Strange Stories, By Strange Authors, for Strange Listeners
Gardner was drowning, and strangers were laying hands on the bones of my forebears. I felt obligated to see that liberties weren’t taken with my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and other good, God-fearing ladies, so I put the business on auto pilot and made the drive as if on auto pilot myself.
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The niece of King Death had not yet chosen a name. She was the only daughter and youngest child of Death’s sister, Merciful Grace, and everyone still called her by her baby name, Little Grace…
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We stayed on the path. The light seemed to drip down from the canopy of the woods like rain. The going was easy, especially if we didn’t try to look at the path but let our feet find their own way.
Then through the trees I saw their fire…
This episode of the Drabblecast examines humanity through anthropomorphism. In the drabble, peacefully grazing sheep get unexpected visitors who reveal that the sheep are not exactly what they seem. In the feature, when bears discover fire, stop hibernating, and begin populating highway medians in the southern US, their changing behavior highlights how a family’s members react to changes in their own lives with varying degrees of acceptance and grace.
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In some parts of the world — Austria, Croatia, Hungary — they still remember. They understand. You can’t have something bright without having something dark to balance it. If you’ve got St. Nicholas, you also need the Krampus…
This episode of the Drabblecast opens with Norm’s reflections on the holidays, Santa Claus, and the origins of flying reindeer. In the drabble, the mayhem of a large family’s holiday dinner leads to a darkly humorous tragedy. In the feature, an unsavory petty criminal has a chance encounter with a dying old man who confides that years ago Santa bestowed upon him a miracle, a wish, to teach the true meaning of Christmas. Unfortunately, as they both learn, it comes with a catch..
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I take time-lapse photographs of an orange. The result is always the same.
First I remove the previous orange from the spike in front of the black
velvet backdrop and replace it with a new orange. I set an incandescent
spotlight out of frame as a light source…
Episode Sponsor: You Shall Never Know Security by J.R. Hamantaschen
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She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. She was six or seven, Southeast Asian, maybe Indian, her ragged clothes caked in dried mud. Pedestrians cut a wide berth around her without noticing her at all…
On this episode of the Drabblecast, Norm ponders the nature of the undead. He concludes the In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear serial. Following that is feature story Followed by Will McIntosh, author of Soft Apocalypse and the upcoming Hitchers.
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My earliest fear, the one I remember anyways, was of great pulp magazine robots with hot water heater bodies and vacuum tube eyes. My brother forbade me to touch his precious magazines, so I wouldn’t. I’d stare and stare at the covers through; hourglassed damsels in diaphanous gowns draped over thick slab altars, and the robots, always the robots with their cylindrical torsos and pincer claws for hands….
In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear Part III
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