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PseudoPod 991: The Hermit Crab God

Show Notes

Notes from the author: I recently spoke with a nature photographer who was very passionate about hermit crabs, and he made me want to not give up. I suppose just because horror is often hopeless doesn’t mean I have to be. Maybe horror can just be a way to get the nihilism out of our system.


The Hermit Crab God

by ego_bot


“Behold the truth of this world, Koji, my friend,” said Masa. Pretending sophistication. “We live in a world made by humans, for humans. Don’t need a college degree to figure that out.”

Koji puffed on his cigarette. He was trying to enjoy the sunset in silence, but his friend kept going on about the trash strewn across the beach. As if anyone actually gave a shit about that.

“My dad drove me up to this beach all the time when I was little,” Koji said.

Masa took a sip from his plastic bottle of green tea. “Is that right?”

“We came up here to catch fish for my aquarium—snails, clams, whatever. Anyway, the place was pristine back then. I swear. No trash.”

“A lot’s changed since then.” Masa gestured his green tea bottle towards the ocean. “All those countries. All those corporations, those boats out there—these days they’ve got plastic to spare. How nice of the currents to deliver it all to our lovely beaches.”

Koji took a long drag of his cigarette, let the smoke mix with his thoughts. “We must be idiots to want to be biologists.” He exhaled. “All the coral on this island will be white as snow before we graduate, and nothing you and I do will make a damn difference, ever.”

“That’s the spirit. Rest easy knowing humans will get what’s coming to us. Nature will make sure of it, yeah? And either way”—Masa took another swig of his tea, then held the bottle out—“the sun will rise again in the morning. Hey, want a sip?”

Koji accepted the plastic without thinking. It was weightless—empty. He shot a glare at his grinning excuse for a friend who had just handed him trash. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 990: Hearts and Half-Measures

Show Notes

From the author: The Manananggal (“self-segmenter” – the creature in this story) is a Filipino Aswang (evil spirit) that detaches her torso from her lower half and then takes flight during the night to eat infants. This creature’s name is derived from the Filipino word, “tanggal,” which means “to separate” because of the manananggal’s ability to separate itself from its lower body. To feed, the self-segmenter chooses an isolated place where she will leave her lower torso while she hunts at night. When she separates from her lower torso, she then gains her ability to fly.


Hearts And Half-Measures

by Cassiopeia Gatmaitan


You eat the hearts of men because your father says that if you consume enough, you’ll turn back into one.

You think it’s all bull. Anyone in their right mind would. But he watches you like a hawk, so you always make sure to bring a fresh one with you when you stagger home past dawn.

He smiles over his cup of coffee, makes you one the way you like it, and helps you into your seat. Most times, he doesn’t even call you hijo when he asks about your evening.

This time, he does, and you clench your teeth as you tell him about the fire on Recoletos Street, and how you almost wanted to make one of the firemen your mark. And then you realized that it would have been too hard to tear his heart out through his uniform, that he would taste like smoke, and that the body would stand out like a stoplight, clad in red-stained neon green. You recall giggling at the image, but you know that your father would think you crass for that, so you keep it to yourself.

He takes the heart from your hand, and you continue your story as he heats up oil in a frying pan, slicing the meat into bite-sized chunks. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 989: Dimorphism


Dimorphism

Jessi Ann York


Laura pours milk across her skin the first night the wolf spiders begin to bother her. It turns her bath water cloudy and congeals around the edges of her drain. She won’t dry herself before getting under the bedsheets, but she will check her email twice. It’s three-thirty in the morning. Her phone screen is the only light in the studio apartment. The wolf spiders’ eyes glow white in their stacked cages along the corner of the room.

For the most part, the wolf spiders don’t move, aside from the occasional shuffling of their three clawed toes as they groom their gray legs. Sometimes they turn restlessly in circles, laying down a nest of urticating hairs in their webs. Sometimes they flick their hairs at nothing. It’s these invisible barbs that irritate Laura’s skin whenever she opens their cage doors and stirs the air to feed them crickets and mealworms.

They never try to bite her.

They never try to escape.

They have no need to.

Laura imagines they know she’s keeping them safe while Oliver, her fiancé, is finishing up his visiting lecturer position at Newman University.

Out of the twelve wolf spiders, there is only one that takes any interest in Laura. All summer long he taps at the plexiglass, like a hand knocks on a door.

She wants him to stop.

She wishes Oliver would come home. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 988: Anthropology 201


Anthropology 201

Written by Kitty Sarkozy


College is a crucible. You go in a dumb kid, and with luck, you leave a less dumb adult, ready to take your place in the world. It took me a little longer than the standard four years. I had a job throughout, slowing down the matriculation process. It’s not all books, lectures, and labs – there are life lessons too. In college, you learn, grow, get exposed to new ideas, new cultures, and new people.

Do you remember that story I told you a while back, about that cow, the black Angus that showed up in the barn? How I said it came from somewhere else, kinda crawfishing into our reality. You know all about that. Wait . . . have I told you about that waterfall, up near Forsyth? No? Well remind me sometime. Don’t let me get off-topic. I’m telling you about college and learning to see what’s there, not what you think ought to be. Part of growing up is understanding that you can’t always trust that you know the truth, even when you see it with your own eyes.

Let’s see . . . that semester I think I was taking Anthropology 101, with the most delightful professor – Dr. Tragos. He was short, round, bald, and full of energy. Tragos had a dramatic voice, an energetic way of moving around the room, and a bookshelf full of antiques and specimens he used as props. He told the most exciting stories, making his class feel more like a play than a lecture.

However, you had to pay attention in his class; if not, you could get hit in the face with a human skull. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 987: Reflections on Bloody Mary

Show Notes

The Pixel Project, https://www.thepixelproject.net, has a list of shelters worldwide


Reflections on Bloody Mary

By Catherine MacLeod


“Maaa-reee,” my husband taunts. “Oh, Maaa-reee. Come out now, dear. We need to talk.”

Wrong, I think but don’t say. My mother used to say, “A real lady knows when to keep her mouth shut.” It was her favourite piece of advice. When I didn’t follow it, she whispered, “Sh, sh.”

“Mary, you don’t understand.”

Also, wrong. I understand my husband is a liar, a thief, and a joke, and his snug little world just imploded.

My mother would surely have advice for that, too.

I never wanted to follow in her footsteps, but tonight I did, right into a dark bathroom with only one exit. “History repeats itself,” she used to say, and yes, it does.

“Maaa-reee.” Shadows shift under the door as Leonard prowls back and forth. He’s drunk, terrified, and—SLAM!—determined to kick the door in. I might have 10 minutes before he goes full-out Jack Torrance. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 986: The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs


The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs

by E. Catherine Tobler


In the predawn dark, Annie found herself in a bed, holding onto another hand beneath the cool weight of the pillow. Floral case, it was the trailer—her trailer—and slowly she came back to herself, to her body, and kissed the folded fingers beneath the pillow before claiming the ringing phone, dreadful thing. The voice on the other end was frantic, offering double pay because the cops needed her—needed her boat, a man had gone missing—Ricky had that charter, didn’t she remember—it had to be her, there was no one else. Triple, she said. She lived plain, but there were always bills.

She dressed in the dark, phantom chill of the lake already clinging to her. Her skin pebbled everywhere and she was surprised when she pulled her hair back into its customary tail that it did not leak lake water across her shoulders.

It was twenty-four minutes from the RV park to the lake, not counting the time she spent hitching the boat trailer to the truck. Years ago they’d told her: don’t stay hitched overnight, anyone could drive away with the whole shebang. She’d never seen it happen, but there was plenty she hadn’t borne witness to that still was in the record of the world.

The sun stayed hidden the whole way there. The roads were barren and she liked them that way, listening to the even breath of tires over asphalt. Dry, smooth. The trailer had a wobble, a squeak, but it would wait until the afternoon—depending how long they kept her out. A man had gone missing.

It wasn’t the first time and surely wouldn’t be the last. She had helped the law before—it was a fine diversion, given how well she knew the lake, its surrounds. Usually people wanted to know where the fish were: rainbow trout, sockeye salmon. A man was many times larger than a fish, but the lake was larger still. Sometimes the lake won. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 985: Think of Me

Show Notes

Strange Darling


Think of Me

by Lindsay King-Miller


Sasha and Taylor are fucking and Sasha is thinking about me. She tries to stop, but the harder she tries to push me out of her head, the more space she makes for me there.

She thinks about the way I fucked her –things she still hasn’t worked up the courage to ask Taylor for. Things she could only do with me, because there was never any question who was the more damaged one in our relationship. Taylor is very pretty and college-educated and normal in that all-American tennis-scholarship lesbian kind of way, and Sasha doesn’t want to scare her off, so she thinks about me and the good ways I used to hurt her.

This of course leads to thinking about the bad ways I hurt her, and there are so many of those. She’s rocking her hips to the motion of Taylor’s fingers but the rhythm in her mind is me banging my head against our bedroom wall. An image of my body the way she found it, slumped over in the bathtub, flashes through her head in the moment before she comes. Guilt and grief and rage and shame and lust all at once. She hates it, and I hate it too, but I can’t look away. I don’t even have eyes to close. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 984: Flash on the Borderlands LXXIV: Thy Shields Between Them and the Light

Show Notes

“My Heart in a Snow Globe”: The idea for this story came to me while thinking about “helicopter parenting” and how it ends up doing more harm than good to the child—shutting them inside a bubble that’s always under surveillance and stunting their emotional development—as symbolized by the metaphor of fragile snow globes that our narrator is so fond of crafting.

“Exposed, Every Inch Visible”: In the summer of 2024 I was walking with my family along London’s River Thames when I saw a street performer using a small, plastic skeleton as a marionette. I just about had time to pull out my phone and make a note and, later, this story was born.

“We Told You of the One Who Lives in the Mound”: This story is a blend of real-life events from my childhood and my tribe’s traditional beliefs. Edie (not her real name) is based on a friend of mine who disappeared when we were children. Rumor had it that her birth-mother had kidnapped her from her adoptive parents. To this day, I don’t know what really happened to her, but her disappearance inspired this story as much as the many Choctaw legends referenced here.


Clark Ashton Smith

To the Darkness by Clark Ashton Smith

Helicopter Parents


“The spears of the day shall not touch them, the chains of the sun shall not hale them forth.”


The Talented Beetle

By Joanne Harris


Beneath a forest canopy of flowering trees and fruiting vines, there lived a talented beetle. He was a craftsman among dung beetles, making not only balls of dung, but also crafting other shapes, flowers and leaves and insects. They were only made of dung, and yet they were perfect copies of the real thing, so that soon word of the dung-beetle’s art reached the forest canopy, where the King of the Parrots lived, holding court, surrounded by his courtiers. The King of the Parrots was very vain, and fancied himself a great artist, although he could do nothing but imitate (rather badly) the songs of other creatures.

“This beetle is an artist,” he said, “and I shall be his patron.” Then, addressing the beetle, he said: “I hereby proclaim you the official artist to my royal court. You will henceforth be the official sculptor of my kingdom. You will build me a royal palace out of dung. Out of dung, you will create all my official statues.”

The dung beetle pondered this at length, and finally said: “I’ll need more dung.” (Continue Reading…)