PseudoPod 745: Cleaver, Meat, and Block

[Bdoomed]

PseudoPod 745: Cleaver, Meat, and Block

Author: Maria Haskins
Narrator: Larissa Thompson
Host: Alasdair Stuart
Audio Producer: Marty Perrett

“Cleaver, Meat, and Block” was originally published in Black Static #73 in January 2020.


The first thing Hannah learned when she came to live with her grandparents after the Plague, was how to wield the meat cleaver. Grandma taught her, guiding her hands in the backroom of the old butcher shop on Main Street. Showing her how to wrap her fingers around the handle, how to put her thumb on the spine of the handle for extra power and precision, how to let her wrist pivot when she cuts.

“You don’t need to be strong,” Grandma said. “The weight of the blade, the sharpness of the edge, is enough.”


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[Scattercat]

This story was amazing.  First zombie story in years that I've actively enjoyed. 

About halfway through I was getting really jazzed about the world it proposed and was going, "Man, I'd love to see a story that went into what it's like to know and remember what you did and have to hide it," and then it went ahead and got that wedged in with all the other bits in some sort of miraculous narrative Tetris that cleared, sharpened, and redirected the whole force of the story while leaving it somehow less cluttered and even more focused than before. 

More like this one, definitely yes please.