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PseudoPod 446: Killing Puppies for Aunt Jenny


Killing Puppies for Aunt Jenny

by Robert Reed


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.

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PseudoPod 445: Sweetness

Show Notes

“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?”


Sweetness

by B.C. Edwards


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.

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PseudoPod Bonus Flash (444B): Fan Letter to Joe Lansdale


Fan Letter to Joe Lansdale

by Adrian Simmons


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!

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PseudoPod 444: Boys Will Be Boys


Boys Will Be Boys

by Joe Lansdale


Not long ago, about a year back, a very rotten kid named Clyde Edson walked the Earth. He was street-mean and full of savvy and he knew what he wanted and got it anyway he wanted.

He lived in a big, evil house on a dying, grey street in Galveston, Texas, and he collected to him, like an old lady who brings in cats half-starved and near-eaten with mange, the human refuse and the young discards of a sick society.

He molded them. He breathed life into them. He made them feel they belonged. They were his creations, but he did not love them. They were just things to be toyed with until the paint wore thin and the batteries ran down, then out they went.

And this is the way it was until he met Brian Blackwood.

Things got worse after that.

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PseudoPod 443: Watchers

Show Notes

“Very little of this is made up. The coastwatchers on Leserser were there  as described – as was I, half a century later.”


Sounds used in this episode:


Watchers

by Lavie Tidhar


1.

The city is buried deep under the South Pacific ocean, and that is all I want to tell you about it.

In 1942 South Pacific Command was established on the island of New Caledonia following the hurried departure of its French colonial administration. Nouvelle Caledonie, unlike the other islands of Melanesia, was not volcanic. It was, in fact, the sole remnant of an entire sunken continent called Zealandia, a fragment of the once-mighty Gondwanaland.

There had been monsters on New Caledonia, before humans came. Meiolania, a giant horned turtle, two and a half meters long with an elongated skull and multiple horns protruding from of it. Or the Sylviornis, an almost two meters tall, flightless bird with a long reptilian tail. Or the enormous, armoured Mekosuchus crocodiles.

Real monsters, all of them. But when the humans came, when the ancient Lapita people crossed the ocean in their giant canoes, they settled the islands, and they killed the monsters.

I was not in New Caledonia. I was with III Island Command, first on Espiritu Santo and then on Vanua Lava, in the islands of the New Hebrides.

When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro


PseudoPod is open again for submissions. With the reopening, we’d like to announce a few changes for the better. First, we have new pay rates. For all new submissions, we will pay the pro rate of $.06 per word for original fiction up to a cap of 6,000 words. We will pay $100 flat rate for reprints, and $20 flat rate for flash fiction (stories below 1500 words). This now makes all the organizations in the Escape Artists family pro-paying markets. Second, we have moved to the Submittable platform for all submissions. This gives everyone improved tracking, a cleaner user interface, and a better overall experience. Please check out our Submissions page or the Submittable portal for more details.

We would also like to take a moment to recognize our submissions staff. The submissions staff is the lifeblood of our organization and keep the gears from grinding. Moaner T. Lawrence will be stepping in as new Assistant Editor over submissions. Our Associate Editors include Chelsea, Kat, and Jen as new staff members, as well as the returning Brian, Jesse, Nick, and Nicole. Many thanks are owed to the uncountable hours devoted by Joe, who is moving to new projects. With the new rates, we expect you authors to keep these folks busy reading for the upcoming seasons of PseudoPod.

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PseudoPod 442: The Only Child

Show Notes

“While writing this story I was wondering why death sometimes makes people feel special – touching it, escaping it, even causing it. Yet it’s not special. It’s something that happens to all of us eventually and it’s usually terrible.”


The Only Child

by Leslie J. Anderson


Annabell Crowley lay on the dirt floor and looked up at Death. She remembered that a man had cut her throat. It was so hard to hold onto ideas. Her parents were already dead. Death had taken their spirits hours ago. She thought she should be afraid of him, but wasn’t. The human mind has amazing capabilities of adjusting to a new reality. The world was very peaceful. She looked up at Death, who looked back down at her. How funny that everything felt normal now. A man had cut her throat and she was not dead, even though that was impossible. Her arms lay at her sides. She didn’t have the power to raise them.

Death tilted his head. His skin was pulled close over his skull and his eyes were closed and sunken. Maybe he had no eyes at all. After looking at her for a long time he flicked the cigarette away and walked out the door. He was dressed in flannel and jean, with a brown hat. He had taken the hat from a hanged man because he’d liked it and it fit well. He stepped over Anna’s father.

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PseudoPod 441: Deep Deep

Show Notes

“I once worked as a summer camp counselor, and I love swimming in lakes. (You might not think so, but it’s true!)”


Deep Deep

by Karen Munro


If a kid got lost in the lake, all the counselors had to dive. They were supposed to line up an arm’s length from each other, dive to the bottom, swim a few feet, then come straight up for air. If you dove close to shore it wasn’t bad. You only had to go down a few feet. But out at the end of the dock, beneath the diving board, it was twelve or fifteen or twenty feet to the bottom. That’s what we called deep-deep.

I wasn’t a counselor. I wasn’t counselor material, especially not at Wanderwell Reformatory Boys’ Camp. I wasn’t there to reform anyone, I just wanted to get out of my mom’s basement for the summer. Bagging cream of wheat and counting bowstrings in the quartermaster’s A-frame was better than listening to my mom and Shouty Phil rampage through the house. I didn’t want to be a counselor. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone . . . but they still made me dive.