Author Topic: PseudoPod 552: The All or Nothing Days  (Read 5835 times)

Bdoomed

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on: July 23, 2017, 06:47:35 PM
PseudoPod 552: The All or Nothing Days

by Gus Moreno.

“The All or Nothing Days ” is a Pseudopod Original.

GUS MORENO is from the south side of Chicago, and his work has appeared in LitroNY, Bluestem Magazine, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Burnt Tongues” anthology, and a bunch of other places that are totally not defunct. He is currently working on a new novel.

This week’s reader – Maui Threv – was born in the swamps of south Georgia where he was orphaned as a child by a pack of wild dawgs. He was adopted by a family of gators who named him Maui Threv which in their language means mechanical frog music. He was taught the ways of swamp music and the moog synthesizer by a razorback and a panther. His own music has been featured over in episodes of Pseudopod. He provided music for the second episode ever released across the PseudoPod feed: Waiting up for Father. He also is responsible for the outro music for the Lavie Tidhar story Set Down This. He has expanded his sonic territory across all 100,000 watts of WREK in Atlanta where you can listen to the Mobius every Wednesday night. It is available to stream via the internet as well, and Threv never stops in the middle of a hoedown.



Info on Anders Manga’s album (they do our theme music!) can be found here.



Sometimes Ya-Ya would lie on the ground and look up at the sky, and in between sips from her mason jar she would point to clouds and call them out. That one looked like a shark, that one looked like a gun, that one looked like Donkey Kong. And I would always ruin it with my questions. What’s a shark? What’s a gun? What’s a Donkey Kong?

She would roll over and that meant she was over it. She grew impatient with me and with herself, with slipping and mentioning something that was before my time, and having to explain it to me, something that was so simple and obvious to her that she was reduced to stuttering because she couldn’t figure out how to explain what a computer was without me asking what plastic was, what an internet was. She’d rather talk about other stuff, like pyramids. She didn’t mind explaining to me their shape and precision, how no one knew how they were made. I imagined a mountain with flat sides, with the point of a knife at the top, when both of us laid in the red dirt after the sun fell and the stars covered the sky. She said pyramids generated their own energy. You could run a whole city off their magnetic power. They were beacons to lifeforms on other planets. They were built by a kind of human that was different than us. But the planet froze over and killed off this special strain, and the humans we descended from were the cowardly, spindly ones that knew how to hide and steal and survive.




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?


GreySkies

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Reply #1 on: July 25, 2017, 02:02:58 PM
I really loved all the twists and turns this story took, and the goosebump-inducing ending. Very well done!



cwthree

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Reply #2 on: July 28, 2017, 02:47:43 AM
This one took a couple of turns I absolutely wasn't expecting. As it began I thought, OK, we're in some kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia, the boy and Ya-Ya are survivors eking out an existence in the desert. When the police showed up, that was a surprise, but not entirely out of place. Why shouldn't a post-apocalyptic dystopia have some remnants of government trying to hold things together. The stuff that came next though - I couldn't have anticipated it. That's the point where the story became seriously disturbing. Thanks!



Ichneumon

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Reply #3 on: July 28, 2017, 05:07:20 PM
I agree with the other comments, I didn't see that coming.
He was ignorant of the horror of his life when he lived with YaYa, but afterwards he is exposed to the bigger world, it doesn't get functionality better for him, more due to other "normal" people than from his scars of his past.



JohnCombo

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Reply #4 on: August 02, 2017, 09:51:56 PM
Did anyone else have trouble hearing this episode. The audio changes drastically from clear the intro to low in the story and back to clear at the end at the end. I had to crank my audio player and Bluetooth speaker all the way up to hear it.



Ichneumon

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Reply #5 on: August 03, 2017, 01:13:49 AM
It seemed fine to me.



Sgarre1

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Reply #6 on: August 03, 2017, 11:10:50 AM
I checked with our audio producer and it was processed as normal - could it be your device? Please let us know if this week's sounds low to you as well.



Katzentatzen

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Reply #7 on: August 10, 2017, 03:52:57 AM
I'm morbidly interested in stories of serial killers, cannibalism, feral children, etc and this had them all. This kid is probably messed up for life, I felt his pull towards old cannibalistic behaviors at the end. It's how he was raised. I have mental illnesses, anxiety and depression, so I really appreciated Alasdair's postscript. Damage doesn't heal, it scars over and if you're very lucky nothing will happen that pulls those scars back to bloodiness. Few of us are lucky.

"To understand a cat you must realize that he has his own gifts, his own viewpoint, even his own morality."
--LILIAN JACKSON BRAUN