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Category: Drabblecast B-Sides Page 1 of 5

Drabblecast B-Sides 86 – The Yellow Sign

The Yellow Sign cover for Drabblecast by Łukasz GodlewskiThe classic story by Robert W. Chambers, this week on Drabblecast Bsides!

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cecile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: “To think that this is also a little ward of God!”

Drabblecast B-Sides 85- Nothing Changes

Drabblecast Nothing Changes cover by Scott ShafferA sadistic tale from a sadistic future on the Drabblecast this week; we bring you a Drabblecast original from People’s Choice Award winning author Robert Reed. Brought to you by the ever-sexy and captivating voice of the internet’s one and only Word Whore.

For Drabblecast Bsides subscribers only!

A work colleague suffers a stroke and gets whisked to Intensive Care, where an experimental neurostimulant is pumped into the blood. The drug can be therapeutic, and he recovers. Sort of…

Drabblecast B-Sides 84 – Rubble People

Drabblecast cover by ToekenAnother fantastic strange story sure to blow your mind from Drabblecast author Matthew Sanborn Smith.

The local Partyville starts to peel apart around us: the booth, the ball pit, a video game and the netting between them, the pizza on the table, and the table too. Shards of pressboard and plastic fly toward me while molding themselves into the form of a man. A couple of the other moms scream, and their kids run to them. I didn’t expect this, but I know what it is.

Drabblecast B-sides 83- Spar (Bacon Remix)

Bo Kaier's cover for Spar Bacon RemixIn the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien eat bacon endlessly, relentlessly.

They each have their own preference. Hers is the usual, crispy but not too crispy, the creamy fat just firm enough to bite through, the salt making grainy little bumps that she licks off her fingers.

The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. It seems to like its bacon softer than she does, almost raw even, though sometimes it eats pieces that were left to fry a little too long.

It eats the bacon a thousand ways. She eats it, too.

Drabblecast B-Sides 82 – HP’s Mad Gibbs

Bo Kaier's cover for Mad Gibbs DrabblecastWe take the classic Mad Libs formula and give it an eldritch twist. On this special B-Sides episode turn your ears up for H.P. Lovecraft inspired purple prose with listener submitted prompts…

Drabblecast B-Sides 81 – Sally

Drabblecast cover Sally by Jonathan SimsSally was coming down the lake road, so I waved to her and called her by name. I always liked to see Sally. I
liked all of them, you understand, but Sally’s the prettiest one of the lot. There just isn’t any question about it.

She moved a little faster when I waved to her. Nothing undignified. She was never that. She moved just enough faster to show that she was glad to see me, too…

Drabblecast B-Sides 80 – The Peoria Plague

Drabblecast Cover Peoria Plague Bo KaierFor Drabblecast Bsides Premium Subscribers this week, we bring you the classic 1972 Full Cast radio production of The Peoria Plague.  Don’t worry, it’s just a fictional audio drama!

…isn’t it?

Drabblecast B-Sides 79 – My Father’s Crab

My Father's Crab by Cagdas DemiralpI don’t know where it was—that miniature golf course in the sand—but it had to be the Gulf of Mexico somewhere. We were driving from one coast to the other, like always. “The Great Southern Route,” my dad called it. It had to be Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, or Texas—one of them. I was seven…

Drabblecast B-sides 78 – The Shadow Over My Dorm Room

Cover for Drabblecast Episode The Shadow Over My Dorm Room by Justin Eisenbeiss

Drabblecast Exclusive Premium Content for $10/month Subscribers

The sky is falling,” Chicken Little said, but of course I didn’t understand him right away. He forgets sometimes that he no longer has lips and teeth and all the other bits you need to produce intelligible speech. I gave him a moment to remember. He isn’t stupid—he’s better than me at math, and his Ancient Religions project won some kind of award—he just has a hard time facing reality, at least where his affliction is concerned…

Drabblecast B-Sides 77 – Looking for Jake

Drabblecast cover Looking for Jake by Bo KaierDrabblecast Premium Content. Sign up here to support the Drabblecast and listen!

I don’t know how I lost you. I remember there was that long time of searching for you, frantic and sick-making … I was almost ecstatic with anxiety. And then I found you, so that was alright. Only I lost you again. And I can’t make out how it happened.

I’m sitting out here on the flat roof you must remember, looking out over this dangerous city. There is, you remember, a dull view from my roof. There are no parks to break up the urban monotony, no towers worth a damn. Just an endless, featureless cross-hatching of brick and concrete, a drab chaos of interlacing backstreets stretching out interminably behind my house. I was disappointed when I first moved here, I didn’t see what I had in that view. Not until Bonfire Night.

Drabblecast B-Sides 76 – Sad, Dark Thing

Drabblecast cover for Sad, Dark Thing by Bo Kaier

Drabblecast Exclusive Premium Content.

Aimless. A short, simple word. It means “without aim”, where “aim” derives from the notion of calculation with a view to action. Lacking purpose or direction, therefore, without a considered goal.

People mainly use the word in a blunt, softened fashion. They walk “aimlessly” down the street, unsure whether to have a coffee or check out the new magazines in the bookstore or maybe sit on that bench and watch the world go by…

Drabblecast B-Sides 75 – The Five Hundred Days of Ms. Between

Cover for Drabblecast The 500 Days of Ms. Between by Thomas N. Perkins IVFor this bit of Drabblecast Member Premium Content, we bring you “The Five Hundred Days of Ms. Between” by Joshua Alan Doetsch.

Joshua Alan Doetsch is a “sentient word virus spreading across the collective unconscious through the vector of human language.” His writings include novels, short fiction, and video games (including Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey).

Click here to become a Drabblecast B-Sides Premium Content Member with access to extra stories like this each month!

Warning: story contains violence and references to suicide.

Story Excerpt:

Can’t feel my legs. So I slither along the ground, toward the audient window, humming that song. I hear the wet-velcro rip of the thousand hands rending flesh. I see her through the window. That mocking grin.

The first thing Ms. Between said to me was, “I’m a mad woman with a lab.” The second thing she said was that I could leave at any time with no obligation. The third thing was that there could be no questions—questions would cause her and her offer to evaporate. I believed absolutely in that, so she handed me the murder weapon.

Drabblecast B-Sides 74 – In the End, You Get Clarity

Drabblecast cover for In the End, You Get Clarity by Unka OdyaThe first time Leopard-Print Girl killed someone, it was an accident.

She wasn’t Leopard-Print Girl then. She was Nicole Davis, an urban studies sophomore at the University of Chicago. When she got home for Christmas break, her mom told her things were getting worse at work…

Drabblecast B-Sides 73 – That Only A Mother

Drabblecast cover for That Only A Mother by Bo KaierThis Drabblecast B-Sides episode features Judith Merril’s story “That Only A Mother”

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

 

Story Excerpt:

Margaret reached over to the other side of the bed where Hank should have been. Her hand patted the empty pillow, and then she came altogether awake, wondering that the old habit should remain after so many months. She tried to curl up, cat-style, to hoard her own warmth, found she couldn’t do it any more, and climbed out of bed with a pleased awareness of her increasingly clumsy bulkiness.

Drabblecast B-Sides 72 – Looking for a Key

Drabblecast B-Sides Looking for a Key by Bo KaierThis Drabblecast B-Sides episode features S. L. Bickley’s story “Looking for a Key”

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

 

Story Excerpt:

My lover is a used bookstore, and when I have money we play a game. He closes me inside him and won’t let me out till I find a certain book. And I do not know what it is or where it is, and so I have to touch every part of his insides to find it. And I wander him all over and touch his spines with my dry fingertips – slide the books from his worn-smooth wooden shelves and riffle his pages. I like the deckled edges best. Sometimes I will find an uncut page and when that happens I will turn my back so his clerk doesn’t see me and slit it with my pocketknife that I keep for only that purpose. That excites him, I think, more than most things I do, and often it means I have found my key.

Drabblecast B-Sides 71 – The Man Who Has Been Killing Kittens

Bo Kaier cover for Drabblecast The Man Who Has Been Killing Kittens

This Drabblecast B-Sides episode features “The Man Who Has Been Killing Kittens” by Douglas Warrick.

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

Story Excerpt:

So you want to know about the man who has been killing kittens.

There’s a little congress of dead men in bad suits at the bottom of the reservoir. Some are handcuffed to steering wheels and float upside-down from shattered windshields, and others have their ankles chained to old cinder blocks. Some, their murderers evidently keen on homage, even have their feet sealed in buckets full of cement. They bicker and gossip and lie to one another. Blank-eyed and bloated and secretive are the dead men in their underwater garden.

The Man Who Had Been Killing Kittens

Drabblecast B-Sides 70 – Saint Darwin’s Spirituals

Cover for Drabblecast B-Sides episode 70 by Bo Kaier A Saint Darwin’s SpiritualThis Drabblecast B-Sides episode brings you “St. Darwin’s Spirituals,” a new tale from D.K. Thompsons’s Saint Darwin’s Spirituals series. You can check out our previous installments Heart of Clay, A Last Kiss for Lazarus Winters, and Blessed Are Those Who Have Seen and Who Do Not Believe.

One women’s quest for the truth will take her down the darkest of alleys and the most sinister of delights.

Story Excerpt:

Despite my profession, I have never considered myself to be a holy man. Curious about all things supernatural, certainly—ever since I first lowered Darwin’s goggles over my wide-eyes and could see for myself the world I’d been blind to. When I saw the ghosts that day as a boy, I believed. But belief does not equate holiness. Even the demons believe.

No, I am not a holy man. But I have always prided myself on being a practical spiritualist.

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

So enjoy:

Drabblecast B-Sides 70 – Saint Darwin’s Spirituals

Drabblecast B-Sides 69 – Blessed Are Those Who Have Seen and Do Not Believe (A Saint Darwin’s Spiritual)

Cover for Drabblecast B-Sides episode 69 by Bo Kaier Blessed Are Those Who Have Seen and Do Not Believe (A Saint Darwin’s Spiritual)This Drabblecast B-Sides episode features another from D.K. Thompson Saint Darwin’s Spirituals series, which includes Heart of Clay and A Last Kiss for Lazarus Winters. This one is called “Blessed Are Those Who Have Seen and Do Not Believe.”

This fantastical story follows two sinister individuals and their brush with the divine.

Story Excerpt:

Despite my profession, I have never considered myself to be a holy man. Curious about all things supernatural, certainly—ever since I first lowered Darwin’s goggles over my wide-eyes and could see for myself the world I’d been blind to. When I saw the ghosts that day as a boy, I believed. But belief does not equate holiness. Even the demons believe.

No, I am not a holy man. But I have always prided myself on being a practical spiritualist.

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

Drabblecast B-Sides 68 – The Wanderers

Drabblecast B-Sides 68 The Wanderers cover by Bo KaierWe came to your planet because we knew that you, the peoples of Kill Bill and Saw and Vietnam and Columbine Massacre would understand us. You could not call us monster, as our subjects had done, and you would not call us morally reprehensible, arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct. We had watched your entertainments, our satellites catching your transmissions from so many fog years away, through so much space we marveled at the quality of transmission. The other planets never sent out such good entertainments. Yours we liked to watch most, the four of us, as our subjects screamed from the metal chambers which we had locked them in and which we never strayed from so we could hear them as they cried.

Drabblecast B-Sides 67 – Bad Shit

Drabblecast cover for Bad Shit by Declan J. Keane“Fat Jimmy,” said Wilbur. “I told you: Fat Jimmy.”

“You told me it was a skinny guy,” said the uniform.

“Fat Jimmy is skinny,” said Wilbur.

The uniform sighed.

“So you bought the weed from a skinny dealer called Fat Jimmy?”

“Didn’t buy, just holding.”

“For Fat Jimmy?”

“That’s what I said: Fat Jimmy.”

“Where did Fat Jimmy get it?”

“I don’t know,” said Wilbur. “His man.”

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