Return of the Freebies

A few of the great freebies from just the last couple of days. 




[Art for Drabblecast, linked in Audio Ficion below]



Fiction
• At The Colored Lens: "Shadow of the Rain Catchers – Part 1" by Dean Giles. Speculative Fiction .
      "The hang glider looked like a parrot with a broken wing, a patchwork of coloured cloth stitched together in a swooping arc across its five meter wingspan. The wings told the story of the last year of Ewan’s life. He had scrounged every scrap of material from old clothes, furniture, and even dried out rabbit hide."

• At Lightspeed: "Exogamy" by John Crowley. Fantasy.
     "In desperation and black hope he had selected himself for the mission, and now he was to die for his impetuosity, drowned in an amber vinegar sea too thin to swim in. This didn’t matter in any large sense; his comrades had seen him off, and would not see him return the very essence of a hero. In a moment his death wouldn’t matter even to himself. Meanwhile, he kept flailing helplessly, ashamed of his willingness to struggle."

• At Lightspeed: "Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris" by Carrie Vaughn. Science Fiction.
      "Harry looked out the window and thought: At least I saw Paris one more time before it was destroyed in the bombardment."

• At Nightmare Magazine: "Cry Room" by Ted Kosmatka. Horror.
       "The church looked normal from the outside. All steepled and angular in the way of good, rural Indiana churches of a certain age. Red brick and stained glass, St. Thomas Aquinas, surrounded on three sides by hot asphalt parking."

• At Project Gutenberg: "The Unwilling Professor" by Arthur Porges. Science Fiction. 1954.
     "The "Professor" had braved great perils to reach Earth, and believed he knew what he was up against. But he hadn't counted on the menace of Fatty Schultz and Irv Lece."

• At Short-Story.Me: "Fred" by Jeffery T. Ford. Science Fiction.
     "There are two-hundred sixteen stitches on a baseball. Its inner core is either rubber or cork. The baseball is wrapped in yarn that, if stretched, can reach up to a mile in length. The outside core that covers the tightly wrapped yarn is usually leather, sometimes plastic in the case of younger children."

• At Tor.com: "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu.
      "In the near future water falls from the sky whenever someone lies (either a mist or a torrential flood depending on the intensity of the lie). This makes life difficult for Matt as he maneuvers the marriage question with his lover and how best to “come out” to his traditional Chinese parents."

• At The World SF Blog: "Eagle Feathers" by Joyce Chng.
     "Noraishah watched the dance of the eagles in the air, her digital camera poised in her hands. She seemed to have forgotten about it, so transfixed was she to the dizzying spiralling movements of the sea-eagles. They were a mated pair, appearing frequently in the skies. As long as she could remember, there had always been a mated pair of Lang Siput. White-bellied sea eagles."

Flash Fiction

• At Daily Science Fiction: "A Hairy Predicament" by Melissa Mead.  
• At Every Day Fiction: "Third Time's the Charm" by Robert J. Santa. Fantasy.
• At Flashes in the Dark: "The Devil and Father Joseph" by Reed Beebe. Horror.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Run For Your Life" by Patricia Stewart. Science Fiction.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Protect The Weak" by Clint Wilson. Science Fiction.
• At Yesteryear Fiction: "The Field of Endallah" by Josh Susie.  Fantasy.

Audio Fiction
• At Drabblecast: "The Electric Ant" by Phillip K. Dick.
     "At four-fifteen in the afternoon, T.S.T., Garson Poole woke up in his hospital bed, knew that he lay in a hospital bed in a three-bed ward and realized in addition two things: that he no longer had a right hand and that he felt no pain."

• At PodCastle: "Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot" by Claire Humphrey. Fantasy.
     "Making friends with Ginevra was like taming a stray cat. First I started hanging around in areas where she might be found. If she showed, I didn’t approach her. I just stood there, smoking, or I read something, glancing at her secretly from behind my hair. Then I started catching her eye once in a while. Then I started smiling."

• At Protecting Project Pulp: “The Experiment In Gyro-Hats” by Ellis Parker Butler. Science Fiction.
     "The idea of a gyro-hat did not come to me all at once, as some great ideas come to inventors. In fact I may say that but for a most unpleasant experience I might never have thought of gyro-hats at all."

• At StarShipSofa: "Citizen-Astronaut" by David D. Levine.  Science Fiction.
      "You are probably also aware of the difficulties we've been having with funding and public opinion." We'd had people on Mars continuously for over eight years now. The initial discoveries of water and life -- frozen, sub-surface water and fossils of microscopic, long-extinct life -- had been newsworthy, but after that interest had declined steadily."

• At Tales of Old: "Memory is Translucent" by Adele Gardner. Horror.
     "Your good friend Dr. John Seward was found dead this morning in his office. The police thought at first that he died by his own hand, but the strenuous objections of all who knew him, and the escape of one of the more violent inmates, have called this verdict into question."