Archive for Rated R

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PodCastle 135: California King

Show Notes

Rated R: Contains violence, language, drug use, and Dave Thompson singing.


California King

by Michael J. Jasper and Greg van Eekhout

Our hero, a scrawny, bristle-haired man, softly sings a song he wrote when he was fifteen as he gives himself a new tattoo. He no longer remembers the verses, but the chorus goes something like: “Nyah-nyah, fuck-fuck, I’m the king, nyah-nyah, fuck-fuck.” Even after all these years, he finds the hook sort of catchy. His raspy tenor smoothes and deepens as he embeds dozens of carefully-spaced puncture wounds into his skinny right arm with his long, sharp knife, stealing the voice of the unconscious man upon whom he sits.

This will not be a big tattoo, we realize, for the real estate on our hero’s right arm has become quite crowded. Someday soon he’ll have to move on to his unmarked left. As he rubs a hanky soaked with berry dye and coal dust into the bloody dots, we watch a thin line of red trickle from the mouth of the motionless, waxy-skinned man beneath him. We see the scuffs and the ruined soles of our hero’s black boots, so recently applied against the skull of the man under him. But what we cannot see is what his tattoo will be. At least not yet.

We call this man, our hero, the California King.

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PodCastle 134: Corinthians


Corinthians

by Sam Schreiber

God chuckled at that, a basso rumbling that tickled the hairs on the back of your neck. He said He remembered buying the Sergeant Pepper LP like it was yesterday, which made a sense when you stopped to think about it. Then He told you how He met Paul McCartney at a bar in Manchester in the seventies. How they had both agreed over rounds that the rumors of their respective deaths had been greatly exaggerated.

It’s not hard to see why so many people love Him. Of course, long before you were born God was considered something of a bad boy, at least within the theological community. You’ve seen William Blake’s painting with His shaggy hair whipping through the air like a rock star’s and His byzantine muscles gleaming with cosmic power. Somewhere down the line, you think around the Italian Renaissance, God started to mellow out a little. These days His hair is white and puffy like Christopher Lloyd’s, but the look works for Him. He’s also put on a little weight over the last few centuries but that just makes Him feel safer somehow. Like a big, tame animal.

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PodCastle 133: And the Blood of Dead Gods Shall Mark the Score

Show Notes

Rated R for: violence, language and adult themes.

This week’s episode is sponsored by METAtropolis: Cascadia


And the Blood of Dead Gods Shall Mark the Score

by Gary Kloster

Huck smiled, and his smile stretched the pink rift of scar tissue that ran up from the corner of his jaw, across the twisted pit of his ruined right eye and onto his broad forehead. Before Nikolai’s betrayal, Huck’s face had been sternly handsome and the blood tatted into his dark skin had shone like lightning. That tat’s magic had made him beautiful and terrifying, like a storm rolling, and with a look he could make all the world his bitch. Now, left with just the scar and the spark of rage that still burned in the depths of his remaining eye, he had to be content with just scaring people shitless.

“Tribals are crap, redneck poser ink. Do yourself a favor and piss off.”

Two minutes after Huck banged in and my only customer that whole damn day was sulking out, a black dot of ink no bigger than a pimple hidden beneath his shirt. “Follow him out, Huck,” I said as the door rattled shut and I trashed the ink that I’d laid out for the job. “We’re done, remember?”

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PodCastle 131: Skatouioannis

Show Notes

Rated R: For language, and other shit.

Cooks Source links: Copyright Follies


Skatouioannis

by Nick Mamatas

The first time Skatouioannis made an appearance was the morning of the SATs. I had just started the ignition and was pulling out of the driveway when the ground gave way. It felt like I had hit a speed bump, or a kid, then it all went black. The edge of a shovel and a drizzle of broken glass woke me up – he was there, a silhouette with the sun behind his head, branches and telephone wires criss-crossing the sky, poking away at the windshield of my car, which was standing nearly straight up, the trunk and back seat in the sinkhole left by the collapsed septic tank. A mostly empty septic tank. The shovel came down hard.

I woke up in the hospital three days later, my first year’s tuition already spent on a new septic tank and driveway. Plus the medical bills. If there were big muddy footprints all around the front yard, they had been swept away before the doctors let me go home. Old, empty septic tanks collapse all the time, you know. It was another two seasons of mowing lawns for the little old ladies my mother knew from church before I actually got to go to school.

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PodCastle 130: Chemical Magic

Show Notes

Rated R: Contains Adult Themes


Chemical Magic

by Katherine Sparrow

Two months earlier the magician stood on the dance floor wondering how to magic his feet into graceful motion rather than the choppy glitched movement of a thirteen-year-old boy. He hated his dancing, but hated more those men who stood in the club’s shadows and watched without ever moving their bodies. So he bounced and swayed while his elbows jerked backwards in a hopeless gesture.

He hit something soft that squished and said “Ow.” He turned around to see a woman holding her breast and glaring at him. She had the kind of breasts he loved: round and droopy.

“Sorry,” he mouthed over the bass boom. She rolled her eyes.

He tried to elbow himself in the chest; it only seemed fair. But the laws of physics only allowed him a blow to the belly. At least it made her smile a little. It turned her hard-edged face lovely for a moment.

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PodCastle 129: Songdogs


Songdogs

by Ian McHugh

She led Carrick along the eroded bank, examining the creek bed in the moonlight. It was furrowed with flood channels and littered with rocks and small debris, but no patches of smooth sand that might indicate a jack-o-box lurking underneath.

He slipped going down the bank, despite Agnieska’s efforts to keep him upright. He knocked her off balance, too, and caught her a painful blow on the breast with his elbow as they slithered to the bottom. Carrick landed on top. He pressed the mittens onto her chest as he scrambled up, squashing the breath from her lungs. Agnieska got her arm in the way of his clumsy swing at her head, yelped as she caught the blow on the point of her elbow. Carrick staggered away, trying to run. His escape lasted only a handful of paces before the compulsion spell stopped him and he sprawled once again in the dust.

Agnieska surged to her feet, her patience shot. With a snarl, she kicked him over onto his back. From her coat pocket she took a pair of steel-bladed calf hooks.

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PodCastle 127: The Belated Burial


The Belated Burial

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Being buried when one is fully conscious and keenly aware of the confines of her narrow house and the stink of cemetery soil, these things are terrible, but, as she has learned, there is always something incalculably worse than the very worst thing that she can imagine. Miss Josephine has had centuries to perfect the stepwise procession from Paradise to Purgatory to the lowest levels of an infinitely descending Hell, and she wears her acumen and expertise where it may be seen by all, and especially where it may be seen by her lovers (whether they are living, dead, or somewhere in between). So, yes, Brylee objected, but only the halfhearted, token objection permitted by her station. And then she did as she was bidden. She dressed in the funerary gown from one of her mistress’ steamer trunks, the dress, all indecent, immaculate white lace and silk taffeta; it smells of cedar and moth balls. Amid the palest chrysanthemums and lilies, babies breath and albino roses, she lay down in the black-lacquered casket, which is hardly more than a simple pine box, and she did not move. She did not make a sound. Not breathing was, of course, the simplest part. Miss Josephine laid a heavy gold coin on each of her eyelids before the mourners began to arrive, that she would have something to give the ferryman.

“She was so young,” one of the vampires said, the one named Addie Goodwin.

“Your sorrow must be inconsolable,” said another, the man whom they all call simply Signior Garzarek, who came all the way from New York for the mock-somber ceremony in the ancient yellow house on Benefit Street.

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PodCastle Miniature 55: Ghost Market


Ghost Market

by Greg van Eekhout

Every third Tuesday of the month, they hold the ghost market beneath the Washington Street Bridge. You have to get there early if you want the best bargains, before the sun has a chance to warm the day.

“Hey, you wanna be a red-hot lover boy?”

I shrug. “Who doesn’t?”

Behind a folding table, in a stall built of PVC pipe and crinkled blue tarp, she’s shaped like a Willendorf Venus in a Che Guevara T-shirt. “Some people are scared to be red-hot lover boys,” she says, showing me an apparently empty beer bottle sealed with wax. “I knew this one personally. He was my neighbor. He fathered seventeen kids. Energetic, you know?” She winks. “He was in the act when his heart exploded.”

“How romantic,” I say, taking the bottle and holding it up to the gray-lilac sky. There’s nothing to see inside. “But that doesn’t sound like red-hot lover boy to me. It’s more like horny-old-man-who-wouldn’t-give-his-wives-a-break boy.”

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PodCastle 126: Creature

Show Notes

Rated R: Violence and Disturbing Themes


Creature

by Ramsey Shehadeh

And so came Creature out of the wasteland and into the city, bouncing from hilltop to hilltop like a bulbous ballerina skipping across the knuckles of a great hand. He was big as the moon and black as the night, and he came crashing into the city like a silent meteor. The cityfolk watched his approach with wide eyes and open mouths, and then scattered like leaves.

The sun sat smudged and pale behind a grey smear of cloud, and the air stank of scat and putrefaction. But Creature said: “What a fine day it is!” Though he did not say it, of course, he thought it, and so the cityfolk thought it too. And when he released a great bolus of happiness into the air, they paused in their desperate flight, and smiled, and thought: “What a fine day it is!”

Creature surveyed the sea of smiles around him, and was well pleased. He rolled along, growing and shrinking and flattening and widening as he went, dispensing false joy to the destitute and the hopeless, the desperate and the sad. They lined his path like parade-watchers, caught helplessly in his spell.

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PodCastle 121: The Warlock and the Man of the Word (Giant Episode)

Show Notes

Rated R: Contains Violence (Including Gore), and Language

This episode of PodCastle is proudly sponsored by:

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson

You can read the Prologue and Chapter 1 online now! Check back on Friday for an exclusive audio chapter read by M.K. Hobson!


The Warlock and the Man of the Word

by M.K. Hobson

Mrs. Jorgensen ran the whores out of a big square building that had once been butter-yellow but had weathered to the color of chicken fat left out on a plate. The place was built sturdy, of white pine and fir, and had fine scrollwork supporting the eaves. The windows were covered with stretched oilpaper, ripped in places. At night, behind the oilpaper, shadows moved in the light of kerosene lamps. Some of the shadows had horns, some did not.

The building had three floors. The saloon was on the ground level, and above it there were two floors of small rooms where the girls worked. It was in the room on the east corner of the top floor that the demon prince Methe Pyrtrogo was shot dead.

It was past midnight on a Saturday, a hot night after a day when the thermometer outside Jowett’s General Supply had risen to a hundred and three. The hot thick dark air was split by a sound like branches being snapped. Two cracks. No one downstairs heard the sounds. Miners from the Baby Boy and the Independence and the May Queen had gotten their monthly envelopes that day. There was every kind of miner in the dance hall that night–alive and undead, Indian and white, human and demon. The noise they made was deafening.

Then Minnie, a young whore with yellow hair, came stumbling down the stairs. She was splattered with black blood, a great deal of it, all over her face and the front of her dress.