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 NashPseudopod 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.