Ms. Plover (as she likes to be known) is a deaf security guard on an abandoned island colony. She's got no way off, and it just trying to stay safe and mentally well. She spends her days painting, distributing food to her fellow stranded expatriates, and fending off the dinosaurs.
Yeah, there's a bit of a dinosaur problem at her compound. Even giant herbivores are dangerous, especially when you can't hear them coming. And there's one critter in particular that is about to change her life - by stealing her painting supplies.
I'm also tickled that it's available in both text and audio. The Drabblecast is a zine I tried to get into for years back in the day. This is actually my debut there. Let me know what you think.
This is a story from the point of view of a lie. The lie wants to help her family; she doesn't remember why her family began telling her, or why they ignore her now. She lingers over the things they can't confront. I circled around this story idea for years before finally grabbing onto it and putting it to paper. It was a protagonist I couldn't leave alone.
This is my third story at the Escape Artists network. Previously they ran "Wet" at Podcastle and "Under the Rubble" at Pseudopod. I'm so happy for another of my stories to find its home with them.
The Consumed Podcast rose from the dead this weekend for a double-feature. Max Cantor and I gathered in New York for the opening of Star Trek Into Darkness and spent over half an hour hashing Bad Robot's franchise. We start off questioning if this is really a reboot, which leads to the many ways the company has changed the franchise.
But the big stuff lies in the Spoiled section, where we get to discuss
the mystery villain, villainy in Star Trek, and most interesting of all,
Into Darkness as an action movie that attempts to condemn revenge and
violence. It's a conversation I'd love to expand on. You can join us in
the Comments and download the MP3 of the podcast right here.
The second half of our double-feature, discussing Iron Man 3, ought to be out in the next week. With good luck the podcast may get up and running routinely afterward. We're deeply looking forward to some episodes about Naoki Urasawa's Monster, which you can watch for free on Hulu.
Happy birthday to Danielle La Paglia! For her birthday, Danni asked me to record the classic opening chapter of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. It turns out that I am absolutely awful at this, but if you'd like to hear me be awful at it, you can listen below.
If you listen very carefully, you might hear me arguing with someone about how to pronounce one of the words.
Though now several days late, I've finally made my birthday recording for Helen Howell available for free stream. It's an excerpt from Bram Stoker's Dracula, wherein our narrator first meets the world's most famous vampire.
You can listen to me voicing the hero and the count below.
It’s still surprising Mom lived so long. She was a sweet lady, always donated to UNICEF and Make-A-Wish. She worked as a maid at one of the Chicago Hyatts for thirteen years, and again at the Radisson for eighteen more. She cleaned rooms, folded toilet paper into white roses, and occasionally spiked visitors’ medications or the minibar with untraceable chemicals. As Aunt Theresa put it, she was a prolific but unassuming professional.
When she died, it wasn’t by a hitman. It was liver failure. I was there, bawling my eyes out, and the only assassins to blame were diet and genetics. She’s why I eat so many salads.
She’s also, I think, the reason why all my ex-boyfriends are dead. As far back as I can think, Mom was very supportive of who I was. Dad still doesn’t understand – he thinks I can just like girls if I try hard enough. Mom understood and coaxed me to love who I loved, though she refused to lower her standards. The boys I liked weren’t good enough for her. When I was dating Micah, she actually went to his concert to watch how he behaved. I saw her halfway through his set. She made a little “swish” sign at her neck, which meant I wasn’t seeing him again. Like, romantically again. She didn’t kill him. Heroin killed Micah. I’m pretty sure heroin killed Micah.
It was a month after Mom’s funeral that I noticed a problem. I was with… Jake. It sounds tackier than it was, but Jake was a Canadian brewer hoping to turn full-time hockey player. I know, it’s terrible, but he was so earnest. Or he seemed earnest. Actually, he was an asshole who called that he was sick the morning of Mom’s funeral, and it turns out he was actually drunk with his team. I saw the pics on one of their Facebook Walls. I was so mad, and I was plotting to dump him via that same Facebook Wall when other status updates came in. Jake, who was almost born on ice, had slipped in his shower that night and broke his neck.
I was devastated. Like, Aunt Theresa and my friends thought I was going to kill myself. These two girls from Mom’s church actually drove me to grief counseling sessions, to and from, and took me out to lunch afterward every time. Mom knew really nice people. I mean, except for the mob ties.
It was at one of these sessions that I met Hunter. Hunter. God, I can’t believe I ever dated someone named ‘Hunter,’ and that name hurts twice as bad in retrospect. It turns out he would go these sorts of grieving sessions to prowl for easy lays. I kind of suspected it, but he had the nicest hands I’d ever seen. Hands are a thing. Don’t judge.
Anyway, Hunter tried to sneak out of the house with my wallet and was, by means I still haven’t figured out, decapitated by the screen door. You probably read about it. It was kind of a big deal in the newspapers. I hear it made the front page of Reddit for a minute.
Then there was D’Angelo. He restored vintage cars, and we made out in the back of the only Rolls Royce I’ve ever been in, and a week later a pneumatic press broke and the Rolls fell on him. And then Gustav and Aleksei, who I wasn’t really in a thing with, but they both fell through the same patch in the ice. I remember them because right before my cell rang, I swear I saw Mom in my mirror. She looked like she was cleaning the frame.
Am I crazy, or is my mom’s ghost killing all my boyfriends? Dad said he still feels her presence, but I don’t have the balls to ask him if that presence feels like it strangles people. He’s lucky that he doesn’t want to date anymore. It’s also frustrating, because if he would, and those women died, I’d know Mom was looking after me. I mean, stalking after me. Poltergeisting after my sex life, because it isn’t hard enough being gay in America.
It’s super-weird, but I moved twice, and it hasn’t stopped. I could probably get the Match.com people arrested as an accessory at this point. Last week a cute guy cut me off in traffic, and ten minutes later I drove past the smoldering ruins of his car. “Afternoon Delight” was on the radio. That was Mom’s favorite song.
I once saw a psychotherapist to find out if Mom is just a useful delusion, expressing latent telekinetic abilities. What if I was actually killing all of those people with mental powers, and schizophrenically projecting it onto my late mother? The doctor thought this was all a scam to get prescriptions. He’s dead now.
It’s lonely. I mean, I guess Mom is stuck in a homicidal purgatory which is probably pretty lonely. I still have friends, and Aunt Theresa, and Dad, while Mom doesn’t even have Twitter. I’ve tried telling her, and praying to her, and praying to God to maybe finally take her away, but if you believe that omen on the turnpike, it hasn’t taken yet. It feels too harsh to have my mom exorcised, especially just for my sex life. I don’t know. It isn’t fair.
So now I just tell people the truth. Nobody believes my cute maid of a mom is now snapping necks from beyond the grave, and I need this stuff off my chest. I don’t know. What would you do?
It's been a long time since all three of us were in studio together, but that's our Thanksgiving gift to you! Nat, Max and I gathered to discuss a great range of topics. What stories exactly won't mainstream fiction tell? Is there a market for live-action short film? What drives an artist to compare his working conditions to the Holocaust?
And somehow this all revolved around videogames. We started with
Wreck-It Ralph, which is adorable and quite appealing for audiences with
any level of familiarity to old games. From there, we stretched into a
documentary on videogames development and how nuts it drives
programmers, then sampled the fruits of their labors with some of the
incredibly unusual approaches to games available on Steam and XBLA. Nat
winds up calling one of them "Portal as written by Douglas Adams." Which
was it? Click through this link to find out!
In
a radical reversal of roles, today the U.S. government banned the
military from gays. War will no longer be allowed to be declared where
there are any gay people, to avoid exposing soldiers to what one White
House staffer called, “uncomfortable environments.”
The
Prime Minister of Iran quickly explained that earlier speaking snafus
were mistranslation and there are indeed homosexual people in his
country. In fact, he added, “I may be gay, or may have a gay person near
me at all times!”
In related news, the governments of
North Korea, Sudan and Venezuela have begun importing people of
alternative lifestyles in bulk. Massive tax credits, free upscale
housing and ludicrously generous civil unions have been offered to lure
these sexual expatriots, or "sexpatriots," as bloggers have begun to
call them.
North Korea and China entered a bidding war
this morning to attract the cast of the now-defunct Bravo television
series “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” hoping to have them spruce up
their capitols. Anonymous sources close to the bidding war say
government heads hope to make their populations look more fabulous and
thus render their countries even more immune from military action.
No officials would confirm these allegations.
“We’ve
been planning this for a long time,” explained one North Korean
insider. “Our tight borders have left us unfashionably stuffy. The
glorious leader is a longtime fan of Queer Eye. This has absolutely
nothing to do with avoiding being attacked by a major superpower.”
The new episode of Consumed is online, featuring myself, Nat Sylva and Max Cantor. This week's episode is explicitly and entirely devoted to discussing Mass Effect 3. There's a controversy around the ending, but we approach the game holistically, discussing:
-Squad choices and New Vs. Old characters
-Writing, and the game's problem with urgency in a crisis-plot
-Rushed development cycle and DLC
-The altered conversation system
-Multiplayer, and getting eaten alive in it
-The incredible ambition of the series overall
-And hey, that game has a beginning too.
Other topics beg not to be spoiled here. It's about as detailed a discussion of ME3 as you'll find on the internet. I don't think there was anything we all agreed upon.
As a bonus, we included three editions of the podcast with three different endings. How different are they? That depends how different you thought Mass Effect's endings were.
"Two years he’s turned us out of the playoffs. Their training camp looks even sharper this year. You’re going to have to do something more than trade for a draft pick. And I’ve got something to think about. Something to keep in your pocket, in your office safe. Something you should burn before November, whether or not we do it.
"I know a woman at an escort service. She's not from here or their town. I think she’s from Baton Rouge. We met once. She's… frightening in how persuasive she gets.
“We can hire her through an intermediary who will have no direct connections to you or our team.
"Now, if he's too good a few weeks into the season, we call an innocuous disposable cell. She'll single him out at a club. Get him alone. He's already had so many indiscretions that he practically has this coming. He’s had so many that whatever she claims, people will suspect. ESPN will discuss. Blogs will believe. The bruising will be artificial. The photographs convincing. The distractions? Perpetual. Even if her suit folds, he will miss at least one game against us. In all likelihood, he'll miss the season and wind up on a crap team next year, possibly in the other conference.
"It will cost us less than any of our defensive linemen make. Her life will be pulled apart by media and she won't care, because she doesn’t like her life. You wouldn’t agree to this if you did. With this money, she can make another one somewhere she likes better than Baton Rouge. And we hamstring the biggest team in our division.
There’s one last lesson that every priest from my school must learn. We teach it through a parable because parables have been better to us than life.
Imagine: it’s the cusp of winter, when the grass can’t help but stiffen, and rivers don’t freeze enough. The priest knows not to test the ice and preaches thus, but not everyone goes to his services. A poor mother and son slide to the center of the river, trying to catch one more autumn trout. They fall in with their trout.
Now our priest happens along. He knows to lose his robes. He knows how to tie a rope between a tree and his waist. He knows how to swim. He knows what he’s supposed to do, and with a great deal of sputtering, he drags the mother and son to shore.
But it’s the cusp of winter. The boy is paler than the river. The priest knows how to check for fever and hypothermia. He knows how to first dry himself, then strip and cover them. He knows how to build a fire whose heat will assist here and attract attention from on far. The priest knows all this because he was a very good student. He’s read very many parables.
He doesn’t have to be learned, however, to know the mother’s gone blind. He knows how to stall her as he tries to keep her son breathing. When she asks him to pray for her boy rather than her own sight, he is burdened with knowing that the gods don’t work that way. Like all priests, he knows to pray anyway.
And she calls for her boy. She calls, and calls, and her voice is plainly getting weaker. Soon she sounds not ten feet away from her boy, but ten worlds away.
The priest looks up the road. No one is coming; no one has seen the smoke soon enough. Now the mother looks at him with useless eyes and a purposeful face. Now she calls to him, asking. Is he alright? Is he alright? Is he alright? Every time softer, farther toward the veil.
Put yourself in his moment, as this naked servant of the gods looking into a blind plea on the cusp of winter. You’ve learned the medicines, and the physics, and the scriptures, and very plainly the boy is dead and his mother is following. This is why every priest I teach must learn how to lie.
A new Consumed has appeared, but it’s not what you expected.
Consumed: Spoiled #1 is an in-depth conversation about David Fincher’s The Game. Unlike normal Consumed Podcasts, there is only one topic and we spoil the heck out of it. In this case the movie is 15 years old and hinges on so many twists that it can only really be appreciated when speaking without holding back.
My favorite Fincher flick, The Game stars Michael Douglas as a tycoon who is targeted by CRS, an all-consuming corporation that manipulates his business, television, home, family and personal life until even his sanity is fleeting. Allegedly it’s a game, but he can’t get it to stop. It all leads to what is quite possibly my favorite twist ending of all time.
This Sunday I'm proud to present to you Consumed Episode 3. It features what I'd conservatively peg as one of the top five worst intros of all time. We spent most of the episode discussing Science Fiction television with a focus on Eureka, Futurama and Steins;Gate. Then we swapped over to zombie media with the recent PC game Dead Island, and Max Brooks's follow-up to World War Z, Recorded Attacks. At a certain point I rattle of my wishlist of unused premises for zombie stories.
Allegedly this episode will kick off regular bi-weekly recordings. It took far too long to produce, but with Garage Band and some regular work schedules, Max Cantor, Nat Sylva and I are pretty confident Episode 4 is coming sooner than 3 did.
I was a guest on Anna Harte's Webfiction World podcast this past week. We discussed the origins of The Bathroom Monologues, the strengths and weaknesses of flash fiction, and I interviewed Angie Capozello on one minute's notice for both of us. It was very fun; I somehow managed to ramble about both Eudora Welty and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a conversation about flash fiction. Please drop by and give it a listen and a comment.
One notion I don't get is the effeminate gay guy. Gay men are the manliest men of all time. A straight guy can nail the most attractive woman you've ever seen. Hell, he can coerce the most attractive woman, and the smartest woman, and the most unattainable woman to jump into his bed simultaneously. But there's little manliness about that foursome. There's a 3:1 femininity ratio about that.
Meanwhile, a gay guy is consuming more man. At any given time he is giving you at least double the man for your money. He can date the laziest waif in America, and still be manlier than Don Juan because he's doing manly things. In fact, he's doing the manliest thing: men.
He is transcending manhood by way of someone else's manhood. That is a severe degree of masculinity that intimidates lesser men like me. In fact, given how gross I find naked men, the enthusiasm my gay friends have for them strikes me as decidedly bad ass. It’s no different than your ability to wrestle an alligator or fix a carburetor. I can’t do it, I won’t do it, and concede that you are the manlier man for the wrestling that phallic car-part. Gay guys are looking into the eyes of my darkest fear and seeing a turn-on. They are the best, the greatest, and last line of defense against something that I don’t want to do. That's because I'm not very manly. You could call me a girly-man.
My teddy bear is acting funny. He used to need me to pull his chair out for him. Before Wednesday, he definitely needed me to hold the cup to his muzzle so he could drink his tea. Now he makes the tea. He also makes my bed. He likes the corners tucked snug. I dug his box out of the trash, and it doesn’t say he’s supposed to do that. Plus I keep waking up and he’ll be gone from the bed. Usually he’s by my closet door, his paws against it like he’s holding it shut. My closet’s haunted my demons, so it’s not surprising he’d want to hold it shut, but he never used to do that. My parents don’t believe about my closet. Neither does Tim. For the longest time it was just me; now it’s me and the teddy bear. Does this make me crazy? And if so, is it okay that I kind of like it? He’s growing into such a thoughtful bear.
I’ve always wanted to die. What could be grander than to pull away the veil? There are other grand things. Earning your first dollar, getting married, fighting on the side that wins the war – but those all pale in personal comparison to the end. You can’t top the end. Nothing gets to follow it.
It wouldn’t be a noose for me, though. No sitting the garage with the motor running. It’d be a waste of my only demise.
I took one of those tours of the Empire State Building. Went up near the top, to the wide room with all the windows. My plan was to find a door outside and leap into the world’s most famous skyline.
The skyline was my undoing. Or, my death’s undoing. Because you know what you see from the top of the Empire State Building? Story upon story of people’s work. Cement, brick and steel laid so men could deal, sell and swindle. The sheer quantity of life that goes on in just one adjacent building is intimidating. And I realized that no matter how many feet I fell per second, my impact would be negligible. All those active lives would keep marching towards much bigger deaths than mine. All mine would have over theirs was flash. I hate flash.
No, suicide simply wouldn’t do for me. It was too closed a circuit. Too petty for a grand thing. Nor could I hire someone to kill me. Then it’d be a two-person affair, still too closed a circuit. No, I wanted to die a real death, and since death is the end of life, I had to live a full one in order to receive a grand demise.
So I earned my first dollar. It’s still in my wallet, and will remain there when I hit the floor. I got married to a wonderful woman. We got divorced, which is understandable because Unitarians have always been too much for me, but being too much for me was the same reason I married her. And I got married a second time. I worked at the steel plant that supplied our military in three wars that we won. You can say we didn’t, but the privilege of being American is we always doing enough damage to feel like we couldn’t have lost.
And I bought a piece of the Berlin Wall on eBay. I was in Ohio when gay marriage was legalized, and actually held the camera for one of the first couples that proposed. I watched the last NASA space shuttle launch with my granddaughter.
She probably won’t be there when it comes. I don’t want to be surrounded by mourners who’ll leach the emotion. My death is going to be all mine. But it’s going to be amazing, not because of how many feet per second I fall, but because of how high I lived. How I cannot wait for it.
"No, I get it. You had a radioactive piece of my home planet. It was very clever of you, much as it was clever of the umpteen prior opponents I’ve had who pulled it on me. Decreasingly clever each time somebody thought I wouldn’t be ready for it. I’d imagine all the defense shields and laser fields in the cave seem ingenious against mundane intruders, too. But thinking somebody who moves faster than the speed of sound would be impeded by them while you reached at very human speeds to your utility belt? Bruce. I get it. You’re more popular than me. That doesn’t mean you’d win in a fight. Proof? You’re only just hearing this while I’ve already dumped you in the Antarctic and gone home. I think I’ll go have sex with a reporter. I hope that radioactive piece of my home planet keeps you warm. That'd be super."
Untied Shoelaces of the Mind has introduced audio editions of their previous issues. Harriet Whitbread has narrated both my "Sologamous" and "Kill Mommy." Both of her reading were added directly onto the story pages themselves in free MP3 formats. Simply click "Audio**Read By" to listen to or download the stories.
I'm tickled for it, particularly to hear someone with a British accent and stage voice read an American dad giving bad advice to his cowboy-loving son during football. That was the premise of "Kill Mommy". "Sologamous"is the more dignified story of a man who seeks to marry himself to double his insurance.
Social responsibility is just a ruse. You were making fun of the fat kid in kindergarten. He was different in a way that wasn’t special, so you mocked him. It wasn’t even him – it was an excuse to hate someone who wasn’t you, and because other children joined in, it was socially reinforced. You were cruel then and you haven’t grown.This whole business of obese people putting extra strain on the healthcare system is rationalization for you being an emotional kindergartener. I’m sure you were well-briefed on the healthcare industry in elementary school and that’s why you were such a dick to Willy, or Robert, or Mandrake. And if he was a fat kid with a name like ‘Willy,’ I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s hanged himself by now. Thanks to humanitarians like you.
Justified by their abuse of doctor’s time and getting sick more often, you berate them, to “change” them. But even if a chubby bastard were to fall on his knees tomorrow and beg you to fix him, would you? No! You’re too busy checking movie times on your iPhone. The extent of your donation to the cause is being heartless.
You think mocking him is going to make him finally buy that gym membership? A chunk of these chunky people are the result of depression eating. A reasonable person doesn’t browbeat alcoholics under the idea that it’ll make them kick the bottle. Smokers get more sympathy than that for willingly sucking on sticks of carcinogenic poison. All the fat guy does is eat more than you. He may do it because he’s got a psychological problem. He may keep weight because of a glandular or digestive problem.
Or he may be rich. There are fat millionaires. Any random fat ass at a buffet may well have donated six figures to a state-of-the-art hospital. He may serve on its board, arranging healthcare resources more efficiently than he’ll ever use them up. He could hire two guys to go build clinics while he pounds Big Macs. Now who is better for the healthcare system: the one who enabled them to have a new MRI machine, or your skinny ass? Which, by the way, is still freakishly ugly.
Yes, the fat guy is ugly, but most thin people are hideous, too. Even supermodels. That’s why they invented Photoshop, so I can masturbate to an ideal that nobody’s trying to live up to. Moles, boils, scars, stretch marks, bad bone structure, bicep flab, chicken legs, post-pubescent acne, hair where you can’t shave – don’t get me started on the list of erection-killing traits you could have hidden under that fashionable tracksuit.
You don’t have some inner beauty the fat guy lacks. He’s got feelings. He’s got family. He’s had heartbreak and loss and one day walked out of a building wondering if he still had a soul. The beauty that culture makes sure we sheathe and hide and wrap in an intellectual condom is in both of you. But seeing either of you naked? That’s like asking if I want second- or third-degree burns. You’re not ethically right, you’re not helping him, and you’re unfuckable despite fitting into those jeans. Shut the fuck up and leave the fat guy to people who care. Give him the decency of ignoring him like you ignore the majority of the human race.
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