1) Peel their husks in an Autumn field and be the first person to be greeted by their vegetal grins as they leave the stalk.
2) Dig them free from the shallow mud behind the pens and baptize them with a garden hose
3) Set up body-sized lightning traps on the barn roof when heavy clouds roll in and capture cousins as they bolt from the heavens
4) See if your aunts or uncles have any kids
5) Rest in the sun ’til your skin tightens, then carefully peel yourself to find the cousin within
Follow Friday: Ash, The Gelded Twins, Yours Truly
It’s Follow Friday! This week, we recommend following:
Ash of Outside – He never looks behind him! You can follow him through the woods, under bridges, and even into the damp hole he calls home and he won’t notice. Follow away!
The Gelded Twins – Everyone who follows them ends up losing them in the Carnival of Silk. Maybe you’ll be the first to dodge the silk-weavers and their cold eyes and find out where the Twins roost!
Yours Truly – Not a trap! You can follow me! I’ll move slowly! You don’t need a torch where we’re going! Follow me! And when the air gets musky with spores, breathe deeply! It’ll help with the following!
mushrooms
It’s Friday and we all know what that means! It’s time to venture under our homes into the cool caverns in search of mushrooms! You’ll recognize them by their sightless eyes, their rubbery flesh, and the strange sounds they make when they’re harvested. These sounds sometimes resemble phrases, like “Who’s there?” and “Not again!” and “The Elders said these caves were safe! Life is a short misery!” Is this a form of camouflage? Our minds finding patterns where there are none? Who knows! Keep your knives sharp, your flashlights handy, and you should have a week’s worth of mushrooms in no time!
butter
Oh sure, everyone laughed when I carved replicas of them out of butter, but who’s laughing now? It’s my butter friends, and their laughter takes the form of goopy rivers dripping down their cheeks because we’re enjoying a day at the The Beach That Forbids the Presence of Doubters. That’s the official name, it’s on the sign and everything, and you’d know that if you were here or made of butter.
Thursday
It’s Thursday and we all know what that means! Time to grab your Whisper Journals and meet at the town’s center to compare notes! What have the Cold Voices hissed at you from under beds, from behind heavy furniture, from under the floorboards this week? Have any names been repeated? Are they still talking about me? If we don’t write it all down, we’ll never know when the hissing stories align into truth!
lost time incident 68 – money and toast for the rag-picker
lost time incident 68
Greetings, travelers! It’s been awhile since I’ve visited your Inbox. I like what you’ve done with the place. No need to thank me… I’m happy to improve the general tenor of your Inbox with my presence. Not every email has to be a newsletter from a vendors you bought something from once.
I just got back from watching a movie alone. I don’t do that often. I got a seatmate to the left of me, but about halfway through the film, he got up and walked out. I thought it was a restroom break, but he never came back.
Have you seen him? Kind of an old guy? Like the kind of old guy whose bladder could no way make it through a modern movie?
I didn’t check to see if the theater had replaced its Men’s Room with one of those imported-from-Knossos labyrinths like all the hip new places are doing. The trick to finding a urinal in one of those is to just pick a wall, left or right, and stick to it. Eventually you’ll find your way to the labyrinth’s dark heart where you’ll avoid eye contact with a minotaur who always seems to be standing in the way, drying his hands. How wet are your hands, fella? Just drying and drying.
Anyway, in this installment, we’ve got some more collected short pieces. They’re just below. Just… just look down. Keep scrolling. No, stop reading this part and go down.
Okay, well, I’m just going to stop typing here if you’re not going to follow directions. Then you’ll have no choice but to read below.
I’m doing it now. Here I go. Don’t think I won’t. I’m doing it. I’m doing it now.
top 5 secrets of the recently dead (and you won’t believe #3!)
1. The afterlife can not be described by words… only by touch. Surrender to the touch of the recently deceased. A cold palm against your cheek. You will know.
2. Coffins are not for containment. They are keys. They open the doors.
3. Where language fails, the self dilutes like salt in water.
4. A kicky red lipstick can reinvigorate your look! Match colors to scarves to really kick it up a notch!
5. The silence in graveyards is a pause in conversations, for your benefit. Move on.
it’s [day of the week] and you know what that means
It’s Saturday and we all know what that means! Time for the whole village to grab their sharpest knives and head to the orchard in search of the Apple King. If we find him on his branch, you’ll hear the cry of “Justice for the Pips!” as the knives strike home, banishing monarchism again from our fruit pastures.
It’s Saturday and we all know what that means! Time for the whole village to grab their sharpest knives and head to the orchard in search of the Apple King. If we find him on his branch, you’ll hear the cry of “Justice for the Pips!” as the knives strike home, banishing monarchism again from our fruit pastures.
It’s Tuesday and you know what that means! It’s time to gather the whole family and go down into the caverns as we do every week, drowning our worthless eyes in darkness, slipping into deep cold pools and gnashing cave fish with our needle-like brittle teeth. Fun for all! Except the fish! And the day ends, floating in the subterranean void, false stars of exertion in our vision, listening to the hum of the earth that will one day swallow us again.
cursive in schools
So glad kids aren’t being taught cursive anymore. Half the grimoires one can purchase in the Half-Green Market are nigh-unreadable, thanks to the lazy looped handwriting of mages and aetherpokers, running all their letters together EVEN BEFORE they get ghastslime, candle wax and cat hair on ’em.
Teach every junior candlewick bender and spirit knitter to PRINT, please, thank you, and we’ll happily spend fewer days haunted by accidentally-summoned eye-wights because we read some cursive J as a G.
ending theme song
What the hell’s an aetherpoker? I have no idea.
All I know is: the local rag-picker knows a spot where people just dump short fiction and he scoops it back up with a lucky pointy stick and when I hear his squeaky wheel going by, I lean my head out the window and shout “Hey, you got any fiction in there for me?” and he says “Sorta!” and then I lower my basket to street level with some coins and toast in it (he likes toast) and he sends me back this… stuff.
Eye-wights. “It’s Saturday.” This fiction isn’t fresh, that’s for sure. Days old. I don’t know what to make of it, but here you go. I can’t get that toast back. That toast is gone, gone, gone.
—Michael Van Vleet
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The Signal: EP138
The Signal: EP138 – Exactly 45 minutes of eclectic sounds from around the globe, carefully designed for your lifestyle… even if that lifestyle includes dangerous drives through desert landscapes, scrapping with biker gangs and dodging crude explosives on the dirt trails.
We’ve got Bollywood sounds given dub treatment, Brazilian pop to get your hands clapping, Peruvian garage rock, cut-ups and funk, a musical exploration of Alzheimer’s and more!
Download by clicking on the link (or image) above. The file is available only for a limited time. If you’re interested in the tracklist, it’s in the mp3 itself, in the id3 tags. Or, if you sign up to be a member of our mailing list, The Tuned In, you’ll be among the first on the planet to know when a new mix is posted, and you’ll get a permanent archive link and the entire playlist, delivered to your inbox.
death to the apple king
It’s Saturday and we all know what that means! Time for the whole village to grab their sharpest knives and head to the orchard in search of the Apple King. If we find him on his branch, you’ll hear the cry of “Justice for the Pips!” as the knives strike home, banishing monarchism again from our fruit pastures.
damn it, gary
There’s always that one guy in your cult who’s always tugging at his robes, saying “this fabric doesn’t BREATH” but when it’s time to pay dues for the robe budget, he always forgot his wallet in his other robes, the red ones for sacrifices, and it’s like “That’s what you said last time, Gary, and we KNOW you had to pay for parking to get here, so what’s up with that, GARY?”
It’s Friday! Green Sleep
It’s Friday and you know what that means! It’s time to gather your fingerling gems and head down to the A N S W E R S P I T! Every gem you lick and drop down into the pit is one more day The Greenish Lady will sleep down there in the dark, blanketed in jewels, every moistened gem facet a plummeting kiss to her cheek. While she dreams, our children grow and the village prospers. May none of us live to see Her wake!