A fan-hosted Series that features fan-picked stories from the Drabblecast archives, remastered and brought to you by fans like our host this week, Bart Epstein.Enjoy!
This week for Drabbleclassics Bart Epstein brings your Primary Pollinator, by Nicole Kimberling.
When Dr. Lopez came for me, I was plunging the geo lab toilet. She carried a red stickle suit in one hand and a spray can of anti-fungal lubricant in the other.
After a year in San Francisco, my legs grew strong again. A hill and a half lay between the bookstore where I found work and the apartment I shared with the Kotos. Every morning and evening I walked, breathing mist and rain into my desert-scarred lungs, and every morning the walk was a little easier. Even at the beginning, when my feet ached all day from the unaccustomed strain, it was a hill and a half that I hadn’t been permitted for seventeen years.
The bar is plenty kitschy: goofy statues made from coconuts everywhere and strings of shell beads hanging from the ceiling. I smile when I see a coconut sporting a pair of mouse ears made from scallop shells.
Tourists from all over the world are sitting around, ordering drinks non-stop because the sun is so hot at this time in Indonesia that you’ll wilt if you go outside and also because the drinks are so watered down. But that’s all right with me. I’m here to blend in, not to get drunk.
My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond…
This episode of the Drabblecast kicks of H.P. Lovecraft Tribute Month. It begins with a reading from Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth. In the feature, an impoverished student is forced to take an apartment in an almost empty building on the mysterious Rue d’Auseil. One of the other tenants, a viol player named Erich Zann, lives alone on the top floor and plays strange, otherworldly music at night. The student, drawn to his music, eventually gains Zann’s trust and learns catastrophic secrets.
Another child was born in the great Mother, excreted from the tube protruding from the Nursery ceiling. It landed with a wet thud on the organic bedding underneath. Papa shuffled over to the birthing tube and picked the baby up in his wizened hands. He stuck two fingers in the baby’s mouth to clear the cavity of oil and mucus, and then slapped its bottom. The baby gave a faint cry.
“Ah,” said Papa. “She lives…”
This episode of the Drabblecast is about awakenings and transformations. In the drabble, not all its memories of a man’s life make sense to an undersea creature. In the feature, generations ago the survivors of a ruined world struck a deal with their Mother, an enormous creature merging flesh and technology. They live symbiotically within her, helping her do everything from navigating to digesting food while in return she provides them safety and sustenance. When Mother is injured beyond repair, starved for both food and fresh genetic material, she passes on a dying gift.
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim—
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name…
To kick of Lovecraft Month Norm once again reads an H.P. Lovecraft classic.
I woke to this new darkness, swirling about me. A phrase sticking in my mind — “Lazarus Syndrome.” What happened to people when they had died, but, for some reason, some lack of death’s completion — some unfinished business — had rejoined the living.
In this episode of the Drabblecast, with a theme ‘Control,’ Norm speculates on zombies as dependents. In the drabble, we visit the zombie apocolypse. In the feature story, the consciousness of a slain man forms a being out of his remains, and the sea life around the. What is the nature of this entity, what is its place, and ultimately, what is its sinister purpose?
When Dr. Lopez came for me, I was plunging the geo lab toilet. She carried a red stickle suit in one hand and a spray can of anti-fungal lubricant in the other.
“Great news, Oliver! Big Spike is in season,” Dr. Lopez said. “He finally wants to fertilize Thick Root…”
The theme of this Drabblecast is propogation and legacy for future generations. The feature lets us into the world of Oliver as he imitates a bora monkey-bird and goes to fertilize a massive jerk of a tree. Norm recaps and wonders what we can learn from the story and it relates to state tax.