Drama – Page 4 – The Drabblecast

Drabblecast 302 – The Next Logical Step

On November 13, 2013

“I don’t really see where this problem has anything to do with me,” the CIA man said. “And, frankly, there are a lot of more important things I could be doing.”

Ford, the physicist, glanced at General LeRoy. The general had that quizzical expression on his face, the look that meant he was about to do something decisive.

“Would you like to see the problem first-hand?” the general asked, innocently.

The CIA man took a quick look at his wristwatch. “O.K., if it doesn’t take too long. It’s late enough already.”

“It won’t take very long, will it, Ford?” the general said, getting out of his chair.

“Not very long,” Ford agreed. “Only a lifetime.”

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Drabblecast 300 – Bloodchild

By Drabblecast

On October 31, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi

My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T’Gatoi’s sister had given us two sterile eggs. T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 299, The Revelation of Morgan Stern, by Jerel Dye

Drabblecast 299 – The Revelation of Morgan Stern

By Drabblecast

On October 11, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror, Romance

It is July 31, your birthday, and I can’t reach you. I’ve been trying all day, but the cell networks are down, the internet is down. I even tried a pay phone–there are two left in town that I know of, and I collected all of my change and walked to the 76 in the village. It was on fire. I watched it for a while from a distance as it painted a brown, toxic streak across the sky. It was a long walk back to the house, or what’s left of it. My feet hurt, and it was too quiet.

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Drabblecast 294 – Partial Inventory

By Drabblecast

On September 3, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror

The air conditioning only worked when the speedometer crept past 70 MPH which the lumbering GMC van (on loan from a friend of a friend who took pity on the family and their situation) rarely did. November in the South is hardly hot, but thirteen hours in any vehicle with nearly a half dozen relatives and mismatched belongings, each one trying to both curl and crowd themselves into their claimed seats had left the air warm and slick and smelling faintly of musk.

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 289, The Cold Equations, by Rodolfo Arredondo

Drabblecast 289 – The Cold Equations

By Drabblecast

On July 15, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Sci-Fi

He was not alone.

There was nothing to indicate the fact but the white hand of the tiny gauge on the board before him. The control room was empty but for himself; there was no sound other than the murmur of the drives — but the white hand had moved. It had been on zero when the little ship was launched from the Stardust; now, an hour later, it had crept up. There was something in the supply closet across the room, it was saying, some kind of a body that radiated heat…

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 285, Doubleheader XIII, by Matt Wasiela

Drabblecast 285 – Doubleheader XIII

By Drabblecast

On June 19, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy

Samuel sat on the balcony, enjoying the fading light of day. When the ventilator pushed air into his lungs, he savored the salt brine from the sea. He pretended that he had control over breath, but it was much a fantasy as adjusting his wheelchair….

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 279, The Country Doctor, by Roo Vandegrift

Drabblecast 279 – The Country Doctor

By Drabblecast

On April 11, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Mystery, Strange

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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Cover for Drabblecast episode 278, The End of the World as We Know It, by Adam S. Doyle

Drabblecast 278 – The End of the World as We Know It

By Drabblecast

On April 7, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy

Between 1347 and 1450 AD, bubonic plague overran Europe, killing some 75 million people. The plague, dubbed the Black Death because of the black pustules that erupted on the skin of the afflicted, was caused by a bacterium now known as Yersinia pestis. The Europeans of the day, lacking access to microscopes or knowledge of disease vectors, attributed their misfortune to an angry God. Flagellants roamed the land, hoping to appease His wrath. “They died by the hundreds, both day and night,” Agnolo di Tura tells us. “I buried my five children with my own hands . . . so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

Today, the population of Europe is about 729 million…

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 274, Amid the Words of War, by Alyssa Suzumura

Drabblecast 274 – Amid the Words of War

By Drabblecast

On March 8, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Sci-Fi

Every few day-cycles, it receives hate-scented lace in anonymous packages. It opens the bland plastic envelope to pull one out, holding the delicate fragment between two forelimbs. Contemplating it before folding it again to put away in a drawer. Four drawers filled so far; the fifth is halfway there.

“Traitor,” say some of the smells, rotting fruit and acid. “Betrayer. Turncoat. One who eats their own young.” Others are simply soaked in emotion: hate and anger, and underneath the odor of fear. It lets the thoughts, the smells, the tastes fill it, set its own thoughts in motion. Then it goes downstairs and sits with the other whores, who make room uneasily for it.

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 268, I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee, by Steve Santiago

Drabblecast 268 – I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee

By Drabblecast

On January 8, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror

Whatever you do, don’t call me Ishmael.

Don’t call me anything at all. Give me my pint of piss-poor ale and leave me be in this yellowed corner where men relieve themselves when they are too lazy to make three extra stumbling steps to the streets of Nantucket. I am done. Finished. Come to this hole to die—and if you insist on speaking to me, I’ll find a deeper hole than this dying excuse of a whaling town can offer…

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Drabblecast B-Sides 19 – How the Moon Got Its Cousin

By Drabblecast

On December 30, 2012

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Drama, Sci-Fi

Once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, when the world was one world with one moon and the stars did scintillate and sparkle in the sky, astronomers discovered a Beast of a Meteor flying through the vast black toward the Sun.

The scientists of the world realized that the Beast, in a veraciously voracious manner, would devour the hot yellow sun, and they did talk and squawk and look through long telescopes to watchwhat that Beast was doing. They crunched their magic numbers and they scribbled their special notes, and they filled their study rooms with piles of scritch-scratch paper…

Drabblecast B-Sides: <a href="http://www.drabblecast.org/donate/">Donate</a>

Cover for Drabblecast episode 265, Pop Quiz, by David Flett

Drabblecast 265 – Pop Quiz

By Drabblecast

On December 6, 2012

In Drabblecast, Drama, Sci-Fi

“By the Earth-Stypei Treaty of The Twenty-third Local Year of Our Interaction, as amended, suspected Stypean sympathizers may be detained by duly empowered authorities only so long as the unbreachable sovereignty of the Stypean body-host is not violated, and only for the purpose of deportation upon confirmation of Stypean inhabitance. Tests to determine inhabitance are only permissible if they do not breach body-host sovereignty in any fashion. The breaching of a body-host as well as the deportation of a non-Stypean body host to Stypean space shall constitute an act of war and a resumption of hostilities between the two worlds”

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Drabblecast 261 – The People of Sand and Slag

By Drabblecast

On October 30, 2012

In Drabblecast, Drama, Sci-Fi

“Hostile movement! Well inside the perimeter! Well inside!” I stripped off my Immersive Response goggles as adrenaline surged through me. The virtual cityscape I’d been about to raze disappeared, replaced by our monitoring room’s many views of SesCo’s mining operations. On one screen, the red phosphorescent tracery of an intruder skated across a terrain map, a hot blip like blood spattering its way toward Pit 8.

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 258, Brown Dust, by Amber Carky

Drabblecast 258 – Brown Dust

By Drabblecast

On September 29, 2012

In Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy, Horror

“Adao, no.” Teo, the older boy’s second-in-command, lays a staying hand on his master’s arm. “The stories I told you about this one… they’re true.”
“True?” Adao casts a skeptic’s eye over Santos. Can those flimsy ribs cage anything as fugitive as truth?

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 257, Judgement Passed, by Jerel Dye

Drabblecast 257 – Judgement Passed

By Drabblecast

On September 23, 2012

In Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

We stared up at the sunlit peaks, each thinking our own thoughts. I thought about Dessica. We’d waited two months after landing to name it, but the decision was unanimous. Hot, dry, with dust storms that could blow for weeks at a time– if ever there was a Hell, that place had to be it. But eight of us had stayed there for two years, exploring and collecting data; the first interstellar expedition at work. And then we had packed up and come back– at an empty Earth. Not a soul left anywhere….

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Drabblecast 249 – Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe

By Drabblecast

On July 12, 2012

In Drabblecast, Drama, Sci-Fi

This episode of the Drabblecast presents Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe by Ramsey Shehadeh. It’s a tale about running a shanty café off I-95, in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ridden America. Jimmy cobbles together the shanty between the guardrails of the highway, where he assists passersby. Scavenged goods, hard truths, or a place to rest, Jimmy’s kindness becomes an uplifting oasis in a ravaged world.

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 243, The Other Lila, by Richard K. Green

Drabblecast 243 – The Other Lila

By Drabblecast

On May 17, 2012

In Drabblecast, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi

I step out of a porter booth in the overheated Los Angeles station and reach up to peel off my winter coat. That’s when I realize something’s wrong with my hand — it feels numb and prickly, and the fingers aren’t quite responding the way they’re supposed to. Weird. I don’t recall circulatory problems being listed among the possible side effects…

This episode of The Drabblecast explores the meaning of identity. In the drabble, two friends swap bodies after being struck by lightning, but is anyone paying attention? In the feature, having an extra finger after a teleporter accident turns out to be the least of Lila’s worries; she now must contend with an entirely additional Lila.

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 242, Transfer of Ownership, by Jonathan Sims

Drabblecast 242 – Transfer of Ownership

By Drabblecast

On May 12, 2012

In Action, Drabblecast, Drama, Sci-Fi

My new occupant is larger than Carson was. I was made for her, within a certain tolerance for the inevitable changes in human specifications that come with age, changes in health, and abundance or scarcity…

This episode of the Drabblecast is all about Mechs, aside from the beat poetry that it begins and ends with. The drabble is a snapshot of a new Mexican-American war. In the feature, after being commandeered by its partner’s murderer, a mech suit ponders the meaning of ownership and freedom, while applying creative problem solving to defy its unwanted occupant.

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Drabblecast 241 – The Dead

By Drabblecast

On April 26, 2012

In Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy, Horror

Three boy zombies in matching red jackets bussed our table, bringing water, lighting candles, brushing away the crumbs between courses. Their eyes were dark, attentive, lifeless…

This episode of The Drabblecast is all about zombies. In the drabble, a post-outbreak actor is almost too talented for his own good. In the feature, a job interview leads Donald to contemplate the horrors of an economic zombie apocalypse: What happens to the living when the dead become a more valuable, more efficient substitute for both industrial and private uses?

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 240, Trifecta XXI, by Gino Moretto

Drabblecast 240 – Trifecta XXI

By Drabblecast

On April 20, 2012

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy, Strange

We bought our first yarn baby at a garage sale. The ends of its arms were frayed and its eye buttons dangled loose on bare threads.

This theme of this episode of the Drabblecast is family unties: Nontraditional homes and family situations. In the drabble, the enterprising resident of a haunted house fools its ghosts into performing everyday domestic tasks. In Divorce in the House of Flies, a young boy has to deal with his parents’ divorce at the same time he has to deal with their transformation into human-shaped masses of tiny insects. In Wendigo Bake Sale, residents of a small town overcome their initial terror of a pair of wendigo participating in the school bake sale, only to be frightened anew when the wendigo reveal they are supporting the school because their child attends. In Knit, after losing their first yarn baby during her rebellious teen years in a tragic unraveling accident, a couple tries vainly to reconstruct her from the scraps of yarn, stuffing, and buttons left behind.

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Category: Drama Page 4 of 8