Drabblecast B-Sides

1.

When a spiral staircase appears in front of you, don’t panic. Just know that if you place your feet on that first step, it shows commitment. You can’t go back. You can only go up and up and up until you reach the very top.

Watch your step. That’s the main thing to remember. Some people think they can race to the top, or take the steps two at a time. All it takes is one stumble, one slip, and soon you’re tumbling, arms pinwheeling, shins banging, down, down, down.

You don’t want to be rejected by a spiral staircase. It’s painful.

Drabblecast B-Sides: Donate

Drinks and shop talk with short fiction editors John Joseph Adams (Lightspeed Magazine), Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld), Scott K. Andrews (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) and Norm Sherman.

Drabblecast B-Sides: Donate

If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of allergies can kill you. Nut allergies, for instance. Bee stings. But I imagine most people with fatal allergies to common things have died by now.

I am allergic to wool, soy, peanuts, and pollen. Only my peanut allergy can kill me.

Drabblecast B-Sides: Donate

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

Drabblecast B-Sides: Donate

The day she left we forgot to take out the trash. At five-thirty in the morning, I heard the city trucks lumbering down the street with their mechanical, prehensile arms and remembered that we had forgotten to take out the trash. I didn’t care though. I knew that in a few hours I would help load the last of her boxes into the truck, and she would leave. Everything was expanding without me, and I felt like the room was growing until I was lost in and filled with its great, grey nothing.

Drabblecast B-Sides: Donate

John was born with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and he often wondered why. But as a boy, it was simply wonderful to have those abilities. He could lift his father’s tractor overhead before he learned to read. He could outrace a galloping horse. He couldn’t be cut or bruised or burned. He could fly…

Drabblecast B-Sides: Donate

Sure, I know Istvan Horvath.  We met about a year ago before Eva died.  That’s my wife, Eva.  You knew that?  Yah, I figured you were pretty thorough…

Drabblecast B-Sides: Donate