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Drabblecast 463 – A Hymn Upon the Lips of the Dead

On November 11, 2022

In Drabblecast, Horror, Mystery

Episode Sponsor– Mothmen 1966

The secret’s out on this week’s Drabblecast, and nothing will ever be the same. We bring you an original Drabblecast story called “A Hymn Upon the Lips of the Dead,” by Mav Lux.

Oh and Norm sings us a song about singing that he should have just told you. Enjoy!

Cover created by Bo Kaier in concert with the midjourney text-to-image AI (and unidentifiable, scraped contributors).

I was with her when she died. Underneath that frail shell of pallid, papery skin and tubes coiling into her body she was still my mother. Her last sound should have been the steady trickle of the morphine drip and a low, long death rattle. She died at 3:28 am. At 3:29 am her mouth opened and she began to sing…

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Drabblecast 459 – 7099 Brecksville Road, Independence, Ohio

On August 2, 2022

In Drabblecast, Horror, Mystery, Strange

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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Drabblecast 455 – How Lovely Are Your Branches

On January 1, 2022

In Drabblecast, Fantasy, Holiday, Mystery

Norm closes out the year and existence as we know it, due to the phenomena known as “The Continuation,” with the Drabblecast annual holiday Tim Pratt story, an original commission called “How Lovely Are Your Branches.” Enjoy!

Somebody was murdering people, but the killer’s name wasn’t showing up on my naughty list. That got me curious, so I poked around. There was nothing left at the crime scenes but dollops of sap and scattered pine needles, which felt less like sloppiness and more like a signature. I was in New York trying to track down the killer, but first, I needed a drink.

Play

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Drabblecast 447 – Echoes

On June 25, 2021

In Drabblecast, Drama, Mystery

The Drabblecast is on the scene this week, with an original story by Gail Ann Gibbs, read by Starla Hutchton, that reminds us that it’s ok to be a little weird. Or maybe even, SUPER weird…

I like the way Richard smells. The next time a psychiatrist asks me what makes me happy, I’ll say it’s the way Richard smells when he’s on the job.

Karen tilted her head down so Richard wouldn’t see her smile, which would be inappropriate here. He was standing next to her, rummaging through her tool kit.

“I could have sworn I brought the small sieve.” He pulled one out and waved it. “Thanks, don’t let me forget it’s yours.” He headed back to the crime scene in the kitchen, and Karen turned back to her own dead body, here in the dining room…

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Drabblecast 432 – Housebound

On October 4, 2020

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror, Mystery

Weirdness is in the air at Drabblecast as we bring you an original story about spousal life and home ownership by author Ao-Hui Lin.

“Hey babe, where did the closet go?”

The Hubby, Victor, gives me a blank look, like the word “closet” is Swahili for “bratwurst”. He neither understands the question nor the purpose of the question.

“The closet. It used to be here, through this door, under the stairs. Now there’s just a pit and bite marks on the door jamb.”

More silent incomprehension.

I let the subject drop. After all, who uses the under-the-stairs closet anyway? I don’t even remember if I ever put anything in there, and if I did, it would have been stuff I’d never planned on seeing again. High school journals, SAT study guides and shoeboxes full of bad poetry to that guy I had a crush on during junior year – Tony? Toby? Tory? I’ll find someplace else to put the vacuum cleaner.

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Drabblecast 425 – Unlike Most Tides

In Drabblecast, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Norm pays tribute and bids farewell to the greatest unsung hero of the podcast for the past two years: editor Sandra Odell. This fantastic story and many others have been brought to your ears through her hard work!

Our story is another original Drabblecast commissioned story for Women & Aliens month, this week by Darcie Little Badger. Solitude is often a time to help reflect on ourselves, and realize just how wonderfully connected we are to the universe around us. But how do we cope with such inevitably connectivity? What are our responsibilities to those fastened to us or colliding with our destinies us? Grab your kayak, hit the beach and find out…

“The prima donna sun has not yet risen to outshine every other star in the Milky Way. Overhead, a flash of light arcs between Orion and Taurus, the hunter firing at the bull. With a grunt, Mathilda lowers her kayak and admires the streak of light across the sky, thinking of her childhood in Los Angeles. There, shooting stars—most stars, really, except for the terrazzo and brass ones on the Hollywood walk of fame —were rare and wondrous. Things are different now. Mathilda still considers the stars to be wondrous…”

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Drabblecast Director’s Cut – Sing

On March 18, 2019

In Director's Cut, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

“A Musical on a Submarine”

Norm and author Kristine Kathryn Rusch discuss her story from way back in 2008 for Drabblecast #53. This is the “Director’s Cut – Sing.”

We also dive into a discussion about unsung women in Science Fiction, like Leigh Bracket and James Tipree Jr. Why use a pen name after all? And how might you use punctuation as sound?

Story Excerpt:

Child, you sing all the time- when you’re walking, when you’re eating, even when you’re laughing. You people make the most beautiful music in the entire galaxy…

Drabblecast Director’s Cut Specials are special features where we bring back a story from the archives and play them uncut as Part 1. Then in Part 2 we replay the episode with bonus commentary from the author.

Enjoy!

Drabblecast Director’s Cut – Sing

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Drabblecast Fan Pick: The Belonging Kind

On October 5, 2018

In Drabblecast, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi

As the Drabblecast Reborn Kickstarter campaign continues, we bring you another Fan Pick: The Belonging Kind. Drabblecast fan Kyle Sellers introduces this eerie story about how hard fitting in can be sometimes…

It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo’s, or Sad Jack’s, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where he’d first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke… she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.

Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful telescope, small and clear and very far away.

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Drabbleclassics 24 – Cinderlands (176)

By Charity Helton

On August 29, 2015

In Drabbleclassics, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Mystery

Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things:
clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes; rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus; wickedly-curved shards of brown glass; bullets of various sizes, crusted with dirt; and a foot or so down, fragments of black-stone statuary…

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Drabblecast 342 – I’m Bill Kurtis

On November 10, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror, Mystery

Nate had expected the first serial killer. In fact the first thing he’d said to Kelly once their Ford rolled to a stop on the shoulder was, “This is serial killer country. We’re finished.” She made scaredy-cat eyes and drew a finger across her throat. “Finished,” he enunciated. She’d heard his bake before, something to the effect that certain places settled and then maybe recultivated to feel remote–the Wisconsin Northwoods, for example, or parts of Appalachia or, in this case, Tornado Alley–were stuffed silly with the dumped spent corpses that were the nuggets of serial killers’ labor. The type needed space to operate. So each tree in the Northwoods doubled as a headstone, each stalk of corn out here a memorial, and to hike cross-country through such territory was to traipse condemned through the densest kind of cemetery.

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Drabbleclassics 6 – The Outsider (175)

By Charity Helton

On August 31, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Mystery

Here it is again – the very first H.P. Lovecraft month special! Listen in as we try to figure out what it’s all about at the end of the episode!

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books. Such a lot the gods gave to me – to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken…

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Drabbleclassics 2 – Over the Walls of Eden (133)

On June 22, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi

This week, we listen to Jay Lake’s “Over the Walls of Eden.”

If you listened to Clown Eggs and thought, “I need more stories like THAT,” you are in for a treat. Stick around at the end and hear a brief discussion of the story the author.

Story Excerpt:

“Why do you remember the books?” he finally asks.
She smiles again. “O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere, Till pride and worse ambition threw me down…”

Enjoy!

Drabbleclassics 2 – Over the Walls of Eden (133)

Drabblecast 314 – The Blue Celeb pt. 2

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 313 – The Blue Celeb pt. 1

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 310 – The Ugly Chickens

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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Cover for Drabblecast 290, The Screaming Door, by Forrest Warner

Drabblecast 290 – The Screaming Door

On July 30, 2013

In Drabblecast, Mystery, Strange

It has been two hundred days since the door to my study began screaming. I was nodding over a volume of Edwin Corang’s collected prose when I first felt it; a curious ripple that moved through the
room, standing my hair on edge, followed by the sensation of coffee spilling into my lap as the screaming began…

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 279, The Country Doctor, by Roo Vandegrift

Drabblecast 279 – The Country Doctor

On April 11, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Mystery, Strange

Gardner was drowning, and strangers were laying hands on the bones of my forebears. I felt obligated to see that liberties weren’t taken with my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and other good, God-fearing ladies, so I put the business on auto pilot and made the drive as if on auto pilot myself.

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Cover for Drabblecast Episode 264, The Belonging Kind, by Kathleen Beckett

Drabblecast 264 – The Belonging Kind

On November 22, 2012

In Drabblecast, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi

It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo’s, or Sad Jack’s, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where he’d first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke… she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.

Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful telescope, small and clear and very far away.

Podcast: Download

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 256, Roanoke, Nevada, by Spencer Bingham

Drabblecast 256 – Roanoke, Nevada

On September 14, 2012

In Drabblecast, Mystery, Sci-Fi

“It’s the extra-terrestrials,” the General said, watching for my reaction. “Our extra-terrestrials are falling ill.”

“Really?” I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice. My eyes wandered back to the picture on the general’s wall.

He noticed. “That’s an untouched photo,” he said. “The aliens are real, and they’re here…”

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Cover for Drabblecast episode 221, Year of the Rabbit, by Rick Green

Drabblecast 221 – Year of the Rabbit

On October 30, 2011

In Drabblecast, Horror, Mystery

It used to be that the sun would go down and the streetlamps would come on and make pools of this wet, yellow light. No matter where you stood, you could see the lights on somewhere. You could run from streetlamp to streetlamp and you could look down the streets and you’d never drown in the dark…

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