For the Drabblecast’s 28th trifecta anthology, we explore ‘changes of heart.’ EARTH MUSIC By Miriah Hetherington A potted arrangement of anemones recoiled from Polbo’s wake of odorous irritation as he jetted through the passageway. His meeting with the Grand Curator of the Inter-species Museum of Music […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Call her Anlic. The first time she woke, she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine. At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black hole’s gravity was so strong that […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
My boss, Danny, liked to brag that El Corazon was the best Tex-Mex restaurant just off the Vegas Strip. “Because of you, Bescha,” he’d say to me. “You keep the customers happy. You keep me out of trouble.” I won’t say which part of my job was harder. I kept an eye on the help-wanted […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An oral history, recorded in the annals of sentientkind, spoken by Sven Al’bedo di’Cantara, on the eve of the ninth flying. 1. The Tree And so it came to pass, in the years past reckoning, when I served as a scribe in the court of the king, that there stood the last and only tree. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hunger has made you reckless. You track the sound of human voices through the woods until you find a man and a woman. They are shouting at each other. The woman slaps the man’s face. He presses his hand to his cheek for a moment, and then lunges at the woman, knocking her to the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The moon came up and the sun went down. The moonbeams went shattering down to the ground and the jackalope wives took off their skins and danced. They danced like young deer pawing the ground, they danced like devils let out of hell for the evening. They swung their hips and pranced and drank their […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I’m not employed by the store. They don’t pay my wages. I’m with a security firm, but we’ve had a contract here for a long time, and I’ve been here for most of it. This is where I know people. I’ve been a guard in other places—still am, occasionally, on short notice—and until recently I […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lawson was already regretting the decision to go shopping by the time he was standing in line waiting to buy a ticket for the tube. All but one of the time- and labour-saving automatic ticket dispensers was either closed or unable to give change, and it was all he could do not to let out […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The magician’s table was covered by a sheet of plywood, four feet square, completely wrapped up in aluminum foil. Sugar magic was messy magic, and the foil made for easier cleanup. Scattered across the aluminum were misshapen chunks of candy, the seeds from which the carnival would grow. And grow it did. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The devil lives in Houston by the ship channel in a high-rise apartment fifty-seven stories up. They say he’s got cowhide sofas and a pinball machine and a telescope in there that can see past the oil refineries and across Pasadena all the way to the Pope in Rome and on to where them Arabs […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thank you, Inspector. I’m ready. Yes, I understand my rights as a resident extraterrestrial. No, that won’t be necessary. Of course. Ask me anything. I only wish to see justice done. It grieves me to say so, but I concur. There’s no doubt about who murdered Lord Ash. Half a Conversation, Overheard […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Drabblecast April Fool’s Day episode! Recorded live: A Drabblecast story slam that took place March 27th 2014 in Baltimore Maryland at the EMP Art Collective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This happened about ten years ago, out at Tobin Farm. Back in the sixties, somebody bought Tobin Farm for the purposes of holding a renaissance fair there during the summers. Off seasons it became a kind of commune for the people involved in putting on the fair. They lived modestly in sheds and trailers scattered […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You do not know me yet, my love, but I can hear you in my future. You are there from the beginning–at first just a few stray notes, but your presence quickly grows into a beautiful refrain. I wish you could hear time as I do, my love, but this song was never meant to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week’s column is not about a restaurant, exactly, but about a memory. A distinct and painful memory, like a softened tooth you can’t help but poke at with your tongue to see if it still hurts. A memory of seafood. (That sounds like one of those divine collections, doesn’t it, like a flight of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It was 8:34 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it was almost the end of the world. Actually, the world was expected to end on Friday, at precisely 5 p.m., eastern daylight time. This was not a forecast, or a projection: it was more like an appointment. On Friday at 5 p.m. eastern, a thousand high-powered […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“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. The Blue Celeb by Desmond Warzel When me and Joe got […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. The Blue Celeb by Desmond […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl, and a love story. DAY MILLION by Frederik Pohl On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thomas takes his lunch outside the shelter, on one of the park benches that look out over the interstate and down all the way to the containment pond. He has wondered whether a passerby seeing him from the highway would know whether he worked at the shelter or was one of its clients. He has […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2249 A.D. All the young Kirks in Riverside Public High School are assigned to the same Homeroom class. They sit together in the back corner on the far side from the door. They speak only to each other. The young Kirk on the Moon goes to school with no one. Each of the colonists has […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week the Drabblecast Presents “Happy Old Year” by Tim Pratt. Tim is a regular Drabblecast contributor, bringing us such classics as Postapocalypsemas, Rangifer Volans, and fan-favorite Morris and the Machine. He also runs a Patreon page where you can read and download a new, unpublished story from Tim every month for a little as […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
IT HAPPENED IN BRYANT PARK, a little after six o’clock in the evening. He was sitting by himself in lamp shadow amongst the trees, at one of the rickety green metal tables along the north side, close to where the Barnes & Noble library area is during the day. He was warmly dressed in nondescript, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
While sipping my tea in the morning, I find a small, only two inches long, naked female corpse on the bottom of the cup. Her white skin fades int the white porcelain, tiny gobs of tea leafs cover her round breasts. I immediately slap the cup down, and snick across to the phone to call […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The squid is a solipsistic psychopathic God with a lust for submarine hull and a mandate from Ronald Reagan branded on its hunting tentacles. It sweeps east from Iceland in the cold under the thermocline, alone in the dark, solitary lord of a solitary place. TESTIMONY BEFORE AN EMERGENCY SESSION OF […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rick takes the money the Mayor of Corkscrew has wired him and flies to Florida, feeling his oats, full of hope. He’s met at the airport by one of Mayor Delameter’s staff and driven to his hotel, the old but clean and dry Swamp Hotel in downtown Corkscrew. The next morning he’s out at the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This romantic comedy begins where all low-budget ’50s creature-features ended: The mutant insects born of atom-bomb radiation (or invaders from space, or monsters from the sea, or fifty-foot women) have at last been defeated and our small-town hero, with girlfriend Janie or June or Betty at his side, must now face the rest of his […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“I don’t really see where this problem has anything to do with me,” the CIA man said. “And, frankly, there are a lot of more important things I could be doing.” Ford, the physicist, glanced at General LeRoy. The general had that quizzical expression on his face, the look that meant he was about to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. We all knew who it was. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
