AUTHOR: Beth Goder NARRATOR: Amy H. Sturgis HOST: Alasdair Stuart Murder or a Duck is an Escape Pod original. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter about the author… Beth Goder worked as an archivist at Stanford before becoming a full-time mom […]

Paradise Regained By Edward Lerner My head hurts. I expect it: this is winter. I want it to be spring. Paradise does not ask what I want. The winter is young, and I think the dogs are not yet so hungry as to attack me. Still, I hold tight to my spear. Dogs or no …

Oracle By Dominica Phetteplace The two biggest applications for predictive software are killing people and selling things. Rita was quite successful at the latter. She founded a nail-polish-of-the-month club that used an online personality quiz to determine customer preferences. Bold cremes for basics, chunky glitters for the outrageous, and dark, sparkly metallics for edgy, forward-thinking geniuses …

Disarm By Vylar Kaftan Excerpt We kept in touch through the war, when he messaged me about marching through upstate New York. He always started the same way: “Dear Ryan, Please come kick my commanding officer in the balls.” Then he’d tell me about the latest mess–cracks in their radiation suits, or toxic …

The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike by Andrea Phillips 1. THE BRIEF Corazon clicked to the slide she’d been dreading: long-term trends for brand engagement. It was dire. She focused on the smudgy mirror at the far end of the conference room, looking past her team to her own reflection. She pulled her shoulders …

Imma Gonna Finish You Off by Marina J. Lostetter On the examining table lounged a body. It was an unremarkable body–rather wrinkly, with an inordinate amount of hair in all the wrong places and too few clothes for most people’s liking, but otherwise nothing to write your congressman about. The only thing special about the …

Me, Meg, and The Thing By Gian-Paul Bergeron I’m Inroom making honest credit, doing Daily, counting breaths, when Meg messages me with extreme urgent markation to say that she got a Thing and I’m like Meg, you loon, please, and then she stresses the urgency with absolute dire markation – i.e. there has never been …

Into the Breach By Malon Edwards I’m off my bunk and into my jodhpurs, knee-high leather boots and flight jacket the moment the long range air attack klaxons seep into my nightly dream about Caracara. Muscle memory and Secret Service training kick in; I’m on auto-pilot (no pun intended) and a good ways down the …

Of course, if someone were systematically scrubbing the Internet of all references to the glitter frogs, then how do you explain the Tumblr gif sets? The audio recordings? The videos that don’t involve illegal firecrackers and animal cruelty? via Po…

I’ll keep this one, I thought, that day at the fair, as the sunset cut a sharp line across the sky. Gina’s laughter rose in a crescendo of delighted giggles, and life seemed absolutely perfect: a sparkling gift of wonder and joy. I’m not going to se…

You can hear it, in the basement, behind the metal boxes that your human puts her outer-coverings in just when they start to smell good—when the boxes are done, she brings out her things stinking of flowers or fruit. via Pocket

He is lying on the splintered, faded-gray wood of the dock, the fingers of one hand dangling in the slough and glitter frogs in his hair. His breath catches and he cups the back of Christian’s head. An airplane is flying far, far overhead. It sounds…

I’m all stims and grins as I kick open the door to West Precinct, strung-out bounty dangling from my headlock like a slab of vat beef with a fauxhawk. via Pocket

Diwali, the Festival of Lights is a magical time of the year, even on the Indian Battle Station. via Pocket Escape Pod 703 Light and Death on the Indian Battle Station | Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2TFpTbn

Peifan had come and gone before Nevaeh reached the lab office the next morning. Nevaeh had hoped to say goodbye, but she supposed that if an algorithm had guillotined her graduate school career like a French royalist’s head, she’d have snuck away, t…

When I met her, I was twelve. There was no one else to take care of me. Before she showed up, she was preceded by this man in a pinstriped suit. A harbinger. He sat me down in his sterile office and he said, “Time Law is not a joking matter. via Poc…

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Tagedouchet teased her father as she leaped over the long stick he swung at her ankles, raising a puff of sand with her sandals, the gritty substance drifting between her toes, and landed, folding her knees, narrowly dodging the swing of her father’…

Mother never wanted me to take the meteorology job. “Those high fences and secret regulations,” she said. “There’s something shady about Rubens’ Medicines” —dear Mother’s tone was sarcastic when she wished it— “mark my words, Genevieve. via Pocket

The Tale of the Golden Eagle by David D. Levine This is a story about a bird. A bird, a ship, a machine, a woman—she was all these things, and none, but first and fundamentally a bird. It is also a story about a man—a gambler, a liar, and a cheat, b… EP402 The Tale of the Golden Eagle – Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2RdbtOM

Carmen would have expected a gold necklace or tarnished antique, maybe some money or a secret family recipe card, but she’d never dreamed her grandmother would try to immortalize herself through an inheritance like this. via Pocket via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Escape Pod 702 Inheritance - Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2qnrR48

Warm liquid gurgled away and the kettle field winked off, leaving me naked, wet, and trembling in the soup kitchen’s receiving chamber. My traveling companion, Roger, waited with clothes. via Pocket

At exactly nine in the morning, Karen tapped the green box on her tablet screen and said, “Hello, my name is Karen. I’m listening.” “Okay,” said the young woman. “I uh…my landlord’s raising my rent again. via Pocket

Escape Pod 715 A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman | Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2Tv9sij The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you’re crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There’s no spaceship making a bright arc agains…