Author Topic: PseudoPod 775: Miss Mack  (Read 947 times)

Bdoomed

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on: September 23, 2021, 04:13:24 AM
PseudoPod 775: Miss Mack

Author: Michael McDowell
Narrator: Jessica Nettles
Host: Alex Hofelich
Audio Producer: Chelsea Davis

“Miss Mack” was first published in the 1986 anthology Halloween Horrors



When Miss Mack showed up in Babylon in the late summer of 1957, nobody knew what to think of her. She had come from a little town called Pine Cone, and had a brother back there who did ladies’ hair in his kitchen. Miss Mack was a huge woman with a pig’s face, and short crinkly black hair that always looked greasy. Her vast shapeless dresses of tiny-patterned fabric seemed always to have been left too long in the sun. She always wore tennis shoes, even to church, because, as she candidly admitted, any other sort broke apart under her weight.

She wasn’t old by any means, but a woman of such size and such an aspect wasn’t regarded in the usual light, and nobody in Babylon gave any thought to Miss Mack’s age. For seven years she had traveled all over Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, doing advance and setup work for the photographer who came in and took pictures of the grammar school children. She had been to Babylon before, on this very errand, and the teachers at the grammar school remembered her. Now the photographer was dead, and Miss Mack returned to Babylon. She showed the principal of the grammar school her college diploma and her teacher’s certificate from Auburn University, and said, ‘Mr Hill, I want you to give me a job.’

Mr Hill did it, not because he was intimidated, but because he had a vacancy, and because he knew a good teacher when he saw one.




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Scuba Man

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Reply #1 on: September 23, 2021, 01:04:01 PM
Did other listeners enjoy it? I had a tough time with it.  :(

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Fenrix

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Reply #2 on: September 24, 2021, 02:16:27 AM

Did other listeners enjoy it? I had a tough time with it.  :(


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c210344

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Reply #3 on: September 24, 2021, 05:41:11 PM
Wow, in 11 years of listening to Pseudopod I've never been grabbed by a story like this before. I loved the normalcy of it all before it suddenly went pear-shaped for Miss Mack. Just got the ebook of Blackwater and am looking forward to reading everything this fellow wrote.