A special throwback episode. With One week left in the Drabblecast Reborn Kickstarter, Norm presents one of his favorite surreal stories from deep in the archive by Hootingyard writer and Resonance FM radio personality Frank Key, and gives us a teaser about Frank’s commissioned story for Drabblecast Kickstarter Supporters
The bullet-riddled corpses of our dead crew-mates, all sixteen of them, are coffined up, and the coffins stacked as a makeshift ping pong table…
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Tompkins sighed. “What happens is this: You pay me
my fee. I give you an injection which knocks you out. Then, with the aid of certain gadgets which I have in the back of the store, I liberate your mind…”
This episode of Drabblecast starts with Norm recommending and playing an excerpt from Frank Key’s story anthology. In the feature we learn about Mr. Wayne, a man who visits the store of the world in order to discover his deepest desire. Is it simply an escape from a post-apocalyptic world, or is it something more?
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Testimony of Witness No. 5671 before the Special Presidential Investigative Commission. Leonard Drucker, thirty-one years old, unmarried, of 238 West 10th Street, New York City, Borough of Manhattan, employed as a salesman by the Har-Bern Office Partition Company of 205 East 42nd Street, New York City, Borough of Manhattan. Witness, being placed under oath, does swear and depose:
Well, I don’t know, the telephone woke me up about eight A.M. on that Wednesday morning. I grabbed at it, half falling out of bed, and finally managed to juggle it up to my ear. A girl’s voice was saying, “Hello, Lennie? Is that you, Lennie? Hello?”
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“Your suitor’s here!” Ma Flesh hurried into the back room of the butcher’s shop. “Are you presentable?”
Betty waited there amongst the swinging, marbled yellow cow carcasses. The wooden butcher’s table was smooth under her fingertips, and solid as the earth. Knives glinted from the walls, each reflecting a tiny, seated Betty and the thin figure of Ma Flesh standing over her.
“Sit up straight,” Ma snapped. “And don’t scratch. It could lead to tragedy. I mean it.”
“I won’t.” Betty didn’t dare ask why Ma was so against scratching. Her head itched but she didn’t lift her hand. Ma had cut off Betty’s hair to stop her from being so floaty. She hoped the suitor liked short hair. If he was blind, he’d like it, she thought. She could lay her head in his lap and he could tell her mood by the bumps on her skull. He could stroke behind her ears, let his fingers drift up to her crown, slide down her neck–
“It isn’t Saturday.” Ma rapped on Betty’s head with the back of her shining metal hook. “No going floaty today, girl.”
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The sound of running water came from ahead. The trail emerged from the woods and he looked up at the side of a rocky hill. A narrow waterfall trickled down the side of the rock, splashing into a pool of water.
His father claimed the water here was the most amazing color he’d ever seen – a vivid blue-green he’d dubbed Hokkaido green…
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Tompkins sighed. “What happens is this: You pay me
my fee. I give you an injection which knocks you out. Then, with the aid of certain gadgets which I have in the back of the store, I liberate your mind…”
This episode of Drabblecast starts with Norm recommending and playing an excerpt from Frank Key’s story anthology. In the feature we learn about Mr. Wayne, a man who visits the store of the world in order to discover his deepest desire. Is it simply an escape from a post-apocalyptic world, or is it something more?
Podcast: Download
From a small, dusty box similar to a contact-lens case, she took a fresh iDreams bindi, a self-adhesive circlet displaying the iDreams logo: a stylized human head wreathed in fluffy clouds and displaying a Third Eye…
This episode of the Drabblecast explores the relationship between technology and romance. In the Drabble, cryotechnology brings new dimensions to love, loss, and grieving. The feature, Daydream Nation, is a post-modern fairy tale exploring how the development of an iDreams caster, a device allowing users to broadcast crafted or purchased iDreams to one another, might affect courtship and relationships. After the story, Norm waxes poetic about the effect of our instant message society on “good old fashioned cheesy flirting.”
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The bullet-riddled corpses of our dead crew-mates, all sixteen of them, are coffined up, and the coffins stacked as a makeshift ping pong table…
In Drabble News, Norm congratulates the Harper Collins Dictionary for adding the slang term “meh” (an utterance of indifference). For the Drabble segment, returning author and future editor Matthew Bey (responsible for Drabblecast #58, “Eggs,” among others) allows his strange nocturnal fantasies about pupating locomotives to cross into the listener’s daylight. Next, Norm reads from the work of Frank Key, the British surreal author whose ‘lopsided fiction’ has graced the Drabblecast on numerous occasions, including episode #190. The selection: “The Goat God.” The feature describes the Flying Dutchman space journey of the starship “Corrugated Cardboard,” and the strange transformations of its surviving crew. The crew’s destination: a tiny pink planet where blind, mute, magnetic love monkeys frolic. Do these wonderful mythical creatures even exist, or are they figments of the unreliable narrator’s imagination? Finally, Norm reads from the positive feedback heaped by readers upon Episode #86, “Half Sneeze Johnny.”
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She was a machine, fabulously complex and durable and imaginative. She was also alive…
This well regarded episode of the Drabblecast shares the poetic story of two complex individuals welcoming, dreading, and ultimately learning from the finality of their own end.
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The Drabblecast’s first ever trifecta special, three short stories asking there interesting questions. Is best model, best witness? How much is a dream worth? And what would you do to get a pound of flesh?
This episode marked the first “Trifecta,” as Norm produced an anthology of three short-ish stories connected by a theme. Norm left the specific theme open for speculation by listeners. Was it perhaps, “lethal consumption?” In the first story, “Witness,” a cleaning robot recounts a mysterious incident from its uniquely prosaic point of view. Next, “Wiggin’s General Store,” turns out to be a place that sells dreams. No, really, sells dreams and not the safe kind. (The author, Basil Godevenos, wrote the poem “The Truth about the Reaper” in Episode #34.) The final story, “Pork and Steak Eye” ponders the ethics of willing organ-donor clones. Upon reading the feedback from Episode #33, “Dessert Storm,” a good laugh was had by all.
Trifecta – a run of three wins or grand events. Origin: 1970s from “tri” + “perfecta”
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