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

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

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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.

Artemis Rising 2 Has Arrived

Artemis Rising 2 is here! It’s a special month-long event featuring stories by some of the best female and non-binary authors in genre fiction, airing across all the Escape Artists podcasts in February 2016. PodCastle for fantasy, EscapePod for science fiction, and PseudoPod for horror. Cast of Wonders will be joining the Artemis Rising event in 2017.

This year we have commissioned a special art print by legendary illustrator Galen Dara. The print will be available for purchase through Society6 until March 31, 2016. Go buy it now while you can!

Galen likes monsters, mystics, and dead things. She has created art for Uncanny Magazine, 47North publishing, Skyscape Publishing, Fantasy Flight Games, Tyche Books, Fireside Magazine, Lightspeed, Lackington’s, and Resurrection House. She has been nominated for the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and the Chesley Award. When Galen is not working on a project you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains and hanging out with an assortment of human and animal companions. Her website is www.galendara.com plus you can find her on Facebook and Twitter @galendara.

Purchase your print here: https://society6.com/escapeartists

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PseudoPod 475: The Toad Witch

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

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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.

For Your Consideration

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In our first 2016 metacast, we present the Escape Artists (EA) stories that ran in 2015, which are eligible in the upcoming Hugo nomination season.

A quick plug. For us. All four EA shows – PodCastle, Pseudopod, Escape Pod and Cast of Wonders – are themselves eligible in the SEMIPROZINE Hugo category. (Continue Reading…)

When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird (continue to) Turn Pro

For 2016, PseudoPod has new pay rates. For all new submissions, we will pay the pro rate of $.06 per word for original fiction. We will pay $100 flat rate for short fiction reprints (2,000 words or more), and $20 flat rate for flash fiction reprints (stories below 2,000 words). This makes all the original fiction purchases pro-paying. See the submission guidelines for further details. To maintain a transparent relationship without the writing community, We have also placed our contract templates on the submission guidelines page.

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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.'”

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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.

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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.”