In 2016, Escape Artists will again celebrate ARTEMIS RISING, a special month-long event across all three Escape Artists podcasts featuring stories by some of the best female and nonbinary authors in genre fiction. PseudoPod will fill the entire month with female-authored horror fiction. Payment will be $.06 per word for original fiction, and $100 for reprints. Original fiction is preferred. (Continue Reading…)
The painted woman shimmered bronze-red against the desert. I didn’t know if I’d ever catch up with her, but still I whipped my ragged horse on, doing everything in my might to not let that little speck of a savage vanish over the horizon.
My throat itched with hot dust, which bothered me, and my horse’s hooves bled, and that was no good neither—the fanged mustangs would smell it, and the black-hounds, too. But I followed that painted woman like the devil chasing a damned soul, because that woman had stolen Ellie.
_You get my daughter back, Jeremiah. You get her back, or this ain’t your homestead anymore._
I couldn’t remember Clementine’s face much, in the feverish desert and with the sun so unwilling to set—so unwilling to do anything but bake, and char, and burn, and make a man miserable. But my wife’s words burned more than the sun, and even if I didn’t remember quite how she looked when I’d left, I could pretty much imagine her. My mind conjured up images of her tear-dusty face and the way she’d writhe her hands—not despairingly, but like a warning what all would happen if I failed. That was Clementine: pretty and frail on the outside, a wispy ghost of a girl in her thin cotton dress, but when she wanted to she could be something else—something nearly as wicked as the desert and the vile creatures crawling in its cracks. And she wanted Ellie back. So I had ridden out.
I was still riding, ignoring the flicker of scarlet the horse left on our trail, not caring how damn parched I was and how I had no idea when I’d refill my water skin. And I ignored how the life I was desperate to put back together, in my icy-cold fever, I barely remembered anymore.
“Growing up in Pakistan, I heard stories of ‘missing people’ often showing up in gunny sacks. A friend of mine from Karachi told me how he once stumbled upon a gunny sack with a dead boy inside. I suppose this story stems from his experience and my fears.”
Saleem, Wasif, Ali Malik, and I. Always the four of us banded together against the uncertainties of a city running on trepidation. In this season of yoking and yearning, of bereavement and besetment, we started doing the thing we did, for with fear and death and sulfur in the air who would stop us? Who would point and say, Watch it, children, you must survive your age. Must get through one hell to enter another.
‘85 was the year of army generals and feudal lords touring their fiefdoms grandly while the populace died thrashing in gutters from starvation and heat and Hadood Law amputations. Of VIP villas and ruined shanties, bright-tiled facades and haunted houses, ‘police encounters’ and prison suicides, and insurgent bomb attacks.
Most of all, though, it was the summer we went to Bad Bricks during a laal andhi.
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.
The fourth incarnation of the Escape Artists Flash Fiction Contest is coming. Pseudopod will be leading the charge this time. Every author may submit up to two original stories of 500 words or less for consideration between August 15 and September 15. Sharpen your pencils and get your stories ready to submit. The three winning stories will be purchased and run as an episode of Pseudopod. Stories will be published on a members-only section of the forums, so first publication rights will not be expended by participating in the contest. It’s easy to be become a member. Sign up for a forum account and make a single post so we know you’re not a bot. This is a good thread to start with. From there, all the pertinent details will be posted under “The Arcade”. Visit for rules and details.
She’s still here. Now that it’s over, it’s not as bad as I thought because she’s still physically present; they can’t bury her and they can’t ignore her, they have to deal with it.
They watch me with new eyes, tho. They’re waiting to see what will happen.
While she was dying I panicked and got really dizzy; now, I feel strangely calm, but I’m winded. She didn’t have much of a brain but she did do most of the breathing. Without her, I can’t take a good, deep breath. She made these funny little hiccuppy gulps that comforted me, and I’m having trouble sleeping without them.
She died three days ago.
Her head hangs far forward without her holding it up. It was stiff for a bit, but today it’s gone floppy and keeps bumping against my chin. I don’t want to think about the stench; it’s so thick I can almost feel it, but it doesn’t matter because I can barely smell. I got a sinus infection years ago and they didn’t treat it; I burned the poison out using a piece of wire I broke off the cage, and a lighter I stole from Godfrey. They watched that, too. They think I can’t see them thru the one-way glass, but I can always tell, even when they’re quiet. I can sense it, the vibrations. The hairs on my spine stand on end, tickling, tickling. When they’re watching, I like to sleep, or pick thru her hair for lice. But all the lice left her head when she went cold and now I’ve got twice the load on mine.
She would have laughed at that.
Ms. Simmons had asked me to speak plainly about what happened from the beginning, but I was scared at first. I told her I would try and tell her everything, but July was a hot month, I have a hard time membering things when it happens in the hot.
My mom had just died a few months before, and my dad left me here. I don’t think mama ever liked dad, she said he was a liar and a cheat and, mama said you can never trust a person like that. Aunt Jenny never loved me like mama did. She came closer to liking me more than dad did, but that wasn’t much at all. I didn’t have much of anything, but some clothes and a baseball bat. I didn’t even have a ball. I use to stand in the gravel driveway and throw rocks in the air and try to hit them. I’m a real hard swinger, that’s what dad said. Aunt Jenny said I was horrible at baseball and that I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. I thought that was funny, because barns were so big that anyone could hit a barn, as long as they got close enough.
In the hot of July, Aunt Jenny said I needed to get out from under her feet and if I was going to sleep under her roof and eat her food then I needed to contribute more to the house. When Aunt Jenny used the word contribute, she meant get a job. We lived in Hyde Park Indiana, I still do I guess, but mama doesn’t, cause she’s dead. Like I was saying, it was in the hot of July, and aunt Jenny wanted me to contribute. In Hyde Park there just ain’t that many jobs, specially when your nine years old. It’s a small town. It seemed to me that everyone grew corn, everyone had a truck and everyone had a dog. And usually not just one dog, but a bunch. Aunt Jenny said it was because that all dogs do is eat your food and have sex, and that one day, I would like sex; and then she laughed. I didn’t like being compared to a dog.
“When it comes to the classic zombie myth, I’ve always been curious about what it must feel like to change from human to monster. It seems to me something of a huge cop-out to have the transformation happen only after the person was dead. And I’ve always been interested in why zombies act the way they do. Why the hunger?”
It starts in the back of the throat, that spot where coughs gets caught when you’ve got a cold. It is sweet, like too much caramel, like cheap air freshener, like that perfume my grandmother wore constantly and which always made me gag.
Now I wonder if this is the last time I’ll think about my grandmother.
It will consume me piece by piece until there is nothing left and I am one of those that has been overcome by it. That is how it works, they say. The people on the news say.
Dear Mr. Landsdale:
I would like to congratulate you on your story “Boys Will Be Boys” in the FenCon 2010 program booklet.
For years I have tried to write a story that gets into the head of a sociopath, and you’ve put together one that gets into the heads of not one, but two of them!