Cathching Up

More tomorrow (Wednesday)










@AEG: "Steel on Steel" by Shawn Carman.

"Some found it unusual for the master of a great family such as the Yasuki to maintain a private residence outside of the family’s ancestral estate, but by this point in his career, Yasuki Jinn-Kuen had proven both successful enough and eccentric enough that no one bothered to question some of his odder habits any longer."

@Daily Science Fiction: "Meet Archive" by Mary E. Lowd.

"Archive was telling stories at the corner table when Cobalt Starstrong came in. Cobalt looked at the rapt audience, mostly Heffen refugees, and thought about joining them. Archive was a wonderful storyteller, but Cobalt had heard him before. So, he took a seat at the bar"

@Daily Science Fiction: "Everyone Gets Scared Sometimes" by Ari B Goelman.

"She wonders sometimes if it really happened. The zombies and her daddy and his axe. If it happened, it seems to her, the city would be different. There would be fewer cars on the streets. The traffic lights wouldn't work. Her favorite bakery wouldn't be there, not if all that stuff had happened."

@Kasma: "Life Plus Seventy" by Ken Liu.

"She was still in her stage outfit, a tight, bright red leather hobble dress with rings of meter-long spikes around the collar and waist that looked frightening and couldn't have been comfortable to wear. I doubt she could have sat down even if she wanted to..."

@Mindflights: "Pocket Gods" by Philip Hoshiwara.

"They called them pocket gods. Nobody knew what to make of the little wooden figures that began appearing all over the world, buried just below the earth's surface."

@Ray Gun Revival: "Thousand War Soldier" by Mjke Wood.

"My first life: 7.24 seconds. I became aware. I looked. I experienced pain. I died."

Serial Fiction
@Paizo: "Blood and Money - Chapter Four: Death in the Family" by Steven Savile

"Blind optimism wasn’t a particularly useful trait for an assassin. Isra was neither blind nor optimistic. He knew full well that Faris could not be trusted, no matter how generous an offer his own skin was."

Audio
@Escape Pod: "Thanksgiving Day" by Jay Werkheiser, read by Paul Haring.

He bent down to look into the nearest cage. “Maybe you’ll tell us why the food here is poisonous,” he said to one of the rats inside. It rolled its dull eyes listlessly toward him. Rust-brown clumps matted its fur, and the metallic odor of dried blood hung in the air.

@PodCastle: "This Strange Way of Dying" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, read by Marguerite Croft.

Georgina met Death when she was ten. The first time she saw him she was reading by her grandmother’s bedside. As Georgina tried to pronounce a difficult word, she heard her grandmother groan and looked up. There was a bearded man in a top hat standing by the bed. He wore an orange flower in his buttonhole, the kind Georgina put on the altars on the Day of the Dead.

@Pseudopod: "The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise" by Gemma Files, read by Julia Rios,

“‘Yet here we sit snug and warm and dry nonetheless, traders and settlers and immigrants bound for even more distant places alike, before this open, welcoming fire; here we may eat and drink our fill and go ‘round the circle in turn, each of we travellers swapping a story for our place beneath this roof ‘till morning. And I will be more than glad to add my own contribution to that roster, if only it should please you to bend your ear and listen.”

Serial Audio
@Cthulhu: "The Damned - part 7"