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PseudoPod 556: Evitative

“Evitative” is the titular and ultimate story of The Aversive Clause, the collection of stories that also included, ‘Sweetness,’ which ran as Pseudopod episode 445.

Says Edwards: “I’ve been listening to audial fiction for longer than I’ve been listening to music. I ‘read’ Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, the works of Issac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and countless others in this form starting around four and continuing onto today. My work is always written with the intention of being read aloud. So it’s really something to have a pair of stories in your archive. Thanks for keeping both horror and the spoken word going strong at the same time.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:36 — 33.2MB)

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Show Notes

Shawn Garrett composed the soundbed for this episode, which he dedicates to master avant-garde musicians/field recorders Annea Lockwood & Chris Watson. A list of links to sounds used from Freesound.org are below.

SOUNDBED SOURCES
48558__crk365__birds-23dec07-spesh
278213__fundamental-harmonics__ban-doi-insects-night-time-02
320173__arnaud-coutancier__night-insects
65288__acclivity__cicadasplus

Thanks to our sponsor, ARCHIVOS – a Story Mapping and Development Tool for writers, gamers, and storytellers of all kinds!

by B.C. Edwards

Once the oceans came up and covered the streets over it was like they weren’t ever there. No streets or dead Camaros or boys that abandon you when things get flooded and break down. There were just the tall trees with the high branches and water everywhere and the smudge of mountains I can see off on the horizon if I climb all the way to the top of the tree we use for looking at things. The water filled in all the gaps and erased our telemarketing jobs and our high-heels and the clubs we wore them to. But we’re safe up here, on the little platform Jo-Jo built in the trees. He found me wandering in the muck, cold and alone and his was the first face that I’d seen in forever that didn’t look scared or desperate or tired. The first one since the water and the bombs and all who didn’t try to take one more thing from me, didn’t try to steal me away or trick me into anything. Jo-Jo just smiled and his eyes smiled too and even though he’d lost his words already I knew he meant well. And he showed me how to climb the trees and get up to his platform where there’s nothing to do but climb around, eat the berries and the appleish things that dangle off the branches like Christmas ornaments and screw all afternoon long and laze about watching the world disappear. Jo-Jo catches the birds that build their nests and try to eat our fruit, and then we eat the birds too. That’s about all we do.

That’s about all the kid in my belly will do, too. But the kid won’t know any different. It won’t think there was ever something other than the trees and the muck and the water and the men who come by every now and again in their canoes and their ugly paddles and their terrible broken whispers.

You can’t go down there; those men will eat you.

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Flash Fiction Contest 5: A New Beginning

The original paraphernalia for the Flash Fiction Contest had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Stuart, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Lieberman spoke frequently to the forum members about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here.

Mr. Garrett and his oldest daughter, Victoria, hold the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Lieberman can stir the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Lieberman had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Lieberman had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into the black box.

(Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 555: Four Hours of a Revolution

PseudoPod 555: Four Hours of a Revolution is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:56 — 24.3MB)

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Four Hours of a Revolution

by Premee Mohamed

Rebels, like vampires, prowl by night, sleep by day; they are short on everything in the besieged city – bullets, socks, soap, bread – but mainly they are short of sleep, for they fight under starlight, hide under sun in secret places. And yet their enemies are most vulnerable at night when, like all good civil servants, they retire to their houses and lock their doors. Until they swap schedules neither side will eliminate the other.

So the revolution is easy enough to find as I whisper up the wall of the apartment complex, slide under the half-inch of space left by the open window. They will not open it further, even though the little boarded-up living room is intolerably hot. As it is, they sweat profusely in their sleep, even the lucky few shaded by the walls.

One has, deliberately I assume, curled up in an armchair under a poster reading ‘PUNK ISN’T DEAD BUT IT WOZ UP AWFUL LATE LAST NITE.’ On the poster, two men sleep in a train seat, cartoonishly rendered in hot primaries on a black ground. The rebel in the armchair echoes their pose, but instead of a tired friend she cradles a stolen police rifle, its distinctive silver finish oversprayed with matte black paint, the camera blocked with a glued-in coin. The police carry them proudly, counting on the reflected glare to carry their message far ahead of them; the rebels carry them only at night, counting on stealth.

It is this girl, Whittaker, in the armchair, in this war, that I am here to claim. In due time, as is her right and my duty. For I am Death.

(Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 554: A Doll Full of Nails

PseudoPod 554: A Doll Full of Nails is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:21 — 16.7MB)

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A Doll Full of Nails

By Ville Meriläinen

1.

 

“Once upon a time,” the doll began, “there lived a god who feared the dark.

“He cast a shadow over his creations and heard them whisper his doom when he turned away. He feared them so much he stole fire from the other gods and gave it to the tiny creatures, hoping it would take away the dark in their hearts. Instead, they set the god on fire, and that is how the sun was born.”

“Fascinating,” grumbled the doll maker, setting a glass eye into the socket of his latest masterpiece. This one, he hoped, would be as mute as most, unlike the one sitting on his shelf. “And patently untrue. Be quiet, now, or you’re getting another nail.” (Continue Reading…)

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Flash Fiction Contest 5: The Dream Child

Across the globe, the dreams of the artists are causing many a restless and feverish night. Someday soon the call would come, when the stars were ready. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Flash Fiction Contest; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Flash Fiction Contest would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

A special Flash Fiction contest portal will open on Submittable at midnight EDT on 8/15 and close at midnight on 9/15. If the portal disappears, submissions are formally closed and will not reopen.

In order to be a valid submission to the contest, each story must adhere to the following rules: (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 553: Fade to Gold

“Fade to Gold” was first published in End of the Road, edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris Books, 2013).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:26 — 33.4MB)

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by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

They say the afterlife is a wheel and that is true, but I am between and so for me the way is a line. It unspools interminably into a horizon that shows the soft gold of dawn, always just a little out of reach.

Before the war this was only packed earth and grass and dirt to me; before the war I trod this path from home to capital thinking of the sweetness of rare fruits. Now that my back is to Ayutthaya the ground is sometimes baked salt where nothing grows and sometimes wet mud bubbling with the voices of the dead. Inside my arteries there is blood which throbs and pumps, and my belly growls at emptiness as might a bad-tempered dog. But it is difficult to be sure, after so much soldiering, that one is still alive. It is difficult to be certain this is not all a fever dream. 

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PseudoPod 552: The All or Nothing Days

PseudoPod 552: The All or Nothing Days is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:40 — 23.5MB)

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The All or Nothing Days

By Gus Moreno

Sometimes Ya-Ya would lie on the ground and look up at the sky, and in between sips from her mason jar she would point to clouds and call them out. That one looked like a shark, that one looked like a gun, that one looked like Donkey Kong. And I would always ruin it with my questions. What’s a shark? What’s a gun? What’s a Donkey Kong?

She would roll over and that meant she was over it. She grew impatient with me and with herself, with slipping and mentioning something that was before my time, and having to explain it to me, something that was so simple and obvious to her that she was reduced to stuttering because she couldn’t figure out how to explain what a computer was without me asking what plastic was, what an internet was. She’d rather talk about other stuff, like pyramids. She didn’t mind explaining to me their shape and precision, how no one knew how they were made. I imagined a mountain with flat sides, with the point of a knife at the top, when both of us laid in the red dirt after the sun fell and the stars covered the sky. She said pyramids generated their own energy. You could run a whole city off their magnetic power. They were beacons to lifeforms on other planets. They were built by a kind of human that was different than us. But the planet froze over and killed off this special strain, and the humans we descended from were the cowardly, spindly ones that knew how to hide and steal and survive.

(Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 551: Alison

PseudoPod 551: Alison is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:07 — 36.8MB)

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Alison

by Seras Nikita

Alison will live her whole life in Folkston Georgia, forty miles from Waycross and as close to the Okefenokee as you can get before the ground starts filling your footprints with scab-colored water.  She will wake each morning to the thickness of the swamp sucked up into the air around her. She will eat dinners of fried fish, and balls of corn fried with onions.  Twice she will be hospitalized with blinding migraine headaches that are actually overdoses of aerosol insect repellent, ferried to her bloodstream via a bad habit of biting her nails and chewing the torn skin beneath them.

Alison Crenshaw will live to be nineteen years old.  She will die without losing her virginity, or understanding that she is schizophrenic. Up until the very end, Alison will never consider that anyone else’s mind might not be exactly like hers.

Alison’s first ‘episode’, as her mother came to call them, occurred in late March, when the pines of Folkston were heavy with white, football-sized cocoons of brown moth larvae.   Alison had been five years old, breaking apart acorns on the screened-in porch of her babysitter’s house when she smelled a smell that reminded her of the white collar her mother’s cat wore to keep fleas away.  Then she looked to the sky and saw that the caterpillars were finally alive in there, squirming in and out of view, obscured by the gauzy white stuff they’d spun.  Looking at those caterpillars Alison suddenly felt something in her chest  -something bright and hot stirring around.  She stood, disoriented, and something bolted through her, knocking her to her knees, a feeling of rage like nothing she had ever felt.  A feeling of disgust, and terrible urgency, that made her feel like a balloon had grown in her throat and the only way to make it stop stretching her was to scream out and make it pop.  Then she felt something else, some heavy and alien emotion that most people would describe as homesickness.  For the first time she was feeling things in her chest instead of just thinking them in her head, and she hated the feeling.   The thought that the cocoon was like her, that this feeling that had suddenly come over her was only one of hundreds more, teeming and squirming beneath her surface, and the cocoon was only a thick husk- person she had grown around herself.  And then, plain as her mother’s voice, Alison heard something tell her, “Let them out.” (Continue Reading…)