March 06, 2018

PodCastle 512, ARTEMIS RISING: Scar Clan

41 minutes

* Author : Carrow Narby

* Narrator : Becky Stinemetze

* Host : Eleanor R. Wood

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

* Artist : Geneva Benton

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PodCastle 512, ARTEMIS RISING: Scar Clan is a PodCastle original.

PG-13, for graphic monster gore.

Find this year’s glorious ARTEMIS RISING art by Geneva Benton on her website here. Additional ARTEMIS RISING 4 swag is available on Redbubble and Teepublic.

Host Notes:

“Forgetting by Commemoration, or, the Disrespect of Respect,” by China Mieville

“They Should Be Afraid of Old Women” by Mary Anne Mohanraj

Scar Clan

by Carrow Narby

Sage doesn’t ask me to go with her when the call comes in. She doesn’t say anything at all except, “It’s Thunderhead again.” She ducks into coveralls, tosses some shovels into the bucket truck, and speeds away. We call it the “bucket” because of how we use it. It’s not one of those trucks with a boom on it that they use to fix the power lines.

I sit trembling by the phone, sometimes getting up to pace the desolate office, until Sage reappears. Her sleeves are greasy-looking and streaked with pinkish stains. She beckons me to suit up and join her. “There were some folks around to help me get her off the road,” she explains. “But I need you to help unload the truck.”

“What happened?”

“Hit by a semi.”

My whole body tenses up. I must be looking at Sage as if she’s a pair of oncoming high beams, because she adds, “You can do this, right?”

I nod but all around me the night is receding into a dark blur. I’m just a body poised in space, a machine, marching across the yard, perching over the truck bed, nudging at something heavy and slick. Sliding it piece by piece into Sage’s big, orange wheelbarrow. One, two, three, four trips between the bucket truck and the outer door of Thunderhead’s usual room.

I’m lucky, really, to have landed this job. Officially, Red Oak Animal Hospital is a respectable veterinary practice at the southwestern edge of Sudbury. Sage, the owner, is Cornell-educated in equine medicine. The area is semi-rural, but it’s also full of rich people, so we do pretty well. Sage has steady work at a couple of hobbyist stables, and there’s no shortage of pampered labradoodles and wannabe backyard farmers.

I do work the regular day shift sometimes, during the weeks when the moon is slender or dark. It feels like a reprieve to vaccinate a puppy while it squirms and tries to lick my hands, or even to grapple with a spitting cat. But anybody could do that sort of work. Sage hired me to help her run the secret night clinic. The wolves just call it “Sage’s place.” Like a regular emergency room, we have what you’d call “frequent fliers.”

I haven’t been here long, so I’ve only seen Thunderhead once before. It was just about a month ago. She was in one piece then, for the most part. Sage had called me in to help her suture some bite wounds around an anesthetized patient’s neck and wrists: common injuries for wolves who are prone to fighting. “Oh,” I must have said, surprised,

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