Pseudopod 369: Four Views Of The Big Cigar In Winterby
Charlie Bookout“Four Views Of The Big Cigar In Winter” placed in a contest held by a publisher called
Zharmae and it was to be printed in an anthology due out in the spring of 2014. Zharmae’s editor, Travis Grundy, contacted me saying that he’d scrapped the anthology. A link to the Kindle edition of the story can be found at
www.maxavalon.com.
CHARLIE BOOKOUT lives with his family in Gentry, Arkansas — a creepy little town that’s a stone’s throw from the hillbilly infested Ozark Mountains. He belongs to a group of rural artists who, years ago, converted our home town’s old mortuary into a funky project studio for music, film, and strange art that defies description. They did their nineteenth annual haunted house this past Halloween, and it was a scream. (It is a mortuary after all.) – check out
Mortuary Studios and
Facebook. His music can be purchased
here. His science fiction short “
One Sixth Gravity of The Heart” is scheduled to appear on the podcast
Wily Writers this coming April. It will be edited by
Guild Wars 2 designer
Angel Leigh McCoy and
Ghost Hand author
Ripley Patton.
Your readers this week include:
Emily Smith (who works as a physician in central California to keep her cats and dogs in kibble and afford her excessive reading habits),
Matt Franklin (who is a narrative developer and vocal talent working in the game design industry. He tweets through
@angusonair, and would like to thank his director,
Pauline Lu, for continued support) and
Laura Hobbs (who works in infosec by day and is a random crafter by night. Twitter is her social media of choice, and she despises the word “cyber”. When asked nicely, she sometimes reads things for people on the internet. You can find her online at
soapturtle.net.
“She watched him tromp away and quickly disappear into the blizzard. Had he survived a little longer, she would have given him the big news he was dreading. But a madman with a hammer would find him that afternoon and mercifully spare him the trouble.
Her tears were starting to freeze on her cheeks. She yawned and looked to the east. Snowflakes swirled against the fragile glow like volcanic ash.
No one would see her. Everyone else was indoors: listening to the weather guy for closings, checking the cocoa supply, planning snow forts. She had observed that Arkansans, as a rule, did not prepare for snow—not like their neighbors to the north—and that the residents of Cedar Hill were particularly myopic. They would weave along slick streets like drunkards. They would entrust their children to the talents of school bus drivers who had established records of vehicular homicide. They would neither chain their tires nor salt their bridges. They would pretend that nothing had changed. But only to a point. When a storm like this one came around, even Cedar Hill gave up and stayed home. Bone-aching winter had assailed the Ozark Plateau like a nocturnal predator, and all the other rabbits were snug in their warrens. No one would see her.
No one but the crow on the branch above her.”
Nick Winnick – Pseudopod Assistant Editor and all around great guy – is available for editing at
Pixel Ink Editing
Just a quick note – this episode of Pseudopod was released with a technical snafu. It has now been corrected but we ask you to please redownload it, as part of the story was missing. Thanks!
Listen to this week's Pseudopod.