We bought our first yarn baby at a garage sale. The ends of its arms were frayed and its eye buttons dangled loose on bare threads. This theme of this episode of the Drabblecast is family unties: Nontraditional homes and family situations. In the drabble, the enterprising resident of a haunted house fools its ghosts […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You know, I’ve heard my share of disembodied voices. I’m accustomed to their fickle, sometimes bizarre demands. But tonight’s voice is different, clear as gin and utterly compelling. I must listen… This episode of the Drabblecast concerns time and inter-dimensional travel. In the drabble, a being hurriedly fleeing its own dimension accidentally merges with a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Translating… Appendix 820 of The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide. This series of audio files was created by TreeFrog7. It has been automatically translated into text In this episode of the Drabblecast, heavily pregnant jungle explorer TreeFrog7 keeps a recorded diary of data she and her husband are collecting for the Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It was my turn to wear the mask, but my egg-sister Linney wouldn’t give it up. She’d been wearing the mask all morning, set on Smile, and it was a test day, too. Everyone thought she was so pleased and relaxed and Earthy… This episode of the Drabblecast opens with the announcement of the 2011 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the place where I was born, stones had been used to mark boundaries for four hundred years. We harrowed stones up in fields, turned them up in roadcuts. We built the foundations of houses from stones, dug around and between them. We made stone walls, and our greatest poet wrote poems about those walls […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I don’t know if this is the same tape as last time, because They keep moving things around and stealing them. I don’t know who does it. It may be the staff here, or my own family when they come to visit, or the aliens, but somebody’s always doing it — taking my glasses, my […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Another child was born in the great Mother, excreted from the tube protruding from the Nursery ceiling. It landed with a wet thud on the organic bedding underneath. Papa shuffled over to the birthing tube and picked the baby up in his wizened hands. He stuck two fingers in the baby’s mouth to clear the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Allan Thermoose’s wife is in love with a blade of grass. It’s the 375th blade directly even with the crack in the third slab of sidewalk east of the mailbox. The blade gets full sun all day, and Allan, a stickler for lawn maintenance, is careful to water it, along with all the others, for […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The first ‘Go to Hell!’ The Angels did say To certain poor bastards On Valentine’s Day; ‘Go to Hell! We do our job well! It ain’t who you are It’s what you can sell…’ On Valentine’s Day, The World demands Love With a milk-chocolate fist In a red tin-foil glove. Romance is featured in this […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The six of them meet for the first time in front of the sagging clapboard house where Everett Montrose was born. All are tired, with hollows under their eyes from driving or riding buses for days. Even so, they greet each other with shy, relieved smiles. Few words are said; most seem unsure of how […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This episode of the Drabblecast presents “Bears Discover Fire,” by Terry Bisson. We examine and interpret humanity through anthropomorphism. When bears discover fire, stop hibernating, and begin populating highway medians in the southern US, people notice. Their changing behavior highlights how other families react to changes in their own lives with varying degrees of acceptance […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
“You don’t have to talk like that to us, mister,” I said. “We know town-speak just fine.” The man with the hat put it back on his head and smiled with a hint of embarrassment. “Sorry, folks. Sometimes it helps, you know, smooth the way.” That man with the computer was lurking by the corner […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In some parts of the world — Austria, Croatia, Hungary — they still remember. They understand. You can’t have something bright without having something dark to balance it. If you’ve got St. Nicholas, you also need the Krampus… This episode of the Drabblecast opens with Norm’s reflections on the holidays, Santa Claus, and the origins […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It is three thousand light years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I can’t fly faster than a speeding bullet. I can’t lift a car. I can’t climb slick surfaces with my bare hands or breath underwater or stop time. All I can do is change blue things to yellow. I didn’t bother to buy a cape or a spandex suit like the others. I just bought […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Once, at the beginning, you asked why you were brought here. This is what I told you: your parents made a deal. I would rid them of their plague of rats, and they would pay me. I cleared the town of pests, easily done, and returned for my payment. They laughed at me and tried […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Kennedy had stared at his sock drawer for a good ten minutes that first morning, dumbfounded. He’d never seen it so neat, and he didn’t remember doing it. But there they were: threadbare, but tidy and folded… Another Drabblecast doubleheader special, featuring two stories from from author John P. Murphy. Help support Norm’s New […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This, of course, is what comes of being overly friendly with strange mangoes. One day you’re a wide-eyed virgin, with nary a care in the world; the next, you find yourself most unexpectedly and all but inexplicably burdened in a manner that afflicts virgins only once every two thousand years or so, to the best […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Now if we, like those characters in recent movies, discovered specific clues in the world around us suggesting that we do in fact live in a simulation, we would of course consider those clues carefully to see what they say about how we should live our lives. — Robin Hanson Norm begins this episode of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Another of the Drabblecast’s vaunted Trifecta series. Three short stories, each with a unique twist. The episode begins with an interview of author J.R. Hamantaschen, Norm runs fingers through his troubled mind, learning of the seeds from which his horrors spring. The theme of this Trifecta: getting the boot – stories of rejection and alienation. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I passed the sign that read Warning: Shark Zone. The sun was setting, lighting up the tops of the condos sticking out of the water. They had been swallowed by the swollen ocean, when it spilled over, like everything else: the skyscrapers, the cars, the fast food joints, the schools and supermarkets and liquor stores… […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I take time-lapse photographs of an orange. The result is always the same. First I remove the previous orange from the spike in front of the black velvet backdrop and replace it with a new orange. I set an incandescent spotlight out of frame as a light source… Episode Sponsor: You Shall Never Know Security […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This episode of the Drabblecast presents “Followed” by Will McIntosh. Norm also starts to ponder the nature of the undead. We conclude In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear serial featuring cryptozoologist Connor Choadsworth. Following that is our feature story by Will McIntosh, author of Soft Apocalypse and the upcoming Hitchers. Story Excerpt: She came […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
His name was Marvin Kasselmeier, though he changed it to Marcus Magnus because he thought it sounded more impressive. He’d been a bright student, solitary and humorless, with no friends, and a single obsession: he wanted to live forever… Is eternal life real worth it? A demonic tale from Mike Resnick explores the question in the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Okay, no one expects eldritch horror in LA. Not that I know what eldritch horror really is. My old boyfriend (about fifteen boyfriends back) called anything that inspired dread “eldritch horror.” I guess that would describe my entire job, really… Another story from Lovecraft month – elder horror in LA. Dread Unlocks is on the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Achtromagk shuddered, lost in nightmare images: crimson lightning dotting a wasteland, twilight despair and feeble railings, isolation in a mewling throng. It thrashed and twisted but could not escape, could not stop the unwanted vistas in its mind. It was silent. And soft. And dark… Next up in Lovecraft month, a heart-warming tale of an […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim— Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name… To kick of Lovecraft Month Norm once again reads an H.P. Lovecraft classic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Planning to live forever, Tiktok?” The words cut through the bar’s chatter and gab and silenced them. The silence reached out to touch infinity and then, “I believe you’re talking to me?” a mech said… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
My earliest fear, the one I remember anyways, was of great pulp magazine robots with hot water heater bodies and vacuum tube eyes. My brother forbade me to touch his precious magazines, so I wouldn’t. I’d stare and stare at the covers through; hourglassed damsels in diaphanous gowns draped over thick slab altars, and the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
