The fish were restless. They spun the water mossy dark until the pond was the color of crushed bottles.
Pey held onto her sister’s hand. They peered down at the water.
This morning, their mother opened her eyes and said she was too cold to get out of bed, so their father said they would spend the afternoon at the hot springs.
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And so came Creature out of the wasteland and into the city, bouncing from hilltop to hilltop like a bulbous ballerina skipping across the knuckles of a great hand. He was big as the moon and black as the night, and he came crashing into the city like a silent meteor. The cityfolk watched his approach with wide eyes and open mouths, and then scattered like leaves…
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Susan found her boss’s feelings drawer by accident. She drank too much and took a wrong turn in Sundrun’s apartment at the office holiday party, while looking for the bathroom. It had been all the rage five
years ago, getting your feelings surgically removed. After a sensectomies, some people had the feelings stuffed or encased in glass to use as paperweights so they could show them off during meetings with clients. That’s my fear, the size of an inchworm! Impressive, isn’t it?
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“I’m not sure I belong here.”
“Then where do you belong?”
The others stopped chewing and looked at me expectantly.
What am I?…
As Norm detailed his Christmas plans, the common theme of this episode became apparent: that “Home” is not a place, but rather a choice. Before getting there, though, the Drabble News tracked through a pile of extremely rare rhinoceros dung or rather, four piles, collected by conservationists and auctioned on E-bay to raise money for preservation of the species. Norm speculates on the market timing of such a gift. Next, Norm reflects on the meaning of the holidays, from the point of view of various people, animals, and legendary monsters. The week’s Drabble, “Choosing Home” by noteworthy community member Josh Hugo, offers a story of love conquering danger. The feature story, “Jelly Park,” (consistently voted among listener favorites), is a deliciously absurd tale of a down-on-her-luck, unemployed secretary who discovers a strange welcome from the easily overlooked community of double-decker bus drivers. The episode’s author, published twice by McMillan Press, helped sing the charminly twisted story’s celebrations. Co-narrator, Dermot Glennon, also contributed Episode #29, “Code Brown.” Feedback for Episode #37, “Luna Springs,” is bittersweet and poignant. Norm and the staff close with a rousing rendition of the Jelly Park Celebration Song, showing off multiple voices and characters, ranging from scat-singing to lunatic opera.
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The chair first appeared on a Thursday afternoon on the sidewalk in front of the Dollar Bank and Trust on Lancaster Street in Pulaski, Kansas. Nobody saw how it got there. At least, no reliable eyewitnesses have ever come forward, so we are unable to pinpoint the exact moment of its arrival. Customers began to ask the tellers about it shortly after lunch.
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Captain Confederation was annoyed when he got off the elevator and it showed. It would have been so simple and logical for him to land on the roof of the Superhero Administration Centre, or in the ample grounds surrounding it, but these alternatives were no longer open to him. Last month Transport Canada had proposed a regulation requiring superheroes to take off and land from helipads unless actually fighting crime, and for some inexplicable reason the Department of Superhero Affairs had gone along with it.
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1.
When a spiral staircase appears in front of you, don’t panic. Just know that if you place your feet on that first step, it shows commitment. You can’t go back. You can only go up and up and up until you reach the very top.
Watch your step. That’s the main thing to remember. Some people think they can race to the top, or take the steps two at a time. All it takes is one stumble, one slip, and soon you’re tumbling, arms pinwheeling, shins banging, down, down, down.
You don’t want to be rejected by a spiral staircase. It’s painful.
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Achtromagk shuddered, lost in nightmare images: crimson lightning dotting a wasteland, twilight despair and feeble railings, isolation in a mewling throng. It thrashed and twisted but could not escape, could not stop the unwanted vistas in its mind.
It was silent. And soft. And dark…
Next up in Lovecraft month, a heart-warming tale of an extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horror (an ‘oh so huggable’ one) by Drabblecast favorite Eugie Foster.
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Tompkins sighed. “What happens is this: You pay me
my fee. I give you an injection which knocks you out. Then, with the aid of certain gadgets which I have in the back of the store, I liberate your mind…”
This episode of Drabblecast starts with Norm recommending and playing an excerpt from Frank Key’s story anthology. In the feature we learn about Mr. Wayne, a man who visits the store of the world in order to discover his deepest desire. Is it simply an escape from a post-apocalyptic world, or is it something more?
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The ghost in my attic is Margaret, but she lets me call her Margie. She was seventy-six years old when she died, and now that she’s a ghost she sits in her rocking chair day and night, holding a tiny baby in her arms. The baby rarely moves and almost never cries. His name is Gavin, and he is thin and wrinkly and covered in fine brown hair. Funny looking, as preemies often are, but sweet nonetheless. Margie keeps him wrapped in a blanket of cobwebs, which I think is disgusting. I’ve always hated spiders.
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If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of allergies can kill you. Nut allergies, for instance. Bee stings. But I imagine most people with fatal allergies to common things have died by now.
I am allergic to wool, soy, peanuts, and pollen. Only my peanut allergy can kill me.
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The day she left we forgot to take out the trash. At five-thirty in the morning, I heard the city trucks lumbering down the street with their mechanical, prehensile arms and remembered that we had forgotten to take out the trash. I didn’t care though. I knew that in a few hours I would help load the last of her boxes into the truck, and she would leave. Everything was expanding without me, and I felt like the room was growing until I was lost in and filled with its great, grey nothing.
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John was born with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and he often wondered why. But as a boy, it was simply wonderful to have those abilities. He could lift his father’s tractor overhead before he learned to read. He could outrace a galloping horse. He couldn’t be cut or bruised or burned. He could fly…
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This week, we listen to Jay Lake’s “Over the Walls of Eden.”
If you listened to Clown Eggs and thought, “I need more stories like THAT,” you are in for a treat. Stick around at the end and hear a brief discussion of the story the author.
“Why do you remember the books?” he finally asks.
She smiles again. “O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere, Till pride and worse ambition threw me down…”
Enjoy!
An oral history, recorded in the annals of sentientkind, spoken by Sven Al’bedo di’Cantara, on the eve of the ninth flying.
1. The Tree
And so it came to pass, in the years past reckoning, when I served as a scribe in the court of the king, that there stood the last and only tree.
It is not known how this came to be the only tree. For a time there were disputing theories; it could hardly have happened by chance. As for me, I favor a hypothesis rooted in the fallacy of infinite halves. For in the strange world where we lived, it was once widely known that if you cross half a distance every day, forever and ever, you shall never reach your destination. Thus, if you consume half the riches of the world, every day, forever and ever, you shall always have some riches left. This truth was a fallacy. It is not possible to cut down half a tree.
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Hunger has made you reckless. You track the sound of human voices through the woods until you find a man and a woman. They are shouting at each other. The woman slaps the man’s face. He presses his hand to his cheek for a moment, and then lunges at the woman, knocking her to the ground. He squeezes his hands tight about her throat. The noises she makes are ugly.
Your nostrils flare. You smell food. It is in the pack on the man’s back. You come closer to the couple, deliberately snapping a twig underfoot. The man whirls around, almost losing his grip on the woman. You point at the back pack.
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