phobos in December, 2014.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:09 — 13.9MB)

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Sack Race To The River

by Chris Kuriata

After cramming ourselves into the sack—my brother and I crouched on top of Dad’s shoulder blades like a pair of folded wings—Dad galloped down the stairs and out into the night. My brother and I cheered, enjoying the midnight wind blasting across our faces. Dad ran to the escarpment, grabbing the trunks of skinny trees to keep his balance as we skidded down the incline. He ran to the edge of the river, huffing and puffing, checking the time on his phone.

“Seven minutes,” he said. “Thank God we’ve started now ’cause we need practice. We need so much practice.”

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PseudoPod 472: Self Portrait With Embellishments

PseudoPod 472: Self Portrait With Embellishments is a PseudoPod original.

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Self Portrait With Embellishments

by Ryan Dull

These are the things you need to make art: Discipline, Opportunity, Inspiration.

Discipline begets Craft, Output, and Dispassionate Self-Criticism. I’ve had Discipline since I was eight years old.

Opportunity means that you can afford the time and the food and the ink required to make art. I’ve had Opportunity since I was a pair of star-crossed gametes.

I have never had Inspiration.