Episode 200: Running on Two Legs by Eugie Foster• Narrated by
Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali• Audio production by
Jeremy Carter• Originally published in The 3rd Alternative, Issue #40 (2004)
Eugie Foster was an American short story writer, columnist, and editor. Her stories have been published in a number of magazines and book anthologies, including Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Interzone. Her collections of short stories include Returning My Sister’s Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, published in 2009.
After receiving her master’s degree in psychology, she retired from academia to pen flights of fancy. She also edited legislation for the Georgia General Assembly, which from time to time she suspected were another venture into flights of fancy. She was also a director for Dragon*Con and edited their onsite newsletter, the Daily Dragon.
Eugie won the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for
Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast. She’s also been a finalist for the Hugo, Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press, and British Science Fiction Association awards.
Eugie died at Emory University Hospital on September 27, 2014 from respiratory failure, a complication of treatments for Large B-Cell Lymphoma. The day Foster died, Daily Science Fiction published her last short story, nominated for the Nebula award,
When it Ends, He Catches Her. The story ran on PseudoPod, and includes the Escape Artists’ tribute to this prolific and diverse author, and personal friend of many EA staff.
Eugie is another proud member of the Hat Trick club – she both narrated and published stories in all three Escape Artists’ podcasts. I’d like to think that running her story here, as our 200th episode, helps her maintain that record.
Her
website and
wiki pages detail the full range of her work.
‘Running on Two Legs’ is narrated by Podcastle’s assistant editor
Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali. Khaalidah lives in Houston, Texas with her husband of twenty-five years and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming and gardening.
She has a self-published novel entitled
An Unproductive Woman, has published at
EscapePod and has a story upcoming in the
An Alphabet of Embers anthology,
STRAEON 3, and
Diabolical Plots.
As Assistant Editor at PodCastle, she’s on a mission to encourage more women to submit SFF stories. Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality. You can catch her posts at her
website and you can follow her on
Twitter.
My mother used to tell stories of how I talked to animals when I was a little girl. And then she’d laugh when she described how indignant I got because no one believed they talked back.
I don’t remember much of that period of my life. There were a lot of hospitals—white rooms, other pale children next to me, all of us with clear IV tubes taped to our parchment paper skin—and doctors, smiling men with haunted eyes that they tried so hard to keep us from seeing. That’s mostly what I remember.Click here to listen to Episode 200Click here to read the text pf the storyTags: acceptance, cancer, Cast of Wonders, death, empathy, Eugie Foster, family, Fantasy, grief, illness, Jeremy Carter, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, loss, Modern Fantasy, talking animals, treatment, Young Adult fiction