Pseudopod 445: Sweetnessby
B.C. Edwards“Sweetness” first appeared in 2010 in the anthology
ZOMBIALITY: A QUEER BENT ON THE UNDEAD (edited by Bill Tucker) and was reprinted in
THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE, Edwards’ debut collection of short stories. “When it comes to the classic zombie myth, I’ve always been curious about what it must feel like to change from human to monster. It seems to me something of a huge cop-out to have the transformation happen only after the person was dead. And I’ve always been interested in why zombies act the way they do. Why the hunger?”
B.C. EDWARDS work has appeared in
Mathematics Magazine, Hobart, The New York Times Magazine, and others. His debut collection,
THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE, was the winner of the 2011 Hudson Prize. His debut collection of poetry,
FROM THE STANDARD CYCLOPEDIA OF RECIPES, was released last year. He is a New York Foundation of the Arts 2014 Poetry Fellow, attended the graduate writing program at The New School in New York and lives in Brooklyn with his husband. you can see more at a fairly un-updated website (i.e. tumblr blog) by
B.C.E-N.Y.C.
Your narrator –
Sam Ferree – by day writes grants and copy for a small environmental nonprofit in the Twin Cities. By night, he scribbles stories, plays, and essays, when not procrastinating. He shares an apartment with a poet and two cats. Also, Sam has accidentally become very involved in the local storytelling community, serving as host of
Story Club Minneapolis and board secretary of
Story Arts of Minnesota. To learn more about Sam, visit his website
Samferree.com or follow him on Twitter @samferree.
“It starts in the back of the throat, that spot where coughs gets caught when you’ve got a cold. It is sweet, like too much caramel, like cheap air freshener, like that perfume my grandmother wore constantly and which always made me gag.
Now I wonder if this is the last time I’ll think about my grandmother.
It will consume me piece by piece until there is nothing left and I am one of those that has been overcome by it. That is how it works, they say. The people on the news say.”
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?