Author Topic: Pseudopod 429: Flash On The Borderlands XXIV: Femme Fatales  (Read 4466 times)

Bdoomed

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Pseudopod 429: Flash On The Borderlands XXIV: Femme Fatales

“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.”
La Belle Dame sans Merci, John Keats



“The Lady With The Lantern” by Charlotte Nash

Pseudopod is the first publication of “The Lady With The Lantern . The lady with the lantern is a nautical folktale. This borrows the name, but re-imagines a very different spectre.

CHARLOTTE NASH is an Australian writer with degrees in engineering and medicine. Her speculative fiction short stories are published in Australia and overseas, and range from near-future cyberpunk and science fiction to contemporary fantasy and horror. She is also the author of rural medical romance novels. Find all her works at Stories From A Life Imagined. Another mining-related dark fantasy/horror tale, “The Seven-Forty From Paraburdoo” will be published in the forthcoming NEVER NEVER LAND anthology.

Your reader – Ron Jon – was featured in a showcase in Pseudopod 377: Showcase: The Dark Audio Tone Poems of The Spectre Collector. Ron Jon has written and published children’s books; scripts and screenplays for animation and live action; musical lyrics and libretti. He is a student of strange phenomena/parapsychology, horror and children’s literature. You can see his videos and hear more of his work on The Spectre Collector Blog and you can download his albums on The Spectre Collector Bandcamp site. Also, be sure to check out the Killer Blood Shroom Cult hymns at The Fruits Of Madness.

“The mine called Callum in his tenth year. One morning, he was walking to school with the other boys; a pair of new shoes, a boiled sweet in his cheek. The next, he found a pick in his soft hand, and his feet followed his father’s to the cold, dark portal.”



“The Bleeding Game” by Natalia Theodoridou.

“The Bleeding Game” was first published online in the June 2013 issue of 713 Flash by Kazka Press.

NATALIA THEODORIDOU is a media and theatre scholar based in the UK. She has had work published in Clarkesworld, The Kenyon Review Online, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and elsewhere. She is nominated for a Rhysling award. Find her at Natalia-Theodoridou.com. One of her stories will be reprinted in The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, forthcoming in December 2014 anthology.

Your reader – Sean Sorrentino – makes his first appearance on PSEUDOPOD with this tale.

“She died two weeks ago. I found her again yesterday. She must have been around twenty when I first saw her again.

It’s not that I wanted to die–I didn’t, not really. I just needed to feel something, anything. I grabbed the x-acto knife and sliced. It was little more than a deep scratch really, just below the elbow. The sound of ripping flesh surprised me–I didn’t know we did that when you cut us open, wasn’t expecting to hear anything–but otherwise it felt good. A little pain, to make sure I was alive. Then a rush of adrenaline on seeing the blood well up, hot and red and mine. And then a flash of neon and that sound, like a record skipping, something being ripped apart, and she was there, or rather I was then.”




“Making Paint As A Means Of Impermanence” by Jeff Bowles.

“Making Paint As A Means Of Impermanence” is appearing here for the first time anywhere.

JEFF BOWLES
(usually) was born and bred in high country Colorado. He’s written and published everything from Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror to Creative Nonfiction and Poetry. His writing has appeared in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Nashville Review, and Penumbra eMag. Jeff is currently earning his Creative Writing MFA at Western State Colorado University. This story’s never before seen publication, but Jeff is a Pseudopod fan and can’t think of a better home for his work. Jeff lives with his wife out on the vast, wide open eastern plains of Colorado.

Your reader – Misty Dawn – describes herself as part warrior and part pacifist, owing to her Comanche and Cherokee heritage. She credits her mother with encouraging her two greatest loves…music and horror, and H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King with teaching her to embrace the darkest corners of her imagination, and to coax those things living within to come out and play. She is currently working on her blog Deadtime Musings, from Dusk to Misty Dawn, to include short stories of horror, both real and imagined as well as poetry and lyrics, also of a dark nature. A Navy brat who grew up abroad, she settled in San Francisco, where she studied drama and music. She has written for and performed with several rock bands on both coasts and currently resides in a quiet suburb of Pittsburgh with 3 humans, 2 Beta fish and a Pomchi named Rose..

“Remember the first time you painted me all over your dead wife? Remember how we danced and danced, on into the night, under the leaves of the tall, ghostly aspen trees? Remember how you made love to her just as the sun rose, and though it was autumn, and though she’d been dead hours already, you somehow thought things could stay that way forever?

I think knowing you is just like knowing God.”





Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


wintermute

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Reply #1 on: March 13, 2015, 11:18:24 PM
I've not listened yet, but shouldn't it be "Femmes Fatales"?

Science means that not all dreams can come true


Megaflow

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Reply #2 on: March 14, 2015, 12:50:55 AM
Thanks to Alasdair for the shout-out for my graphic novel Casefile: Arkham (currently funding/pre-selling on Kickstarter)! It's horror/detective noir, and I'm pretty sure if you're a Pseudopod fan you'll be interested. Feel free to stop by and take a look:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/309827462/case-file-arkham



Fenrix

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Reply #3 on: March 14, 2015, 12:05:03 PM

I've not listened yet, but shouldn't it be "Femmes Fatales"?


The American destruction of French grammar and assimilation of terms and anglicizing them is its own meta-horror.

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”


wintermute

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Reply #4 on: March 16, 2015, 05:17:20 PM
If it were being Anglicized, it would surely become "Femmes fatale", in the same form as "Secretaries General" or "mothers-in-law". I imagine the S in "Femmes" would be pronounced, unlike in the French.

Science means that not all dreams can come true


Fenrix

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Reply #5 on: March 16, 2015, 07:00:13 PM

If it were being Anglicized, it would surely become "Femmes fatale", in the same form as "Secretaries General" or "mothers-in-law". I imagine the S in "Femmes" would be pronounced, unlike in the French.


You keep yer damn stinkin' Latin grammar rules out of my English neologisms (which is a lot more common than you fear).


All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”


Unblinking

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Reply #6 on: March 17, 2015, 03:35:31 PM
"The Lady With the Lantern"
I saw the end of this one coming, when talking about the depth of "plots" in feet that were slowly approaching 6 feet, all neatly rowed up with each other, made me think of burial plots early on.  But that's not a real complaint, this is a story about seeing the inevitable approach of the reaper from far away, you see the light at the end of the tunnel and it fills you with hope even as it kills you.

"The Bleeding Game"
Ooh, this one was EPIC.  So damned good.  Great use of time travel, the characters all felt very real even as they were destroying themselves and each other.  They were both motivated by love and it killed them both.

"Making Paint as a Means of Impermanence"
I didn't really get into this one.  In part because I didn't really understand what the walky paint was actually supposed to accomplish.  So he paints pictures on his wife's corpse every day.  Weird, yes, disturbing, certainly especially since he murdered her with her agreement to do it.  But I didn't understand what was actually being painted, nor what exactly I was supposed to think the thinking paint actually was. 



Dwango

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Reply #7 on: March 18, 2015, 06:59:06 PM
I liked the Lady with the Lantern for its classic scary tale feel and strong allegory to life.  The second one was really disturbing to me how they destroyed their lives in such a coupled manor and with the descriptions of the cutting.  I didn't like that as much, but appreciate how it did its thing and did it well.  The third story I just did not get.  It was the paint talking that was just strange and a bit demented and, while creepy, a little too weird in the love for it's god.  I really appreciate the out-trough on that one so I kind of understand what the author was getting at, but I just didn't like the point of view.



misty dawn

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Reply #8 on: March 20, 2015, 03:10:09 AM
"The Lady With the Lantern"
I saw the end of this one coming, when talking about the depth of "plots" in feet that were slowly approaching 6 feet, all neatly rowed up with each other, made me think of burial plots early on.  But that's not a real complaint, this is a story about seeing the inevitable approach of the reaper from far away, you see the light at the end of the tunnel and it fills you with hope even as it kills you.

"The Bleeding Game"
Ooh, this one was EPIC.  So damned good.  Great use of time travel, the characters all felt very real even as they were destroying themselves and each other.  They were both motivated by love and it killed them both.

"Making Paint as a Means of Impermanence"
I didn't really get into this one.  In part because I didn't really understand what the walky paint was actually supposed to accomplish.  So he paints pictures on his wife's corpse every day.  Weird, yes, disturbing, certainly especially since he murdered her with her agreement to do it.  But I didn't understand what was actually being painted, nor what exactly I was supposed to think the thinking paint actually was. 
Yes, a strange one indeed. When I first read the story, before deciding if I could narrate it, I was also more than a little confused about exactly what was going on. But after reading a few more times, I realized it's basically a twist on the zombie theme, and that it's pretty darn brilliant  :o. Finding a voice for paint proved to be a challenge...until I decided to play it as detached love, and an awe for my "Creator". Listen again if you're so inclined. I love how Jeff took a very old tried and true genre, and "painted" it over in his own unique style.

If I had to give a short summary I'd say it's the story of a man/boy wanting to play God..and finding and convincing a dying woman he could offer her immortality. But I urge you to pay close attention to Alistair's closing remarks, as he obviously has a firm grasp of what lies below and beyond my simple explanation.