Author Topic: EP685: A Vocabulary of Remorse  (Read 1705 times)

divs

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on: July 12, 2019, 08:20:05 PM
Escape Pod 685: A Vocabulary of Remorse


Author : Dantzel Cherry
Narrator : Ellora Sen-Gupta
Host : Benjamin C. Kinney
Audio Producer : Adam Pracht

A Vocabulary of Remorse was originally published as winner of the Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Short Story Contest in October 2017 in the anthology A Practical Guide to the Resurrected.

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“Well, Mrs. Rojas, the good news is that it’s contagious. I can safely state that pneumonia has never had such a positive outcome before.”

Dr. Robyn’s smile crinkled at the corners, as sharp and as numerous as the creases in the medical consent form that Lorelei had folded into an elephant, like the ones she’d been studying in Brahmagiri just before she took ill four days ago.

“Are… you sure?” she said. It was still astonishing to hear her own vocal chords. They weren’t soft and mellifluous like the rain dripping from the cherry blossom petals after the storm. They weren’t sharp, silvery and musical like the flute her son Casper played every afternoon at two-thirty. They weren’t a mellow alto like her sister’s. Her voice was croaked and cracked, an overeager frog at the far end of a drought-stricken remnant of a pond.

And yet it was a voice.


Listen to this week’s Escape Pod!
« Last Edit: July 12, 2019, 08:30:15 PM by divs »



CryptoMe

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Reply #1 on: February 02, 2020, 09:31:38 PM
I love that this story grappled with the thorny ethical issue in a balanced way. One thing that I thought was missing from the discussion, though, is that the option to catch the pneumonia-cure will always be there, since the doctors took a sample to cure other people. So it's not a now-or-never deal. That puts the moral dilemma in whole different light, IMHO....