The Strange Recital
The Strange Recital is an audio forum for short fiction. We delight in perceptions of reality that twist and fold in unexpected ways.
Episodes
"The heat had been painfully oppressive all day, and it was now a close and sultry night.... It was nearly midnight when the servant locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a few paces on the shortest way back to London, then stopped and hesitated."
"A.J. Campbell lowered the folded newsprint to his lap. His heart fishtailed and he struggled to breathe. This thing he had just read was an impossibility."
"I have endeavoured to present the public with accounts of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, and of his singular intelligence, his vigour and his courage. He often joked with me that his great fame was due solely to my embellishments..."
Dr. Watson at last reveals a never-before-told adventure in which Holmes faces a challenge he couldn't have imagined. What are the limits of the world's most logical mind?
"Ed Marks woke from another dream about his wife. She’d been standing in front of him, wearing a white gown that rippled in a breeze he couldn’t feel. In her arms she held a baby, too small and raw-looking to be alive."
"Wheels of a Delta 88 spin fast on winter-ravaged Upstate roadways. Fallow fields, half-encrusted in snow, the rest furrowed in frozen field-rot and iced-over mud, unfurl themselves on either side of a moonlit ridge."
"The beautiful girl, my own girlfriend, lay on her back, needle in her hand. Her arm tied up with her underwear, pulled tightly with her teeth. She was unconscious."
"Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers."
How to make our future a paradise! In 1962, Vonnegut applied his double-edged imagination to the challenge. Does this story still apply today?
"Nathan Byrne walked up the steps of the police station and stopped before the polished steel and glass doors. An icy wind swept past him, sending debris flying down the street."
Something different for this episode! What kind of strange correspondence comes in to The Strange Recital mailbox? Here's a sampling.
But wait... is there a story here somewhere?
"Snorri cackled and sucked at his teeth. The wind blasted across the lake, cutting the snow into sharp ridges. He hurled instructions at me as if he were whipping a husky, and I spun the wheel according to Snorri’s command. Our tires rolled off the beach onto the thick ice cap that froze over the lake in winter, clods of snow drumming the floorboard from underneath like the rapping of the dead."
"It was on my last shift cleaning bathrooms at the Pizza Port, just before I told the manager I was quitting, when I found the wallet in one of the stalls... The picture on the license was exotic. He wore a turban, had thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and sported a flat gold chain with an amulet. Some kind of Arab sheik with Mafia ties?"
"'Are you serious?—do you really believe that a machine thinks?' I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently intent upon the coals in the grate, touching them deftly here and there with the fire-poker till they signified a sense of his attention by a brighter glow."
"Ahhh, the soothing sounds of the Chainsaw Americans. You can hear them, less than a quarter of a mile away, marching up the avenue. Thousands of them, buzzing in unison. Louder than a flock of Harleys."
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