EP739: The Nightmare Lights of Mars (Summer Flashback)

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Escape Pod 739: The Nightmare Lights of Mars (Summer Flashback)

Author: Brian Trent
Narrator: Veronica Giguere
Host: Alasdair Stuart
Audio Producers: Mat Weller and Adam Pracht

Escape Pod 739: The Nightmare Lights of Mars (Summer Flashback) was originally published as Escape Pod, episode 415 on September 27, 2013.

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Content Warning:
Language and scariness.


Before discovering the moths, Clarissa Lang stumbled blind in the Martian sandstorm and admitted she was about to die because of a painting.

Granules of sand flew past her head at 90 kph and crunched between her teeth. The storm hissed around her ears, a terrible insistence that she hush forever. There was no excuse for this death, Clarissa thought. Weather advisories had been in place for an hour. Her death would become a digital footnote, filed under foolishness, for all time.

She staggered blind and tacked through the needle-spray. Red sand piled around her neck and shoulders, grew around her mouth like exaggerated lipstick.
“Overlay!” she shouted — tried to shout — but her mouth instantly filled with gritty particulate. She panicked then, the first moment of true mindless panic. But the Martian Positioning Satellite had heard her cry: Maureen’s property map sprang up in her left eye, drawn scarlet against each blink.

The house was thirty meters northwest. Upwind.

Clarissa tucked herself into a protective ball and scuttled sideways, like a crab. The sand struck her exposed hands and face in a shifting, relentless wave.

I’ll never make it.


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[Languorous Lass]

Not a fan of this one.  I didn’t like that the one-note abusive spouse was a lesbian, especially since the writer is male.  The characterization just appears gratuitous.  If there had been some nuance to the character I might have felt differently.  As it was, I couldn’t even finish the story.