Great Freebies, Bad QD Radio

Some great freebies this morning.  There's a trio of free fiction stories (including a horror story by Lisa Tuttle), some flash fiction (including a Cat Rambo story), and several worthy audio fiction stories (including readings of Philip K Dick and W.W. Jacobs classic "The Monkey's Paw")

 For more great freebies, don't forget to check out SF Signal, Best science Fiction Stories, Variety SF, and Free SF Reader.  All great sites!

 Today's QD Radio is "Almost Human" on Dimension X.  [If you haven't  listened to the prior episodes of Dimension X, don't listen to this one. It's possibly the worst episode of the series.]

[Today's art is from "Monkey's Paw" in the audio fiction section]

Fiction
• At Black Gate: “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye” by John R. Fultz. Fantasy.
      "The haunted city lay sleeping at the feet of the mountains, a gray collection of antique architecture encircled by a granite wall. A monolith rose from its central plaza, crowned by a crimson orb that refracted starlight, painting the streets with bloody shadow. Pale ghosts wandered along the avenues, silver phantasms gliding through vermilion, while the living stayed locked inside their shuttered houses."

• At Nightmare Magazine: "Need" by Lisa Tuttle. Horror.
       "After ballet, Corey liked to walk home through the cemetery. The grounds were large and well tended and offered the visitor a wealth of picturesque monuments and sentimental gravestone inscriptions, some of them dating back before the Civil War. There were columns, slabs, and spheres in abundance of the pinkish marble that was quarried locally, and among the mausoleums built to look like temples, chapels and houses was one defiant pink pyramid."

• At Weird Fiction Review: "Ajantala, the Noxious Guest" by Amos Tutuola.
      “It is time now for you to suspend killing bush animals, for if you continue to do so you will kill the baby that your wife is going to deliver when it is time, and she will deliver of a terrible creature in the form of a baby when it is time for her to deliver.”

Flash Fiction

• At Daily Science Fiction: "Fool's Gold" by Melissa Mead. 
• At Every Day Fiction: "The Passing of Grandmother's Quilt" by Cat Rambo. Weird Fantasy.
• At Yesteryear Fiction: "Wrong Number" by Chris Sharp. Fantasy.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Librarian" by Jae Miles. Science Fiction.

Audio Fiction
• At Drabblecast: "I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee" by Christopher Reynaga. Horror.
      Don’t call me anything at all. Give me my pint of piss-poor ale and leave me be in this yellowed corner where men relieve themselves when they are too lazy to make three extra stumbling steps to the streets of Nantucket."

• At Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences: Tales from the Archives — A 2012 Christmas Special by Phillipa Ballantine. Steampunk.
      "It’s Christmas Eve, and Verity Fitzroy finds herself distracted from her duties with the Ministry Seven. When she endangers her fellow urchins, she begins to question her role in their life."

• At StarShipSofa: "How I Lost Eleven Stone and Found Love" by Ian Creasey. Science Fiction.
      "The magazine's story was a heartwarming tale of someone finding romantic fulfilment, after losing weight through the conventional methods of diet and exercise.  I thought it would be much more interesting if you could lose weight by owning an alien flesh-eating parasite that would crawl across your skin, insert its proboscis deep into your body, then feast upon your flabby torso."

• At SFFaudio: "Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield. Fantasy.
    "Miss Brill, an English teacher working in France, lives in a small room near the Jardains Publique. Every Sunday she visits the gardens and listens to the music of the band, admires the attire of her fellow park-goers, and eavesdrops on their conversations."

• At SFFaudio: "Of Withered Apples" by Philip K. Dick
      "Lori picked the leaf up. It was old and brown. Her heart skipped a beat as she slipped the leaf into the pocket of her jeans. Against her loins the leaf cut and tingled, a little hard point piercing her smooth skin and sending exciting shivers up and down her spine. "

• At Tales of Old: "The Monkey’s Paw" by W.W. Jacobs. Horror.
      “That’s the worst of living so far out,” bawled Mr. White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; “of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses on the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.”