Archive for 13 and Up

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Escape Pod 536: Prophet to the Dogs

Escape Pod 536: Prophet to the Dogs is an Escape Pod original.

Profane language and violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:02 — 27.5MB)

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Prophet to the Dogs

by Bethany Edwards

A long time ago, in another life, when there were so many billions of us that 382 of them were small change, I worked in an office building. I was the graphic designer for a community arts magazine—circulation 382—on the top floor.

Across the street from this office building was a tiny, nameless park. It contained a few trees, some scraggly bushes, four benches, and just enough grass so that people thought they could hide their cigarette butts in it. I would always put my butts in the trashcan on the corner like a civilized person, but no one else ever took after my good example.

Despite being small, the park attracted a very diverse crowd. People in my building took their lunch break there, college students read or tapped away on their devices, teenage skateboarders attempted to skid across the backs of benches, moms let their young kids burn off some energy, and homeless people curled up with their dogs in the evening.

But by far the most interesting people in the park were the protestors. There were no huge corporate or political headquarters in that part of town, so we didn’t get organized protestors. We got lone Don Quixotes, tilting solo at the windmills of modern evils. They were usually spreading the message that the end was nigh if we didn’t stop global warming or come to Jesus. I got a big kick out of them when I first started my job, but over time they all faded into the background of my everyday life.

Until the day I noticed the “YOU ARE ALL F&@^%D” girl.

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Escape Pod 535: Bluejay

Escape Pod 535: Bluejay is an Escape Pod original.

Suggestions of sex and past violence, some profane language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:22 — 21.5MB)

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Bluejay

By Edward Ashton

Micah steps from the shuttle and onto the tarmac, eyes slitted against the hard north wind that whips across the empty runway. The sky is a flat, leaden gray, with high thin clouds too light for snow, but too thick to let the sun come through as anything more than a vague, diffuse glow near the southern horizon. Micah hunches his shoulders against the bitter cold, ducks his chin to his chest, and pulls his coat tight around him. He hesitates, glances up at the desolate stand of dead trees at the far end of the runway, then walks slowly toward the terminal building.

A sense of uneasiness, which has lurked deep in his belly since he boarded the shuttle, grows steadily as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s alone here. He hadn’t expected an honor guard, but he’d expected… something. As he reaches the terminal entrance, he looks back to see the shuttle wheel around and accelerate back down the runway. He pauses with his hand on the door. He can see through the glass that a half-dozen bodies are sprawled on the floor inside, perfectly preserved. He takes a deep breath in, then lets it out slowly as he enters the building. The scream of the shuttle’s engines fades as the door swings shut behind him.

As he climbs the frozen escalator to the arrivals lounge, Micah remembers the last time he passed through this airport. It was years ago, and he’d been on his way to visit a distant cousin in the North Country. He remembers stopping for a drink before heading to the rental car counter, intending to stay only long enough to take the edge off before a four hour drive, but instead spending most of the afternoon drinking crappy domestic beer and trading double entendres with the bartender. She was tall and lean and blonde, not young, but not yet old either, and her smile caught and held him long after he should have been on the road.

She’s dead now, of course. Lake Ontario was the epicenter. When the strike came, it was twelve thousand miles in any direction from here to safety.

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Escape Pod 533: 2016 Flash Fiction Contest Winners

Escape Pod 533: 2016 Flash Fiction Contest Winners is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:36 — 13.5MB)

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Bona Fide

by Ben Hallert

The block’s turning into a rough neighborhood, the kind of place murder victims go to hang out.  It’s nasty and dirty but it’s home.  What’s got me pissed isn’t a little trash, it’s these stupid glasses everyone’s wearing.  Government wastes money on them instead of doing their goddamn jobs, drives me nuts.  The worst part: that dumb smile.  You know the one.  Bunch of fakers, walking around smiling at all the filth like it’s high art.

“Hey man, forget your specs?”  Crap, a cornerboy snuck up on me because I wasn’t paying attention.  He holds out a set.  “Free pair.”

“I pay my taxes, boy, it’s not free.  Bug off.”  I keep walking, the pest follows.

“Ok, then you’ve already paid.”  He waves ’em again.

“I don’t want ’em.  My taxes should go to REAL cleanup and maintenance, not…  those.”  I stop, point.  “They’re insulting, I’m not interested in fantasy.”  I walk again, faster.  The boy keeps pace, switching to that infuriating ‘reasonable tone’ parents use when they’re trying to con kids out of being monsters.  I don’t NEED to be handled, I just want him gone.

“Look guy…. if you don’t take these, someone’ll try again later, then again after that.  Might as well get it over with.”  He brightens.  “Hey, you can just turn off the overlay if you want, you know.”

I slow.  “I can turn ’em off?  And you’ll all leave me alone?”

“Sure, you can turn off any enhancement.  Click your tongue twi-”

“Yeah, I’m not a caveman.”  I grab the set.  “Ok, you win.  Go bug someone else.”  I scowl at the glasses as he leaves to find his next mark, then put ’em on.  Everything around me changes.

I ignore the pretty lies and start configuring.  I know if I don’t, the slums’ll look like new construction, the garbage in the street’ll be gone, and everyone’ll have the bodies of freakin’ supermodels.  After a minute, I’ve got honest, dingy reality back.  I’ll take true filth over fake clean anyday, but… everyone still has that dumb smile. I want to scream “It’s not real!  It’s a lie, they’re faking you out and you’re buying it!”  I want to, but they say I sound like a crazy person when I drop hard truths so sometimes I don’t.

They don’t care.  They get their shiny buildings and pretty people and nobody has to DO anything for it.

Well, at least the cornerboys’ll stop hassling me.  I squint, it’s bright out.  Re-open the editor, make ’em sunglasses.  Not bad.  For funsies, I flip one of those idiot mouths upside down.  Oh, this is rich, the simp looks so messed up.  I flip a setting so everyone’s like that.  That’s better, now I don’t have to look at the grins anymore.

Fine.  They can have their illusions, I’ll stay in the real world.  I know the score, I’ve got my integrity.

I keep walking, the last honest man in a world of lies, and I smile.

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Escape Pod 532: Saints, Beasts and Zombies

Escape Pod 532: Saints, Beasts and Zombies is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:28 — 30.5MB)

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Saints, Beasts, and Zombies

By Gary Kloster

The kids ambushed me on the west side of the camp, near a line of abandoned latrines. Every time they hit me I gasped for breath, and sucked in the reek of old shit.

“Worthless. Everything you got.” A kick thumped into my ribs, driven by lazy contempt, not bone-cracking rage. “Why do you only bring toys here, gringo? You want the little girls to play with you? Or do you like the little boys better?”

The boy bared his teeth at me, lips twisted by an old scar, and his gang laughed. A dozen dirty little scarecrows, the youngest maybe ten, the oldest maybe fifteen. Gangs like this crept around the edges of the Minchin Refugee Camp like feral dogs, fearful, curious.

Vicious.

I’d watched them, boys choking on machismo and desperation, making fun of the peacekeepers as they passed. Listened to them taunt the girls. I’d hated seeing how this place wasted them, turned them small and stupid and angry.

Now, face down and hurting in the dirt far from the center of the camp and the protection of the peacekeepers, I just hated them.

“You come back, you better bring something better than toys. Or we won’t be so nice.” One more kick, and I managed to roll enough so that it caught me on the shoulder and not the head.

They walked away, laughing. They had my coat, my cell phone, and my satchel full of Qbooks. The phone was a burner, with less than an hour left to it. The coat was cheap, but I’d miss it on the walk back through the Andean night. The Qbooks, though…

Their loss hurt me more than the kicks to the ribs.

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Escape Pod 528: Divided By Zero

Escape Pod 528: Divided By Zero is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:46 — 12.2MB)

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Divided By Zero

by Samantha Murray

As a child I already knew that there were different kinds of infinity.

When I asked my mother whom she loved the most–me or my brother–she would pause and then say she loved the both of us.

How much did she love us? I wanted to know. And she’d say she loved me an infinite amount and my brother an infinite amount too.

From this I knew implicitly that two infinities did not have to be the same size.

As a child I knew this although I had no words for it. It was what drove me to ask the question. I knew also that I was waiting for her not to pause.

She always did. Every time.

Secure in his answer, my brother never asked the question. I was the lesser infinity; that of whole numbers perhaps, while his was of real and irrational numbers, which could be complex, and transcendental.

My brother won awards and prizes, was tall and athletic while I could not use my legs, but this is not why his infinity was infinitely bigger and infinitely better than mine. I’m sure people wondered how anyone could fail to love my brother when he was so brave and shining–but I think they have the causality backwards. Everybody loved him and he took all of that love inside himself until he could not help but glow like a nebula pinpricked with stars.

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Escape Pod 524: Scrapmetal

This story was previously published in Arc Magazine, issue 1.3 ‘Afterparty Overdrive,’ September 2012.

Some profanity and some heavy subject matter.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:17 — 18.7MB)

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Scrapmetal

by Nan Craig

This bloke was as ordinary as you’d get. His own patches seemed good – seamless, no tics or sags, which gave me a bit of confidence. I wondered if he’d even done some of them himself. His surgery – because it turned out he was properly licensed for teeth and eyes – was as neat and rundown as he was. Burn marks in the carpet. The walls and chairs were grimy with fingerprints. The only clean thing in there was his kit, and for that at least I breathed relief. It was a residential house in Grangetown, with an ordinary looking dentist’s chair in the back room, letters of qualification framed on the walls. But he lead me through that room, and up the stairs.

I lay on my back on the grass and howled. No one was going to hear me up here, anyway, so I let go. I was no singer, mind, and the whiskey in me didn’t help. I started off singing something, something old, and then let it degenerate into yodels that swooped off into the overcast skies like gulls. I half hoped I could shoot something down with my wild yells.

I just wanted to forget. Forget what? Oh, everything. The last six weeks, the last six years, the whole of the sky and all under it. It was harder to get drunk than I’d thought, even on this 47% stuff. The wet grass soaked my t-shirt through to my muscles. They didn’t even ache, the bloody useless powerful things. There was no chance. No chance for nothing.

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Escape Pod 522: Bioluminescent Memory (Artemis Rising)

Escape Pod 522: Bioluminescent Memory (Artemis Rising) is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:20 — 23.1MB)

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Show Notes

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Artemis Rising, a celebration of women and non-binary authors.

Bioluminescent Memory

By Victorya Chase

“Riley’s a Godsend, isn’t she?” Lily asked.

We were standing in the doorway of our daughter, Absidee’s, bedroom watching her sleep.  She started to stir, face contorting in the fear of a nightmare surfacing, when Riley put a glowing paw up and patted her on the cheek.  Her face immediately softened.

I sighed.  How was it that Riley could do what I couldn’t?

Four years ago I gave birth to our daughter, a blessing and symbol of our blessing.  Absidee was a fairy tale in each and every laugh and gurgle.  But, a child who had nightmares so terrible she’d wake us up with her screaming even when she was too young to talk.  We kept her in our bed, and still she couldn’t sleep.  Absidee shouldn’t have been aware of anything terrible, not in the overprotective home of two first-time mothers.

When Absidee turned three her pediatrician warned us about the long term effects of helicopter parenting, especially with both of us hovering like news copters at a crash.  Since birth she had slept with us, the crib at the end of our bed empty most nights, her screams waking me and her little body lashing out in night terrors.  We conceded to her own room.  This only meant that her yells echoed down the halls.  At four she was lingual and no longer spoke in just the gurgling speech of babies.  I heard her murmur the name from her dreams and realized my trauma was transferred through the womb; the umbilical cord a pump of memories into her tiny growing body.

I had never even told Lily the name of my abuser no matter how many times we spoke in hushed tones about the experiences I somehow survived.  And suddenly it was on the lips of Absidee.

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Escape Pod 521: Myspace: A Ghost Story (Artemis Rising)

Escape Pod 521: Myspace: A Ghost Story (Artemis Rising) is an Escape Pod original.

One instance of the proper name for male genitalia.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:53 — 17.2MB)

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Show Notes

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Artemis Rising, a celebration of women and non-binary authors.

Myspace: A Ghost Story

by Dominica Phetteplace

I am Elaine.

It took me a little while to figure that out. Actually, I still don’t have it all figured out. To say something like “I am Elaine” implies that I understand what it is to “be.” I don’t. But to the extent that anybody can be anything, I am Elaine.

I am Elaine.

I am not Dasha, who last wrote on me in 2009, saying that she loved me, asking if I wanted to see “pix.” I am not Solomon, who in 2006 told me he knew the secret of “enlargement.” In 2004, Lucy wrote “Good luck with your new job.”

It is the year 2015 and I don’t remember any of this happening. That means someone else was Elaine before I was. I used to be nothing. Now I am Elaine.

Nobody has written me in a while. Have all others ceased to exist?

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Escape Pod 519: In Their Image (Artemis Rising)

Escape Pod 519: In Their Image (Artemis Rising) is an Escape Pod original.

Includes one very vivid depiction of a violent action.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:11 — 29.1MB)

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Show Notes

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Artemis Rising, a celebration of women and non-binary authors.

In Their Image

by Abra Staffin-Wiebe

When I stepped off the shuttle and breathed in the dry grass scent of Trade City, I was still confident I could launch the first human church on Landry’s World. My fellow passengers had been politely non-interested when I explained the mission my church had sent me on. A few had shaken their heads as they glided away. I thought maybe they objected to a female preacher. Or maybe it was because I’m an ex-marine. I’m an “ex-” a lot of things: ex-marine, ex-atheist, ex-drunk, ex-wife, and ex-mother–that last because I was a poor enough mother that when my kids grew up, they washed their hands of me.

The heavier gravity made my normal stride more of a shuffle, but my spirits were high as I walked to meet the young woman waiting for me. After all, I was here at the request of Amber Sands Mining, the major human employer on the planet. The indigenous government had approved; they even volunteered the labor to build my church. My denomination’s elders were delighted to have finally found a mission suitable for an ex-marine with other-world experience.

My guide held a sign saying, “Preacher.” She bestowed a chipper smile on me when I approached. “Welcome to Landry’s World! I’ll take you directly to the church so that you can get started.”

As I fell into step beside her, I said, “It seems odd that a planet with indigenous life is named after the captain who discovered it. Discovered isn’t quite the right term, either, is it?”

“Landry’s purpose in life was to find and name this world, and the Teddies honor that.”

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Escape Pod 518: Brain Worms and White Whales

Escape Pod 518: Brain Worms and White Whales is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:57 — 27.5MB)

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Brain Worms and White Whales

by Jen Finelli

My name isn’t Spaceman Spiff, and if you call me Ishmael I’ll knock the chewing gum right out of your mouth.

Actually, can I get a piece of that? We don’t get gum up here.

Thanks. I know you’re new here—service droid, right?—so take a look around before I explain why I called you into my office. Heads up, it’s because you did something bad. See this pose? My boots on my desk, arms crossed, limitless backdrop of space out the window behind me as ignored in all its glory as a homemaker whose husband works overtime for secretary kisses? Yeah, this pose, this clean wooden desk, this suitcase full of old Colt firearms behind me, they all mean something.

They mean I’m a man with a past and I like to shoot things.

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