PseudoPod 638: ARTEMIS RISING 5: A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar

[Bdoomed]

PseudoPod 638: ARTEMIS RISING 5: A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar

Author: Maria Haskins
Narrator: Jen R. Albert
Hosts: Matt Saye, Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger

“A Strange Heart, Set In Feldspar”  was first published in the anthology Abandoned Places (Shohola Press), published in March 2018


Show Notes

“I go back to visit Sweden pretty much every summer, staying in my parents’ summer house in the northern part of the country. Mining, and specifically mining for gold and copper, really shaped the economy in that part of the country, and this story was partly inspired by an old abandoned mine site we visited one year. It’s also inspired by the way the land in Sweden rises by about 8 mm every year, and has done ever since the ice melted after the last ice age. It’s a phenomenon called “post-glacial rebound” that causes visible changes in the landscape over time, and means that the coastline was in a very different position centuries and millennia ago. Ultimately though, this story was inspired by motherhood, by the way it binds you to your kids in ways that can be difficult to understand and express.”


Please consider supporting this Kickstarter for a new collection of short stories by Tim Pratt.

Revisit his stories here on PseudoPod:

597: Fools Fire

205: Gulls

172: The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft (with Nick Mamatas)

123: Bone Sigh

…plus oodles more on our sister podcasts.


Beneath

Alice is kneeling in the darkness, breathing hard, heart thumping behind her ribs.

The kids are gone. She feels it in her cold flesh and aching bones, as surely as she felt them being pulled out of her body at the hospital when she gave birth to each of them all those years ago.

She calls their names anyway: “Anne! Lisa! Eric!”, but they don’t answer.

The guide is nowhere to be found either, but she doesn’t really want to think of him anyway, that smile turned to lips and teeth, the way he shook his head when she asked for help before he sunk into the darkness without a trace.

The tunnels of the old mine seem to throb and twist and shift around her, like the intestine of some strange, gigantic animal; she has to reach out and touch the rough walls on either side to steady herself and stop the world from lurching.

What now?



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[Scattercat]

"Congratulations!  You're actually a good mother, and your reward is to live in a world where you are constantly on the brink of starvation, where you will never again be clean or free of disease or parasites, and in which your children can expect to live to the ripe old age of forty or so before keeling over due to one of their many infections!"

The tour guide is a douchenozzle.