Norm talks birds on this week’s episode, before presenting Drabblecast’s production of “The Pigeon” by Michelle Knudsen. Enjoy!
Cover art by Bo Kaier
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Category: Strange Page 1 of 8
A merry hanging and a game of jacks, this week on the Drabblecast!
This week on the Drabblecast– mutant hillbillies! 
The Drabblecast brings you an original tale of interspecies aid.
#Hivelife this week on the Drabblecast!
This week’s show has it all: vampires, evolutionary biology, and quivering jacked up Taylor Swifts.
We bring you three flash fiction pieces about the complications of being in love: Taylor Swift by Hugh Behm-Steinberg, The Evolution of a Breakup by Etgar Keret, and May I Come In by Adrienne Ryan.
Narrations provided by Avery Alexander, Adam Pracht and Norm Sherman.
Art by Anike Kirsten
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Norm is cryptic this week in terms of offering information on the featured story, “7099 Brecksville Road, Independence Ohio,” by JR Hamentaschen. He will say that that’s the story, and that’s the author. And to listen with headphones on.
And also, check out our episode sponsor this week, pixel-pulp video game Mothmen 1966! Available on steam, switch, xbox, and playstation now!
There were three toilet stalls in the men’s room at the Sunoco Gas Station at 7099 Brecksville Road in Independence, Ohio. One of them was occupied.
If you were, say, washing your hands and looking at the stalls for whatever reason, a mistaken glance, perhaps, you’d see in the space below the door a man’s feet, his black work boots and dark blue Wrangler jeans. (This was one of those bathrooms that had a distressing amount of clearance room between the stall doors and the floor.) The man’s feet flexed a bit, not staying stationary, but not in any unusual way; just in the usual fashion of a man using the toilet, shifting in the usual way a man does as he distributes his weight.
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This week’s show brings you an original commissioned HP Lovecraft mythos story by Nick Mamatas called “When the Sun Hits.” Afterwards, Nick talks about the story in an Author’s Note and Norm gives everyone an existential crises in a Drabble News presentation on The Boltzmann Brain.
When the brain is liberated from the body, only to be imprisoned in a steely new home, one interesting side effect of the process is that all the structures previously dedicated to vision, coordination, the autonomic nervous system, motor control, first atrophy, and then generalize. Perhaps it is an artifact of the nanotech-rich protein fluids in which the brain floats, or the peculiar nth-dimensional folding the Mi-Go use to fit a humanoid brain into their canisters…
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Shark week on Drabblecast has never been so unnerving! Enjoy an original Drabblecast story this week from Evie Mae Barber about what lurks even deeper in the depths…
The great white looked like he was having a good time, swimming upside down, bone-white belly above water, teeth gnashing playfully. Like a puppy dreams of finally catching a squirrel.
Just off the verdant coast, boaters came to see him play. Some reached out as he swam by, trying to stroke his luminous stomach, but he was out of reach.
-get them out-
I warned them to be careful. Something wasn’t quite right; the shark was clearly distressed. Nothing too strange—I’d seen this before—but I had to come out with my crew just to see if it might be research-worthy. Even a byline on a derelict local news site would be nice at this point. Hell, a quote would do fine.
i cant get them out-
Another boat rolled up. One of the boaters said it was tonic immobility—playing dead. “Might think we’re predators. We may want to back off…”
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This week’s episode is brought to you by J.R. Hamentaschen’s fourth horror fiction anthology “You Know It’s True.” Grab a copy for kindle or otherwise, here!
For our story this week, take a trip with us to the Fourteenth Floor, where you are every guest. We bring you “Stay,” by Davian Aw.
You were every guest on the fourteenth floor: none of you alike, a host of strangers across ages and ethnicities, genders and histories, but I knew it was you from the look on your face, and your eyes–your eyes were always the same.
“Stay,” you’d say, a plea steeped in sadness, sometimes desperation, anger, loneliness, or lust…
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Who says Drabblecast doesn’t do Young Adult Fiction?
This week we launch Women & Aliens Month with a fresh, original Drabblecast commission by Effie Seiberg.
We’re grateful to be able to bring you this story this week!
On the day I turned nine I didn’t get a pet nebula.
I’d really really wanted one, just like the one Shelly had. And I’d been talking about it FOR-EVER, so Mom could have the time to save up for the one in the pawn shop. I’m not usually patient, but this was important…
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Our next original Drabblecast-commissioned story for HP Lovecraft month installment, “The Wallpaper Out of Space!” by Adam-Troy Castro read by Jacob Boris.
All right, so it’s Cheryl’s kid, okay? I didn’t know she had a kid until we were two months in and already deeply involved, and then she tells me she has a sixteen year old from a prior marriage, and that he was what you’re what always supposed to say kids are, a great kid, even if they’re just hostile presences who respond to everything you say with a nod and a blank, “Okay…”
Closing Music: “Juzt Mizunderstood” by Norm Sherman
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The Drabblecast Annual Halloween Special kicks off this year simultaneously with HP Lovecraft month on the show, a full month of original Drabblecast-commissioned stories playing around with elements of Lovecraft’s style and mythos.
We kick things off this year with a fullcast adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s most popular stories– The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Do enjoy!
During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting—under suitable precautions—of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
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Another 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.
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“Get Your Home Improvement On, Sucka…”
Norm and author Desmond Warzel sit down and talk about fiction, ghosts, aliens, and of course his hit stor which frst appeared on the Drabblecast back in August of 2014, “On a Clear Day You Can See All the Way to Conspiracy.”
You’re listening to the Mike Colavito Show on Cleveland’s home for straight talk, WCUY 1200. The opinions expressed on this program do not reflect those of WCUY, its management, or its sponsors.
Fair warning; I’m in a mood today, folks…
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Alternate history on this week’s show– an original story by Edward J. Knight about the American Civil War that we perhaps only narrowly missed!
7 August 1865
My darling Emily,
I do not know if this letter will reach you, but if it does, I hope it finds you well. General Lee has sent word to President Johnson requesting the evacuation of Washington, and I fear that Baltimore will be next. Remember that I have an uncle outside of Boston and he should be happy to take you in, should the worst come to pass. Just tell him that we are engaged to be married and I am sure he will provide for you.
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On this week’s Drabblecast, Norm and author Matthew Sanborn Smith bring you a dose of perspective during these crazy times where weirdness seems to be the norm. Remember those invisible things around us that support and hold us no matter what our struggles our, and remember to cherish each moment of every day.
I wonder what will happen when I’m not up for it, when the weight finally overcomes my rigidity and I snap. Will I be a bloody mess when I turn back? Will I be too afraid to turn back and just take my chances with the landfill?
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In 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.
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On this week’s Drabblecast, Norm and NPR’s Chioke I’Anson bring you stories about the voices in your head, including “Go Between” by acclaimed writer China Mieville.
“Go Between” tells the tale of a man who, for several years, has been receiving strange instructions to deliver seemingly random items from location to location. Agonizing over effect his deliveries, he considers stopping, unsure whether the deliveries support a malignant cause or aid a good one.
Story Excerpt:
“Something was in the bread. Morley was cutting, and on the fourth strike of the knife, the metal broke.
Behind him, his friends talked over their food. Morley pried the dough apart and touched something smooth. He had marked it with a scratch. Morley could see the thing’s colour, a drab charcoal. He frowned. It had been a long time since this had happened…”
China Tom Miéville is a British urban fantasy fiction author, essayist, comic book writer, socialist political activist and literary critic. He often describes his work as weird fiction and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers called New Weird.
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