It's our first surprise story episode, wherein only one of us has read the text ahead of time, and, in true Texas style, this story is all about building walls! This week, Cooley offers up the short story Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer, a modern fairytale about the self-destructive nature of cloaking fear in fantasy. Cooley and Herrick discuss the human compulsion to build beautiful facades around ugly truths, how a particular use of "they" can reveal more than your typical pronoun, and the dangers of mixing fluffy kittens, imaginative little boys, and razor-sharp barbed wire fencing.    

Intro & Outro music:

"grapes_-_I_dunno" by spinning merkaba/ccMixter

Licensed under Creative Commons: Free for commercial use with attribution

http://dig.ccmixter.org/free

 

Cover Art: Jake and Sydney Herrick