Hello, Starshine. The Earth says hello, and welcome to the Fantasy Magazine Story Podcast. I'm your host, Janina Edwards. In this episode... You'll be listening to Dread of the White Dog by Lowry Paletti, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and directed by Alison Bell-Bews. But first, a word from our sponsors. With something like 5 million podcasts, finding a really good one can take a ton of time. So let me recommend one. It's called Something You Should Know.
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Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwein, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth. that ours is not a loving God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Rudolf Bantwein, wherever podcasts are available.
and now dread of the white dog by lowrie polletti in the fading shadows of dawn a hunter meets a wolf with white eyes a wolf whose mouth stretches open and in its growl there are three faraway voices distorted as if heard through water so the hunter shoots he does not wait to see what he has done risha follows the limping stag it is so far away that risha can hardly see it but risha drags itself forward anyway
toward the starkly black beady eye toward the musk stench risha's limbs grow heavier with the passing days its jaw hangs from its face swaying with each step it can't remember the last time it ate it is as if the fire inside of its belly gnawing on itself has been there since the day resha was born Risha doesn't know how it will kill the stag, but it smells meat, so it shambles onward. To deny the pole to lie down on a bed of leaves is the same as dying.
and Risha will not die today. The icy ground cuts furrows into its paws. Its pelt hangs from its ribs. The stag will save it. The stag is all Risha has. risha will not die to-day risha takes another step its leg shudders and it collapses pain slithers across its face but it still digs its claws into the ground pulls. Risha will not die today. Between the leaves there is a rustling of white fur and blue eyes. Risha's hackles prickle, but only a dog slinks out from the brambles.
It walks with cat-like silence. It smells like nothing at all. The stag. The stag. Risha tries to stand. The stag is gone. Dear wolf, the dog says, rest a while. The dog leans down. There is a sense of wrongness in the way that it moves, fluidly as if it were swimming.
there isn't a single speck of dirt on its bright coat in another world you are a man the dog says i see it in your eyes when the hunter shot your jaw off you were meant to wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze to lie on top of him until the warmth of his body faded away but instead you are here Your suffering is an affront to nature. Why were you born a wolf? A low, gurgling sound escapes Risha's throat. Its chest heaves, and its tongue trembles as it tries to speak.
White foam dots its lips. Oh, the dog whispers. I can hear you, even when you can't speak. It's all right. my voice i know i had a beautiful voice once i know what what are you I am these things today, the dirt beneath your feet, the eye of a wasp, the cypress needles floating in the pond, the dog says. I am everywhere. and i saw you stalking a stag you cannot eat why meat the dog circles orisha the strike of its paws against the ground is as hypnotizing as pelting rain
I don't smell meat, it says. I smell death. No. I do. No. Do not fear death, wolf. the dog smooths down risha's hackles with its tongue those touched by my hand never die what is it that you desire salt heat blood awful fur skin fat bone the dog stops in front of risha and sits head tilted to the side Leaning forward, it presses its nose to Risha's tongue, and Risha imagines how good it would feel to clap his jaw shut around that snout and drink and drink and drink. Dear Wolf.
The dog says. You may eat. Risha follows the scent of meat to the river, but it does not find the stag. Instead, a wounded rabbit picks its way across the rocks. old blood matting down the fur on its flank. Saliva drips from Risha's lolling tongue. It traps the rabbit underfoot, its paw sinking into the softness of its stomach.
resha remembers the sticky warm rabbit taste and the crunch of bone and the sweetness of marrow and as it remembers the rabbit shudders goes still its skin splits open and its insides wriggle out between the blades of grass until one by one each piece wilts like a flower in the summer time more and more As the rabbit wastes away, a warmth fills Risha's belly. In the spring, the yearling pups roll in a valley of wildflowers.
they were only weanlings when resha met the hunter and the white dog their pelts are black like resha's their faces slender vulpine like their sire weather resha has taken many mates in its lifetime It has sired pups by red-coated bitches and carried the mongrels of dogs, and while these may come and go, weather returns. Weather carries a fox in its jaws.
and drops the carcass at risha's paws it does this every time it hunts when it prods the carcass with its nose it is asking would you eat please it has not seen risha eat since its return this sharing ritual performed with the utmost care time and time again is how risha learned that it can only eat from the living And now there is the beginning of a worry needling its way into Risha's mind that this is a body that it cannot understand.
fit with a wrongness that makes risha's hide itch if it thinks about it for too long after all it didn't ask what the white dog wanted in return it didn't even ask to heal it has taken the whole season for its jaw to sew itself together with bony calluses it no longer sways locked now in its terrible grin risha presses its head against weathers and weather lets the yearlings pull the fox apart by the legs they fall over each other in a tangle of gangly limbs they yelp and whine and sneeze
when risha returned it sought out weather first and first there was fear there is no word for ghost among wild kind risha has since realized But there is an understanding that death is not the end for all things.
mold eats the fallen tree which burrows deep into the earth and emerges again as another oak and so too do the dead sometimes walk so weather approached low to the ground and its eyes white-rimmed as it took in two long breaths resha was acutely aware of how its scent had changed since it met the white dog strange and familiar all at once a bit like something left to rot in the sun but familiar enough it seemed
because weather sprang to its feet and licked the space between Risha's eyes, and together they bounded through brambles and nettles and slept that night in a bed of moss. You are my Risha. said weather's teeth when they nipped and tugged at risha's hide not moss not fungi not meat said weather's tongue when it cleaned the space between risha's toes and risha's god
There is the stirring of next season's pops. In the budding heat, Risha's tongue dries to leather. Its cheeks dry and crack. With each exhale comes the perfume of decay.
dirt collects in the spaces between its teeth and when it sleeps little bugs pick their way across the mountains and valleys of its canines it wakes to worms digging furrows into its tongue to something wriggling into its lungs it scrambles to its feet hacking and digging at its mouth out from its throat springs a ball of rotting meat slick with mucus
Weather presses its weight into Risha's side and looks on with big eyes, soft ears. Risha digs and digs, but its paws only leave more sand, loam, silt on its tongue. Tear it off, Risha wants to say, tear it off of me, and bury it at the foot of an oak, and let no wild kind eat it. But it can speak to no one but the white dog.
in its dreams resha is not a wolf but a doe a new doe not even two years old how long has it been since resha thought of its own youth It is a new doe, twig-legged and gauzy, and it can remember with startling clarity when it fell from its mother's womb and how cold the air had been that day.
and now in its gut there is a sick hot pulling that came with the autumn so strong that the doe is terrified by the sensation the stags fall so quickly to violence the thunder-crash of their duels echoes on and on through the woods a shadow falls over the doe a stag whose head is pulled down to the earth The antlers of another stag, long dead, just bones and leather now, are tangled up in its own.
and these antlers resha realizes are not antlers at all but the gnarled moss-dripping branches of a gray birch with each limping step the stag pulls itself and the corpse forward There is a burning fervor which keeps it from collapsing into the dirt. It exhales in deep, foggy plumes, as if a furnace sits deep within its chest. It is beautiful. The doe backs away, knees shaking. It wishes with every part of its being that it were a fawn again, hidden by the flank of its mother.
But Risha is filled suddenly with the knowledge that it has seen the stag before, and that is why it visits Risha now in its sleep. wolf a soft voice calls risha opens its eyes and finds two blue ones staring back it swings its head around weather is deeply asleep it is not even dawn you called to me in your dreams dear wolf the dog says risha stands shaking it is so close to the dog and yet no heat radiates off of the dog's moonlit body
What is it that you desire? The yearlings can't stand the smell anymore. I cannot speak. The pups make me ravenous. I miss the stag. Part of me is dying. I am full of things that are not me, and I want to kill them. Wolf, wolf, wolf, the dog whispers. What is it you desire? Risha waits until its breaths come more easily. Water. You may have whatever you ask for, the dog says, but you must keep eating. Remember this. You must eat what you have never eaten before.
and then you must keep eating risha's mouth drips with rainwater its throat finally quenched it stands and stretches in the morning air and finds that its tongue can move again it slicks down the fur on weather's back its chest rattles with wetness pooling at the bottom of its lungs like the murky surface of a lake it is overflowing
There are leaves floating inside of it. When it eats, the water is stained pink with squirrel's blood, and it must eat. To make the water, it must eat. It has never been so hungry. So it eats, squirrel and chipmunk, a lynx and each of its kittens, a songbird's eggs, three adders, a doe swollen with twin fawns.
The taste of each meal rolls down Risha's tongue with the rainwater. When it tastes blood, it can almost remember the snap of bone between its teeth, the euphoric act of chewing, grinding, swallowing. It aches to hunt as weather hunts. It eats a fox and a lost dog, a vulture full of rotting meat, and a band of stags.
arrested by risha's eyes they are already on their knees as it approaches and their hides are already unknitting themselves but somehow risha still hungers it returns to the burrow it shares with weather but the smell makes it pause there is a gray wolf curled up in their bed asleep its face is slender and its feet are snowy white there is a scar on its left haunch where it was once gored by an elk it is weather but not weather its smell
like ash, makes Risha's hackles stand on end. Head low, Risha stalks into the burrow, and the ash smell surrounds it. risha is filled with fear now because of this thing that has replaced weather and filled with hunger always hunger it feels as empty as it was when it was dying When it puts its nose to the wolf's fur, there is the faint smell of meat. It salivates twin trails of water and blood. It lets its claws sink into the wolf's belly.
The wolf lets out a strangled whine. Why is that call so familiar? Why does it make Risha's body ache? Just as quickly as the wolf cried, it goes silent again.
risha eats well for the first time in weeks risha looks for weather in the woods weather weather weather it follows wolf trails where packs have pissed and scratched their signs into the trees but when it finds them they carry the same ash smell all of these wolves taste the same resha tells itself that it could never kill weather never something has stolen weather from it and somehow searching day after day resha still cannot find its mate
Even in Risha's dreams it can't smell weather. It can't smell any wolf at all. Not its mother nor its sire. Ash smell is food smell now. And food... is ash. It wants to tear the woods apart until it is wrapped up in weather's warm oak smell, but instead it claws at its stomach until its skin glows red and blood beads between its fur.
it throws itself against the trees and cuts the skin between its teats with the sharp stones that jut out of the earth but still the pups writhe weather weather weather It can't be dead. Risha remembers the ash-scented corpse and how it cried with weather's voice. Risha smells weather in its own piss, but it is a warped kind of weather. the weather of amnion rotting wood the weather that haunts the living weather weather
The pains come in the middle of the night, and Risha finds that it cannot even cry. It knows it lost its voice so long ago, but never has it wanted to snarl and whine and growl more than it does now.
instead the water in its throat bubbles over froths like the waves of the sea and as its belly heaves bile makes the water cloudy then the blood of its last meal and then tufts of gray fur weather weather the taste of weather there is something sick about this pain never has whelping felt as if they were clawing their way out there is no relief when it is done the pups smell like weather but they don't look like weather they are all black
and their jaws are stretched open and they don't breathe in its dreams resha is always a doe and there is always the stag who carries the dead resha watches the stag with a strange longing it remembers its waking body the wolf who should have died in the winter and how it would have dragged itself toward the stag until the end of time if it had to
once and only once the stag mounts resha the doe and then the spring rains come and the fawn drops a fawn with two heads with saplings sprouting from its forehead dead and resha curls up around its cold body waiting for the daylight to come when reesha wakes there is nothing by its side it startles to its feet it paws at the ground then it digs until it hits tree roots there is nothing buried here the fawn must be here somewhere
when it tries to speak water girdles out of its throat put me back inside the dough it needs the white dog where is the white dog put me back put me back put me back rain water fills the hole at risha's feet it paces around its new little pond as a gnawing hunger eats at it it has not seen another wolf in weeks and it no longer pretends that anything can sate it other than its own kind it slinks into the depths of the woods again until it finds a flash of gray fur risha stalks forward
it finds that it can't breathe in a grove of willows a wolf rakes its claws down the tree trunk its head sloping gently into its muzzle its toes tipped with white risha is forgetting what weather looked like but it thinks that weather may have looked like this now the wind picks up this wolf smells like ash it has been so long since risha has eaten a deer
that it nearly ignored the smell, the pinprick eye hidden between the leaves, until it heard it, not the gentle cadence of a doe's lope, but a shuddering, limping gait. and the crash of broken branches as the great beast hauled itself forward risha follows the limping stag it follows the stag for days the sun bites at risha's back and the night closes in. It follows the stag through forest, swamp, and grassland. It feels its own muscles wilt against its bones. It shudders with every breath.
What happens to a body that cannot die? It will walk until it is no longer a wolf, and then it will keep walking. Each day when the sun rises, it can just make out the stag's silhouette on the horizon. It is so tired. that sometimes the sleeping world and the waking world merge into one in dreams it sees the stag as if they are a hair's breadth apart it witnesses the change
The becoming of the stag who carries the dead. The clash of antlers and strike of terror. Each stag realizes suddenly that they are not two beasts, but one. There is nothing that can untangle their antlers. In the frantic battle to escape, Risha's stag breaks its leg in two. The stag was never meant to walk like this, on three legs, with the weight of a skeleton.
pulling it to the ground. Now the muscles on one side of its body are overgrown and as knotted as the trees that crown its head. It doesn't move like a stag is supposed to move. In its ugliness and wrongness, Risha sees itself, its future. In a century's time, it is warped and still walking.
waking risha returns to its body to find itself pressing onward carried by legs which can hardly stand breathing through a throat gone dry it can smell nothing but musk piss and blood hear nothing but the peal of the stag's steps only in risha's dreams does the stag speak it lowers its head to the earth its flags heave as it bellows It came to me as a doe. It came to me with a coat glowing like the moon.
Risha the doe cowers, urine streaming down its shaking legs, as it is surrounded by the thunderclap of the stag's hatred, its love, its longing. But it is too late for the stag's warning now. And even as the creature dressed in white finds another and another, the stag will cry out to a forest that cannot hear. and Risha will drag itself forward. When it meets the stag, Risha tells itself, it will feast.
Welcome back, Starshine. You have been listening to Dread of the White Dog by Lowry Pelletti, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and directed by Alison Bellviews. Hello, I am Kristen Russo. And I am Jenny Owen Youngs. We are the hosts of Buffering the Vampire Slayer once more with Spoilers, a rewatch podcast covering all 144 episodes of, you guessed it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are here.
to humbly invite you to join us for our fifth Buffy prom, which, if you can believe it, we are hosting at the actual Sunnydale High School. That's right. On April 4th and 5th, we will be descending upon the campus of Torrance High School. which was the filming location for Buffy's Sunnydale High. To dance the night away, to 90s music in the iconic courtyard, to sip on punch right next to the Sunnydale High fountain, and to nerd out together in our prom best inside.
of the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer all information and tickets can be found at bufferingcast.com slash prom come join us If you want a person dead, you call a hitman. If you want a monster dead, you call Lincoln Franks. But you better be able to pay the price he asks because Lincoln doesn't work for free. Pay to slay, bitches.
Slay Season 2 is the current season of Scott Sigler Slices, a fiction podcast with dark tales hacked from the mind of a number one New York Times bestselling author. Slay is a foul mouth. monster-killing, drug-addled anti-hero story that's John Wick meets Buffy meets Breaking Bad. Slay season one is complete and waiting for you in the feed, as is Scott's short story anthology, Blood is Red.
Scott Ziegler Slices is the world's longest running fiction podcast, 19 years and counting, with new episodes dropping every Sunday. Get Scott Ziegler Slices on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts. From the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country and back in time through the sapphic history that shaped them comes a brand new season of cruising beyond the bars. This is your host, Sarah Gabrielli.
and I've spent the past year interviewing history-making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces, from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more. For 11 years, every night women slept illegally on the Common. We would move down to the West Indies to form a lesbian nation. Meg Kristen coined the phrase women's music, but she would have liked to say it was lesbian music.
That's kind of the origins of the Combiveroo Collective. You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4th. Fantasy Magazine is published by Adamant Press, and this podcast is produced by Skyboat Media. This episode is copyright 2023 by Adamant Press.
Lowry Paletti is a black author, artist, and veterinary student from New Jersey. They write a variety of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror fiction, unified by their fascination with gore. When they aren't writing about monsters and the people who love them, they can be found wrist-deep in a formalin-fixed lab specimen. Their other pieces appear in Flash Fiction Online, Dark Matter Magazine, and Lamplight Magazine. You can find them on Twitter as or at their website.
is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several audio awards, as well as more than 25 earphones awards, and been named one of audiophiles' golden voices. Stefan has been producing Lightspeed Magazine podcasts since 2010, eventually adding Nightmare and Fantasy Magazine, and sharing the Hugo Awards for Best Semi-Prozine in 2014 and 2015.
Post-production was by Jim Freund. Thanks for listening, Starshine. This is your host, Janina Edwards, leaving you with a little benediction. Ashes to ashes and dogs to dust. For now.