PseudoPod

• Author : Miranda Suri
• Narrator : Rock Manor
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“The New Arrival” was first published in Electric Spec, Volume 5, Issue 4 November 2010

I stood in line at the grocery store with my mother, ignoring Simon as he pawed through the carnival-bright offerings on the candy rack. Suzette, the check-stand girl who sometimes babysat for us on Friday nights, ran the items across the scanner.

“What great news, Mrs. Waverly,” Suzette said. “You must be so excited!”

Simon finally settled on a chocolate bar and held it up to our mom, his eyes eager. Watching my older brother, his ten-year-old body twice my size but his mind still years behind, I felt something between pity and disgust.

My mother took the candy bar and slid it onto the belt. Her other hand held mine.

“I know,” she responded. “We’re thrilled! We didn’t want to say anything until we were out of the first trimester.”

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• Author : Lisa Tuttle
• Narrator : Christiana Ellis
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“The Horse Lord” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in June 1977 and included in A NEST OF NIGHTMARES. This collection was first published in 1986 by Sphere Books and is now available as an e-book from Jo Fletcher Books; it is also included in STRANGER IN THE HOUSE, a collection of her early supernatural fiction published as a limited edition hardcover by Ash-Tree Press in 2010.

The double barn doors were secured by a length of stout, rust-encrusted chain, fastened with an old padlock.

Marilyn hefted the lock with one hand and tugged at the chain, which did not give. She looked up at the splintering grey wood of the doors and wondered how the children had got in.

Dusting red powder from her hands, Marilyn strolled around the side of the old barn. Dead leaves and dying grasses crunched beneath her sneakered feet, and she hunched her shoulders against the chill in the wind.

‘There’s plenty of room for horses,’ Kelly had said the night before at dinner. ‘There’s a perfect barn. You can’t say it would be impractical to keep a horse here.’ Kelly was Derek’s daughter, eleven years old and mad about horses.

This barn had been used as a stable, Marilyn thought, and could be again. Why not get Kelly a horse? And why not one for herself as well? As a girl, Marilyn had ridden in Central Park. She stared down the length of the barn: for some reason, the door to each stall had been tightly boarded shut.

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• Author : Sylvia Anna Hivén
• Narrator : Patrick Bazile
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“How To Remember” won the 2014 Parsec Short Story Contest and appeared in the 2014 Confluence program book, July 25, 2014.

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“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.”

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• Author : Usman T. Malik
• Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“Laal Aandhi” first appeared in the shared world anthology TRUTH OR DARE, edited by Max Booth III, from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing.

“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.”

The post Pseudopod 448: Laal Aandhi appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Elan Hold
• Narrator : Caith Donovan
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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Pseudopod 447: Coo Coo is a PseudoPod original.

“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.”

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• Author : Robert Reed
• Narrator : Dave Thompson
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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Pseudopod 446: Killing Puppies For Aunt Jenny is a PseudoPod original.

“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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• Author : B.C. Edwards
• Narrator : Sam Ferree
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“Sweetness” first appeared in 2010 in the anthology ZOMBIALITY: A QUEER BENT ON THE UNDEAD (edited by Bill Tucker) and was reprinted in THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE, Edwards’ debut collection of short stories.

“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.”

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• Author : Adrian Simmons
• Narrator : Jared Axelrod
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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Pseudopod Bonus Flash: Fan Letter To Joe Lansdale is a PseudoPod original.

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!

The post Pseudopod Bonus Flash: Fan Letter To Joe Lansdale appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Joe R. Lansdale
• Narrator : Kevin M. Hayes
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“Boys Will Be Boys” first appeared in the Winter 1985/1986 issue of Hardboiled. This story, slightly revised, became a portion of the 1987 novel THE NIGHTRUNNERS.

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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• Author : Lavie Tidhar
• Narrator : Robert A.K. Gonyo
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“Watchers” was originally published in World War Cthulhu, ed. Jonathan Oliver, publisher: Cubicle 7, 2013.

“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:

Waves: https://www.freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/191296/

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.

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