Posts Tagged ‘love’

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PseudoPod 563: Flash On The Borderlands XXXIX: Teratology

Kiss, Don’t Tell is a reprint

Shed Skin is a PseudoPod Original. This story is the culmination of Getty’s attempts to adequately explore the experience of depression.

The Corpse Child is a PseudoPod Original

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:07 — 38.0MB)

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Kiss, Don’t Tell

by Cassandra Khaw

You never told me she’d be so human, so sweet. Marzipan bones and caramel hair, latte skin stretched taut over a face still new to wanting. Just a mouthful, really, a morsel, her eyes brittle as she watches us flit by, heartbeats sliding between the ribs of time.

In Europe, no one believes in kismet, but who needs faith to author fact?

Later, you joke about serendipity. I nod in silence, my fingers still glazed with her cells and her atoms, the taste of her bitter with ghosts of Sunday afternoon pasts. How many street corners have you kissed on? How many does she remember? How many times has she sat coiled by her phone, waiting, waiting, thumbing through pictures of you together, a patchwork of possibilities that should have spelled out a future?

(Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 542: That Only a Mother

“That Only a Mother” was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1948. It appears here with appreciation through the assistance of the Virginia Kidd Agency.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:32 — 26.8MB)

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That Only a Mother

by Judith Merril

A well-known geneticist, in the medical news, said that it was possible to tell with absolute certainty, at five months, whether the child would be normal, or at least whether the mutation was likely to produce anything freakish. The worst cases, at any rate, could be prevented. Minor mutations, of course, displacements in facial features, or changes in brain structure could not be detected. And there had been some cases recently, of normal embryos with atrophied limbs that did not develop beyond the seventh or eighth month. But, the doctor concluded cheerfully, the worst cases could now be predicted and prevented.

PseudoPod 479: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Like Dolls

PseudoPod 479: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Like Dolls is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:56 — 18.6MB)

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Show Notes

Like Dolls started as a meditation on the other side of the ‘wailing on your grave’ subgenre of folk music, such as I Am Stretched on Your Grave and The Unquiet Grave. Not only is Like Dolls a Pseudopod original, but also the author’s first professional publication sale. PseudoPod couldn’t be prouder to introduce you to this author.

Like Dolls

by J. Lily Corbie

I am awake. Through the trappings of a funeral and the clods of earth raining upon me, I am aware. When my father kneels at my headstone and calls me his willful girl, I hear him. When Meredith weeps and lays poppies on my grave, I know. When they are gone, I am at rest.

The dark is absolute. I know my eyes are open–curious fingers encounter the wet resistance of eye, feel the brush of eyelashes with each blink. I suffer neither thirst nor hunger, and though my chest still fills and empties, I want for nothing. I am somnolent, content with my eternity.

Only Bastian’s voice interrupts my peace.

At the service, he threw himself across my coffin and wailed. He wasn’t mourning–he was claiming my funeral with his grief. Now he lays himself along my grave. He weeps and he laments, and I feel his weight through earth and wood. I am reminded, time and again, that not even my death belongs to me.