The Drabblecast

Drabblecast B-Sides 43 – The Parasite Parade

On April 20, 2014

If you could shrink tiny, and drop down your own throat
Like the tiniest of captains on the tiniest of boats
I bet you’d be shocked at the things that you saw
In the dark and the damp of your damp and dark maw.
Your body’s a marvel, it’s one of a kind
Which is why countless scary small things live inside!
They can’t live in houses, as most of us do
So they climb inside people– like me and like you!

Do you hear the band playing– that merry old song?
While the horns play the chorus and the crowd sings along?
Down Main Street they march, that gay promenade
Which float is your favorite in the Parasite Parade?

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Drabblecast 321 – The Goat Cutter

By Drabblecast

On April 19, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror

The devil lives in Houston by the ship channel in a high-rise apartment fifty-seven stories up. They say he’s got cowhide sofas and a pinball machine and a telescope in there that can see past the oil refineries and across Pasadena all the way to the Pope in Rome and on to where them Arabs pray to that big black stone.

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Drabblecast 320 – Half a Conversation, Overheard While Inside An Enormous Sentient Slug

By Drabblecast

On April 8, 2014

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Sci-Fi, Strange

Thank you, Inspector. I’m ready.

Yes, I understand my rights as a resident extraterrestrial. No, that won’t be necessary.

Of course. Ask me anything. I only wish to see justice done.

It grieves me to say so, but I concur. There’s no doubt about who murdered Lord Ash.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 42 – Chrysalis

By Drabblecast

On April 6, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Sci-Fi

Dear Grandma,
Your letters beat me to Husa and I’ve told the computer to dole them out at the intervals that you sent them. I got no idea why I’m telling you that, since there’s zero chance you’ll read this. Helps me focus, I guess.

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Drabblecast 319 – Trifecta XXVII

By Drabblecast

On April 1, 2014

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Fantasy

The Drabblecast April Fool’s Day episode!

Recorded live: A Drabblecast story slam that took place March 27th 2014 in Baltimore Maryland at the EMP Art Collective.

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Drabblecast 318 – How They Tried to Talk Indian Tony Down

By Drabblecast

On March 30, 2014

In Drabblecast, Sci-Fi

This happened about ten years ago, out at Tobin Farm.

Back in the sixties, somebody bought Tobin Farm for the purposes of holding a renaissance fair there during the summers. Off seasons it became a kind of commune for the people involved in putting on the fair. They lived modestly in sheds and trailers scattered on a hundred acres of oak wilderness back of the farm, collecting unemployment between fairs.

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Drabblecast 317 – Doubleheader XIV

By Drabblecast

On March 22, 2014

In Drabblecast, Sci-Fi

You do not know me yet, my love, but I can hear you in my future. You are there from the beginning–at first just a few stray notes, but your presence quickly grows into a beautiful refrain. I wish you could hear time as I do, my love, but this song was never meant to be heard. The future should be chronobviated, gathered up in feathery pink fronds with delicate threads that waver in and out of alternate timelines. The past should be memographed, absorbed into a sturdy gray tail that stretches back to the beginning of the universe. We humans have neither fronds nor tails, but when the Eternals wanted to talk to us, they found a way to work around that.

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Drabblecast 316 – A Memory of Seafood

By Drabblecast

On March 16, 2014

In Drabblecast, Sci-Fi

This week’s column is not about a restaurant, exactly, but about a memory. A distinct and painful memory, like a softened tooth you can’t help but poke at with your tongue to see if it still hurts.

A memory of seafood. (That sounds like one of those divine collections, doesn’t it, like a flight of starlings or a murder of crows? I remember when I was a mere seventeen, a slight but fully breasted slip of a girl, my best girl chums and I used to entertain the governor as he waited for his tea at the old tea house on Front Street—you Oolong afficionados, you remember it—and he affectionately called us “a flirtation of jailbaits”—but that’s neither here nor there.)

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Drabblecast B-Sides 41 – Drabblecast Presents: Audio Fiction Production pt. 2

By Drabblecast

On March 12, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Presents

Norm breaks down the nuances of audio fiction production. Based on fan questions.

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Drabblecast 315 – Heaven is a Place on Planet X

By Drabblecast

On March 7, 2014

In Drabblecast, Sci-Fi

It was 8:34 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it was almost the end of the world.

Actually, the world was expected to end on Friday, at precisely 5 p.m., eastern daylight time. This was not a forecast, or a projection: it was more like an appointment.

On Friday at 5 p.m. eastern, a thousand high-powered laser cannons would fire simultaneously from their hidden positions in outer space, instantly reducing Planet Earth to vapor and ash. At the exact same moment, the consciousness of every living human being would manifest itself on Planet Xyrxiconia. This planet was located a trillion light years away in a far-flung region of the universe Earth’s scientists had not yet glimpsed. There, on Planet X, humanity would find themselves in fresh bodies—remade vessels. These reincarnations would live eternally in a world of infinite luxury.

At least . . . that’s what the aliens claimed.

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Drabblecast 314 – The Blue Celeb pt. 2

By Drabblecast

On March 1, 2014

In Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

“Get out of sight, Joe.” He hustled into the shop and locked himself in the bathroom. The first cruiser that pulled up had Frank Boone riding shotgun. Less than a minute later, the sidewalk was swarming with cops.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 40 – Drabblecast Presents: Audio Fiction Production pt. 1

By Drabblecast

On February 27, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Presents

Norm breaks down the nuances of audio fiction production. Based on fan questions.

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Drabblecast 313 – The Blue Celeb pt. 1

By Drabblecast

On February 24, 2014

In Drabblecast, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

When me and Joe got home from Vietnam, we went into business together, cutting hair. Bought a little shop in the old neighborhood and been there ever since. Back then, wisecracking Harlem barbers weren’t a cliche yet — at least not south of 110th Street.

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Drabblecast 312 – Day Million

By Drabblecast

On February 10, 2014

In Drabblecast, Romance, Sci-Fi

On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl, and a love story.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 39 – Becca at the End of the World

By Drabblecast

On February 8, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Drama, Horror

I nestle the video camera on its makeshift tripod, carefully centering my daughter’s image. She tucks her hair behind her ear and gives a strained smile. She is sixteen, and that hair is long and golden–kissed light brown and straight; she has the gangly grace only teenagers have, that sleek gazelle form. She is wearing khaki shorts and a striped tank top, and the bite mark on her arm is already putrefying.

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Drabblecast 311 – Birds of the Air

By Drabblecast

On February 5, 2014

In Drabblecast, Fantasy, Strange

Thomas takes his lunch outside the shelter, on one of the park benches that look out over the interstate and down all the way to the containment pond. He has wondered whether a passerby seeing him from the highway would know whether he worked at the shelter or was one of its clients. He has had this thought most days that he has sat here. Today, though, his attention has been arrested by a small patch of gooselike objects floating out on the containment pond. If they are geese, it will be the first time he has seen a living thing on that pond.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 38 – Drabblecast Interview: Tim Pratt

By Drabblecast

On January 30, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Interview

A special Drabblecast interview with author Tim Pratt. Tim’s frequent appearances include Happy Old Year, Annabelle’s Alphabet, Morris And The Machine, A Fairy Tale Of Oakland, Cinderlands, Angel of the Ordinary and others.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 37 – Parasite

By Drabblecast

On January 27, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror, Sci-Fi

There was a black, one-way window between me and my father, watching my interrogation. I imagined he was looking down at me with the rest of the generals on the second story. Their room looked down into empty cement room where I sat, alone, on a white chair, watching a black video screen. The decision to move them to another floor had been made recently after one of their interrogations became violent. That is, the person being interrogated became violent.

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Drabblecast 310 – The Ugly Chickens

By Drabblecast

On January 16, 2014

In Drabblecast, Drama, Mystery

My car was broken, and I had a class to teach at eleven. So I took the city bus, something I rarely do.

I spent last summer crawling through The Big Thicket with cameras and tape recorder, photographing and taping two of the last ivory-billed woodpeckers on the earth. You can see the films at your local Audubon Society showroom. This year I wanted something just as flashy but a little less taxing.

Perhaps a population study on the Bermuda cahow, or the New Zealand takahe. A month or so in the warm (not hot) sun would do me a world of good. To say nothing of the advance of science. I was idly leafing through Greenway’s Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. The city bus was winding its way through the ritzy neighborhoods of Austin, stopping to let off the chicanas, black women, and Vietnamese who tended the kitchens and gardens of the rich.

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Drabblecast 309 – All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

By Drabblecast

On January 12, 2014

In Drabblecast, Sci-Fi, Strange

2249 A.D.

All the young Kirks in Riverside Public High School are assigned to the same Homeroom class. They sit together in the back corner on the far side from the door. They speak only to each other.

The young Kirk on the Moon goes to school with no one. Each of the colonists has a job and he or she is responsible only to the duties of that job. The others call him Fisher instead of James since he spends his days knee deep in the trout pond, allowing the fish to glide between his legs. When the fish become completely inured to his presence, he thrusts his hands into the water and grasps one around the belly. It fights and Fisher holds on. He is supposed to take it out of the water, to throw it into the white bucket by the shore, but Fisher never does. He lets the fish go and when he comes home, with nothing to show for it, his mother expresses her irrevocable disappointment and sends him to bed.

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