July 15, 2025 • 32 mins
Die Booth reads his story "Warning: Cats Eyes Removed" from the June 2025 issue of Worlds of Possibility, and also talks to us about his creative process.
You can read the text of the story at https://www.juliarios.com/warning-cats-eyes-removed-a-story-by-die-booth
You can read transcript of the interview (including a few pictures of his cats eye travel talsimans) at https://www.juliarios.com/interview-with-die-booth/
You can read the text of the story at https://www.juliarios.com/warning-cats-eyes-removed-a-story-by-die-booth
You can read transcript of the interview (including a few pictures of his cats eye travel talsimans) at https://www.juliarios.com/interview-with-die-booth/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we discuss creative
lives and processes. I'm your host, Julia Rios, and today
I have the first two pieces from the June twenty
twenty five issue of Worlds of Possibility, the final issue
(00:20):
of the magazine version and our special Pride issue. I
have the author die Booth here to read his story
and then give us a little talk about his inspiration,
his creative process, and some of the arts and crafts
that he's made having to do with this story as well.
(00:42):
If you would like to read the text of this
story and the text of the interview, you can do
that on Juliareos dot com. You should be able to
find links in the show notes of this podcast on
whichever podcatcher you're using. And just to reassure you, there
is no animal cruelty in this story, there are in
(01:04):
fact no cats in it at all. Cat's eyes are
an old fashioned type of road reflector stud made of glass.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Warning cat's eyes removed by Die Booth, narrated by the author.
See I told you, Jill said, I told you, Max
said they were here. It's a dark night, just a
sliver of moon like melted ice. The stars shine like
eyes between freezing clouds. When Jill sweeps a torch across
(01:46):
the cracked ground, the stars blink back from beneath our feet.
I dropped to my knees. Are beautiful, The stars are beautiful,
Jill says. She tips her head back. Her throat looks
blue in the cold below light, her breath spewing in
misty plumes. The air glitters with drizzle, catching little sparks
in the torch beam. What do we do now? I
(02:09):
take out my knife. Jill hums. It seems a shame.
Nobody needs them now. The stars. I laugh. I look
around me, and I think probably it's dark. Early winter
has stopped the world with a glaze of frost, turning
it all to hammered silver, from the bushes at the
sides of the motorway to the cracking asphalt under foot
(02:33):
the roads. It's strange to remember places like this raging
with cars, trucks, traffic. Everywhere is quiet as a hell
breath now, the freezing midnight air thin in my lungs.
I think Jill remembers too, because she says they're like archaeology. Now,
though how many are left where they were? What do
(02:55):
they call it in situ. I shrug the movements, ending
my scarf up around my nose as I hunch over.
Poke the little blade of my knife at the edge
of one bright eye, scraping the casing, My breath fogging
damp and prickly in its cocoon of wool. I took
the scarf down, cold, stinging my nose. The eye is stubborn.
(03:17):
Fisting the knife, I stab down through the dirty white
skull of perish rubber, breaking it open. If we don't
take them, somebody else will eventually, Yeah, Jill says vaguely.
Her feet shuffle black tracks backwards as she reverses through
the frost to the concrete overpast wall, leaning against it
(03:37):
and watching me I decapitate the roadstud. The eyes inside,
two pairs facing forward and back, are held in place
with pins. Don't you want one from Mona? She smiles
at that, turning her head to the side like she
thinks I won't see. It makes me smile too. I
(03:58):
jammed the knife blade beneath one of the pins and
pop the eye from its socket, sparkling like a precious stone.
It's coated in tari stuff. I rub it on my glove.
Look the copper ones that's the oldest type, must be
more than one hundred years old. You can thread it
on a necklace for her show me. Jill leans him
for a look. The expression on her face makes her
(04:19):
seem ten again, floating pale in the torchlight. I think
of fairgrounds, fates and zoos, of our parents being friends.
I think of road trips thirty years ago, when it
felt forever sunny, us on the back seat, Hot leather
upholstery that stuck to the pits your knees, the smell
of sandy beach and petrol fumes and bitchamen melting. When
(04:44):
I hand her the cat's eye, am passing her more
than a physical thing, and handing her are past. She
studies it in the torch beam, glove, muffled hands, turning
over a flash of jewel green. It's cracked. I'll get
you another one, no, she said. Look I look as
the flat of glass inside the crack blaze his torch
(05:05):
like back. The broken one shine even brighter. She slipped
it carefully into her pocket. I say, remember when you
told me you like girls? And I said me too,
And I yelled at you for always copying me. Jill's
chiming laugh is swallowed up by the vast road, the
big sky. It makes us seem small, but not in
(05:28):
a frightening way. It's comforting somehow, like being a seed
in a field. I can remember that moment as clear
as day. But not you, No, that would be weird.
Jill struck gold with her first serious girlfriend. I had
my heart broken by musicians for decades until I met
Hannah and realized what I've been missing. Do you miss
(05:52):
being little? I asked, Jill tilts her head to one side.
It's not just a question about age. It's about before
a thing too huge to hold in one thought. Not really,
she says, After a minute, it was all rush and noise.
I didn't realize how much it was until it stopped,
And it stopped for everyone, So you couldn't be jealous
(06:13):
that you were missing out on anything. I like being
able to hear my heartbeat. I close my eyes. My
cheeks above my scarf feel taut with chill, my eyes
watering with it. I can feel misty rain clinging to
my eyelashes. The wind sighs, quiet, rattling the branches of
(06:34):
the trees. There's the smell of wet leaves and damp wool,
and that nostalgic tari edge of scents only noticeable on
the old roads. My toes are starting to ache where
they pressed up in my boots. I shift my weight,
digging into the next cat's eye. Don't take them all,
Jill says. I'll leave one in sit. You leave two
(06:57):
so they don't get lonely being the last one. This
is why we've been friends forever. I think. When I've
duck up all of the treasure except for two, I
stand knees cracking, pockets full of stars. The sky is
clearer now, a waiting kind of still. I'm so ready
to feel the fire in the hearth at home. Unpicking
(07:18):
me with pins and needles. They'll keep us safe traveling,
I say to Jill. It doesn't matter that the most
journeying we do now is on foot between villages, choosing
new paths over the cold old roads. Fishing out an eye.
I show it to the starlight, a memory we can
carry around with us. What have these eyes seen? Jill says.
(07:42):
She sounds like she's talking to herself, and it's not
really a question. When I close my fist around the eye,
and my palm it warms quickly, the copper taking on
my blood heat. What all they see? Now? It's a
long walk home. We should get going, and I sling
an arm around her shoulder and we'd seek zag across
(08:03):
the lines like the plants pushing up through the cracks
and the tarmac. Only once do I look back and
see two pairs of eyes shining in the night. I
think that's what those eyes see looking back at them too.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
That was warning. Cat's eyes removed by die Booth and
I have Die here to talk to us a little
about his story.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Welcome Die, Hi, thank you very much for having me on.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
First of all, I want to get this out of
the way right at the start. In the US, we
don't have Cat's eyes, So for anyone listening in the
US or reading this story in the US, cat's eyes
are reflective road studs. I think in the US we
would just call them reflectors. But the things that we
have aren't what you're writing about. So the first thing
(09:05):
I would love for you to tell us day is
a little bit about who you are, like your brief intro,
and then be explain what cats eyes are and why
you're so drawn to them that you've both written a
story and made art with them.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Well, I'm Diebooth. I'm a writer from England, from the
northwest of England, writing mostly speculative fiction. I write a
lot of horror, folk horror, literary fiction, whatever that means.
So yeah, I've got a few books out, have been
mostly mostly self publishing at the moment, but I've had
(09:45):
loads of short stories in various places, so that's me. Yeah.
So cats eyes, I think now we don't really call
them cat's eyes over here anymore either. It's kind of
an archaic term that known as road studs now, I think.
And they're like square plastic things now. They're not the
(10:06):
the round of glass ones that I'm writing about here.
So really, I wrote this as kind of a nostalgia
thing for me about childhood, because I always used to
love being driven at night when I was a kid
and seeing the cat's eyes and spotting all the different
(10:27):
colors because they'd have I don't know if it's the
same in the US. I assume it is. They're white
ones to mark the lanes that there's green, there's amber,
there's red, to mark kind of like slipways and stuff.
In the past. They were these little round basically glass
balls in casing that would be copper for the older
(10:52):
ones that I think got sort of phased out in
the eighties. I believe after that they were just like black,
like painted metal or rubber. I don't know how much
to it, how much to share of my personal life here,
but when I was a lot younger, When I was
(11:14):
a lot younger, when I was about twenty, my partner
at the time knew that I had a bit of
a nostalgia thing when I was a kid, and he
went and he got me a cat's eye basically from
a road and gave it to me as a gift,
which was probably massively illegal, but it was a siding one.
(11:37):
It wasn't like, it wasn't dangerous. I think they get replaced,
or they got replaced quite frequently anyway, as they'd sort
of break or get dirty as traffic went over them.
And so I knew what these things looked like when
they came out of the casing. So fast forward sort
(11:58):
of twenty odd years and they're all getting removed, and
all these signs start appearing in the UK, say warning
cat's eyes removed. And apparently these signs didn't last for
long because sort of visitors of the UK, we're getting
really distressed by these signs, not knowing what cat's eyes
(12:20):
were and going what cat's eyes removed? What on earth
is what does this mean? And thinking it was some
kind of like an animal cruelty term or whatever. So
that's where the title came from, and that's where the
where the inspiration for this story came from.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It's really funny that you say that they had to
take the signs down because I know I'm also going
to have to put clear disclaimers like all over the
issue because in the US we don't have that term
and we don't know what they are. So I know
there are going to be a lot of readers see
that title and automatically or like is this a story
about cats being armed?
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Which it's absolutely not, But like I'm wondering if that
was a good title to give it now, But that's
the reasoning behind it.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I think it's fine. I think it's fine. So that
was the history of you with cats eyes and the title. Now,
since that you said they removed them all a few
years ago and you you collected a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yes, So basically fast forward about twenty years and they've
started removing all of these old cat's eyes, replacing them
with the like plastic road studs. So I was wondering
where they went, whether I could get any more like
this one that I'd kept since I was young, and
(13:52):
I went to look if anyone was selling any and
I found one guy who works in roads but was
saving all of the world that would have been basically
thrown away and selling them on to collectors. And I
bought a bunch of the copper ones off him because
I thought they would make really wonderful travel talismans basically
(14:16):
for safe travel, and they're also very beautiful. I think
they're very beautiful. So I started producing these little pendants
that are copper and glass. And what I do is
I get these eyes, I clean them all up, a
polish the copper, I take the pins out so they've
(14:37):
got a hole through them from where the pins are,
and then I make copper bales for them so that
they can go on. They can go on a key ring,
they can go on a pendant, they can hang from
your rear view mirror. And yeah, I first started producing those,
and they're getting hard to define now because they are
(15:03):
all being replaced now, so it's a finite resource. And
that's kind of what I was thinking of when I
wrote this story, of sort of setting it many many
years in the future, I'm wondering, will there still be
any left in the roads in situ?
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about your story.
It's a really interesting story. I read it a few times,
sort of trying to decide whether or not I felt
like it was a good fit for Worlds of Possibility,
which is fundamentally like trying to invoke this sense of
like hope or comfort. And the story definitely posits like
(15:45):
a world where some kind of apocalypse has happened and
we no longer have cars, and people are not able
to go very far in the world. You say that
they only travel on foot, so it's a very different
sort of world than the one we're currently living in.
And I was like, is that too dark or is
(16:08):
that okay? And I came down on the side of yes,
obviously it's okay because I took it. But part of
the reason was because I felt like, at heart this
was sort of a cozy apocalypse where everybody in the story,
which is only two people, are having a sort of
emotional bond that strengthens over the course of the story
(16:30):
and really kind of embracing the world that they live
in now. The whole conversation about whether they miss the cars,
but no, actually it's it's quieter now, and they like
that sort of felt like, Okay, this is kind of hopeful.
It is kind of comforting, even though something some kind
of great change has occurred and that must have been
(16:53):
traumatic and life must look very different now. So I'm
wondering if you want to tell me a little bit
more about out why that specific world and what exactly
you and vision for how life works at that point.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I mean, I think I've written this knowing the world
we're living in now and how things are going and
how it's all like a lot of the problems that
we're facing now are I wouldn't say due to, but
definitely being exacerbated by and sort of facilitated by motivated
(17:35):
by tech, big tech tech billionaires, and this push towards
bigger tech controlling all of our lives, pushing people apart,
and the world seems to be getting sort of worse
(17:56):
and worse in that respect, and also the kind of
environmental impact of all of this as well, and so
I'm thinking this is some kind of apocalypse in which
the aftermath allows the environment to recover. And also more
(18:16):
than that, I'm thinking of, well, this is a story
emphasizing the need now to really emphasize community and to
be there for your immediate community and for your friends
and create these like smaller communities that exist in the
real world and building lasting friendships like these characters have,
(18:41):
and the fact that this is queer friendship as well
that has lasted from childhood right up to you know,
later middle age, as these characters are now. So that's
what I really wanted to explore and emphasize with this
is just community over big tech. I suppose that kind
(19:06):
of comfort in we can have our friends and we
can have our communities and that will get us through
and we will get through this and survive and rebuild
after all of this.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Yeah, I love that message, and I feel like that's
at the heart of why I eventually was like, yes,
this story absolutely fits for what World's of Possibility wants
to do, which is kind of remind people that there
is hope even in times when things are a little
bit tricky, and definitely we're living through them, and I
think the emphasis on community and really you are your community.
(19:44):
You have to build it yourself and tend to it.
And this story is very much about the small moments
of tending to your community.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, exactly. This is why I love Worlds of Possibility.
Is there's so much emphasis now thinking fiction, a lot
of fiction on like dystopia.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right, yeah, and so on.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
And I love that you're putting together something that's you know,
reality imitates art. So let's just hope.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, I mean, certainly, let's let's make it happen. I
feel like we are we are the people who are
going to have to rebuild, so we we've got to
start somewhere, and this is what I can do.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
You mentioned that it's a queer friendship and that these
people have been lifelong friends. They're now middle aged. This
is also part of the June issue. June in the
United States is Pride Month. Many of the pieces in
this issue feature queer narratives of some kind. For me,
that's very important because I'm myself and queer, but I
(20:57):
also really love to highlight a lot of different kinds
of queer voices. And I know that in your writing
you also highlight a lot of different kinds of queer voices.
Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Sure. I mean when I first started out writing, I
was writing sis hat horror, sort of the same sort
of stuff as I'm writing now, But it was always
kind of like straight couples or straight people, because really
that's all I'd ever read, and I didn't realize that
(21:31):
you could write anything else. And when I realized that
I can, just you write what you know, You write
the people that you know, you write about your community.
And once I realized that my default could be the
(21:52):
default for my writing, you know, it's like, why would
you write like every single character being queer? And it's like, well,
most of my friends are, so why wouldn't I write that.
So I've just sort of tried to write as much
and as diverse representation of queer people as possible, and
(22:14):
I'll continue to do it to do that because I
don't feel like I have all that much power in
today's society, in the world, and I feel like one
thing that I can do to make things a little
bit better and a little bit more equal is at
least just write loads of queer stories. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Absolutely, And I mean, I think everything that you're doing.
Every time someone else writ it's a queer story and
it gets published, and it gives a chance for someone
else somewhere who maybe hasn't seen that written before, to
realize that that's a possible way of being. Certainly, when
I was younger, there weren't I wasn't allowed to see
(22:58):
the variety of queerness in the world around me that
I can now. And I think kids in today's generation,
like they have so much more just accessible to them
in the mainstream, that it did not exist when I
was a teen. I was just this tortured, closeted person.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Same, And I think if I had seen the possibility
for all the different ways of being that I could
see now, I might have had a very different experience.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, I add exactly the same experience. So there was
just nothing. And then I think I was about seventeen
and discovered Poppy Bright and realized that there was media out.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
There so much as context dependent. It depends on because
in some ways people are always like, oh, well, we've
queerness has always been here, and there's always been curer
culture and there's always been queer media. And that's true,
but It's also very context dependent on who you are
and where you're raised and what kinds of things you're
exposed to, and whether you realize that something is actually
(24:05):
part of queer culture.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and whether you go to a church school in
el Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
So but hopefully by putting this all out there, we're
adding to the collective, and hopefully that will create more
opportunities for other people to see them. One of the
other stories in this issue is about book burning, and
it does not go as the people who burn the
(24:38):
books intend, and instead the stories spread farther than they
ever have before.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
I love that that idea, sort of like you can't
you can't burn it because it will keep spreading.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Fantastic.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
You make these travel talismans of the catsize. Yeah, this
is a second form of creative expression. So the first
one we'll be writing. The second one is this like
physical crafting. Are those your two main modes or are
you multi creative in other ways as well?
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Oh? I do everything. I do a little bit of everything.
What do they say, jack of all trades? Must you're
not mainly writing? I do? I do metalwork in make jewelry,
do a bit of wood, carving, do a bit of sewing,
do a bit of illustration, drawing, So anything, really, I
(25:38):
just anything creative. I love just producing physical things, analogue things.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
You've just always been drawn to creative arts in general.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Everything everything, I love it.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
That's wonderful. And you've mentioned so many fascinating things, but
the one that pops out to me is wood carving.
How did you get into wood carving?
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Really just through walking, Like I love walking in nature,
That's one of my favorite things to do, and just
like picking up interesting sticks and going what can I
make with this, and just kind of playing around and
making stuff. It's all. It's all very professional, as you
(26:21):
can tell.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
So it's not something like formal lessons. You've just decided
like I think wood curving could be fun, so I'm
gonna try it.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, that's everything with me. I don't think I've had
a formal lesson in anything. Oh my mate taught me
to crochet. I'm terrible at that though.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Okay, Well, tell us a little bit about your books.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
I've self published one novel, which is Spirit Houses, which
is way back in twenty thirteen. Now, that was like
my first solo thing I published. I had one co
edited anthology that me and a friend produced before that,
(27:08):
which we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
We just did it for the love of it, and
that was fun. That was called Revamp. That's out of
print now though. But my first one was Spirit Houses,
which is sort of an adventure horror novel. That's a
Kingdom hospital crossed with The Mummy, the Brendan Fraser film.
It's quite an adventually kind of soft horror. I've got
(27:30):
a few collections out. I did one called three six
y five Lies, which I wrote a flash fiction every
day for the whole of twenty twelve. I think it
was No. Twenty thirteen, it must have been twenty thirteen,
and then that came out in twenty fourteen. All of
the proceeds that go to the Most in your Own
(27:51):
Disease Association. And I've got two short story collections. One's
called Making Friends and one's called My Glasses Run. My
Glasses Run is horror short stories, and Making Friends is
a terrible mixture of genres of horror and literary and
just general just weird little stories, weird queer little stories,
(28:13):
I think I called it. So they're all available, and
I've got a novella called cool S, which is my
most recent release. That's about the s thing we all
drew in school and what it means and why it's
terrible and cursed basically. So that's my back catalog. I'm
hopefully getting my first traditional publication next year with a
(28:38):
really good publisher who I really admire. That'll be a
collection of short stories or with transgender and non binary protagonists.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Oh, that's exciting.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
So that should be twenty twenty six. But I don't
want to say who it is because it's not all
all set in stone yet, but hopefully that will come out,
and it'll be out eventually anyway, one way or another.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Well, that's really exciting. So for anyone who's listening who
is curious because they haven't actually encountered your work before this,
where should they go to find more?
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Well, I have a website diabooth dot WordPress dot com.
It's got all information on there about all my published
works where you can get everything from. And also there's
a page that's short stories that has links to all
of my published short stories and there's a lot of
(29:38):
them on there that are free to read online. So
I would say if anyone wanted to check anything out.
Then I have a read or have a listened to
one of my one of my stories that has been
featured on Worlds of Possibility as well, this one and
my previous one, What it Takes to Stay Wild. That's
a weigh in, I think.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
Well, thank you so much for coming and talking to
me and reading your story. It was lovely getting to
hear a little bit more about your background and the inspiration.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Thank you so much for speaking to me today. I
really appreciate the opportunity and it's just lovely to actually
get to talk to you. We've worked together a few
times and it's really really nice to get to chat
to you, and I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Thank you for listening to die Booth narrate his story
and talk to me about his creative process. If you'd
like to read the text of our conversation and the story,
you can look inside the June twenty twenty five issue
of Worlds of Possibility or read it for free online
at Julia Rios dot com. This is the life last
(31:00):
magazine issue of Worlds of Possibility, at least the last
regular one. I'm not ruling out the fact that I
might do a zine or something in the future. I
do still plan to release at least one, but probably
two more volumes of Worlds of Possibility as a book,
and that's before we get into any future things. That's
just counting all the stuff I already have collected, and
(31:24):
I will be putting more of the contents of previous
issues up online for free. I basically haven't had the
time and energy to do that, and one of the
reasons why I chose to wrap up the magazine was
so that I could actually have more time and more
energy to do things like getting some of those contents
out for free and also writing some more of my
(31:48):
own things. So you haven't heard the last of me,
but this is the last of these issues. Thank you
so much for coming along for the ride on this one.
I really appreeciate everyone who has been a fan, who
has bought the first anthology, who's been a subscriber. All
of you are wonderful. I know that all of you
(32:08):
are also interested, like me, in seeing a way to
build a better world than the one that we're currently
living in, and I absolutely love that. So again, a
heartfelt thanks for me, and until next time,
Welcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we discuss creative
lives and processes. I'm your host, Julia Rios, and today
I have the first two pieces from the June twenty
twenty five issue of Worlds of Possibility, the final issue
(00:20):
of the magazine version and our special Pride issue. I
have the author die Booth here to read his story
and then give us a little talk about his inspiration,
his creative process, and some of the arts and crafts
that he's made having to do with this story as well.
(00:42):
If you would like to read the text of this
story and the text of the interview, you can do
that on Juliareos dot com. You should be able to
find links in the show notes of this podcast on
whichever podcatcher you're using. And just to reassure you, there
is no animal cruelty in this story, there are in
(01:04):
fact no cats in it at all. Cat's eyes are
an old fashioned type of road reflector stud made of glass.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Warning cat's eyes removed by Die Booth, narrated by the author.
See I told you, Jill said, I told you, Max
said they were here. It's a dark night, just a
sliver of moon like melted ice. The stars shine like
eyes between freezing clouds. When Jill sweeps a torch across
(01:46):
the cracked ground, the stars blink back from beneath our feet.
I dropped to my knees. Are beautiful, The stars are beautiful,
Jill says. She tips her head back. Her throat looks
blue in the cold below light, her breath spewing in
misty plumes. The air glitters with drizzle, catching little sparks
in the torch beam. What do we do now? I
(02:09):
take out my knife. Jill hums. It seems a shame.
Nobody needs them now. The stars. I laugh. I look
around me, and I think probably it's dark. Early winter
has stopped the world with a glaze of frost, turning
it all to hammered silver, from the bushes at the
sides of the motorway to the cracking asphalt under foot
(02:33):
the roads. It's strange to remember places like this raging
with cars, trucks, traffic. Everywhere is quiet as a hell
breath now, the freezing midnight air thin in my lungs.
I think Jill remembers too, because she says they're like archaeology. Now,
though how many are left where they were? What do
(02:55):
they call it in situ. I shrug the movements, ending
my scarf up around my nose as I hunch over.
Poke the little blade of my knife at the edge
of one bright eye, scraping the casing, My breath fogging
damp and prickly in its cocoon of wool. I took
the scarf down, cold, stinging my nose. The eye is stubborn.
(03:17):
Fisting the knife, I stab down through the dirty white
skull of perish rubber, breaking it open. If we don't
take them, somebody else will eventually, Yeah, Jill says vaguely.
Her feet shuffle black tracks backwards as she reverses through
the frost to the concrete overpast wall, leaning against it
(03:37):
and watching me I decapitate the roadstud. The eyes inside,
two pairs facing forward and back, are held in place
with pins. Don't you want one from Mona? She smiles
at that, turning her head to the side like she
thinks I won't see. It makes me smile too. I
(03:58):
jammed the knife blade beneath one of the pins and
pop the eye from its socket, sparkling like a precious stone.
It's coated in tari stuff. I rub it on my glove.
Look the copper ones that's the oldest type, must be
more than one hundred years old. You can thread it
on a necklace for her show me. Jill leans him
for a look. The expression on her face makes her
(04:19):
seem ten again, floating pale in the torchlight. I think
of fairgrounds, fates and zoos, of our parents being friends.
I think of road trips thirty years ago, when it
felt forever sunny, us on the back seat, Hot leather
upholstery that stuck to the pits your knees, the smell
of sandy beach and petrol fumes and bitchamen melting. When
(04:44):
I hand her the cat's eye, am passing her more
than a physical thing, and handing her are past. She
studies it in the torch beam, glove, muffled hands, turning
over a flash of jewel green. It's cracked. I'll get
you another one, no, she said. Look I look as
the flat of glass inside the crack blaze his torch
(05:05):
like back. The broken one shine even brighter. She slipped
it carefully into her pocket. I say, remember when you
told me you like girls? And I said me too,
And I yelled at you for always copying me. Jill's
chiming laugh is swallowed up by the vast road, the
big sky. It makes us seem small, but not in
(05:28):
a frightening way. It's comforting somehow, like being a seed
in a field. I can remember that moment as clear
as day. But not you, No, that would be weird.
Jill struck gold with her first serious girlfriend. I had
my heart broken by musicians for decades until I met
Hannah and realized what I've been missing. Do you miss
(05:52):
being little? I asked, Jill tilts her head to one side.
It's not just a question about age. It's about before
a thing too huge to hold in one thought. Not really,
she says, After a minute, it was all rush and noise.
I didn't realize how much it was until it stopped,
And it stopped for everyone, So you couldn't be jealous
(06:13):
that you were missing out on anything. I like being
able to hear my heartbeat. I close my eyes. My
cheeks above my scarf feel taut with chill, my eyes
watering with it. I can feel misty rain clinging to
my eyelashes. The wind sighs, quiet, rattling the branches of
(06:34):
the trees. There's the smell of wet leaves and damp wool,
and that nostalgic tari edge of scents only noticeable on
the old roads. My toes are starting to ache where
they pressed up in my boots. I shift my weight,
digging into the next cat's eye. Don't take them all,
Jill says. I'll leave one in sit. You leave two
(06:57):
so they don't get lonely being the last one. This
is why we've been friends forever. I think. When I've
duck up all of the treasure except for two, I
stand knees cracking, pockets full of stars. The sky is
clearer now, a waiting kind of still. I'm so ready
to feel the fire in the hearth at home. Unpicking
(07:18):
me with pins and needles. They'll keep us safe traveling,
I say to Jill. It doesn't matter that the most
journeying we do now is on foot between villages, choosing
new paths over the cold old roads. Fishing out an eye.
I show it to the starlight, a memory we can
carry around with us. What have these eyes seen? Jill says.
(07:42):
She sounds like she's talking to herself, and it's not
really a question. When I close my fist around the eye,
and my palm it warms quickly, the copper taking on
my blood heat. What all they see? Now? It's a
long walk home. We should get going, and I sling
an arm around her shoulder and we'd seek zag across
(08:03):
the lines like the plants pushing up through the cracks
and the tarmac. Only once do I look back and
see two pairs of eyes shining in the night. I
think that's what those eyes see looking back at them too.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
That was warning. Cat's eyes removed by die Booth and
I have Die here to talk to us a little
about his story.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Welcome Die, Hi, thank you very much for having me on.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
First of all, I want to get this out of
the way right at the start. In the US, we
don't have Cat's eyes, So for anyone listening in the
US or reading this story in the US, cat's eyes
are reflective road studs. I think in the US we
would just call them reflectors. But the things that we
have aren't what you're writing about. So the first thing
(09:05):
I would love for you to tell us day is
a little bit about who you are, like your brief intro,
and then be explain what cats eyes are and why
you're so drawn to them that you've both written a
story and made art with them.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Well, I'm Diebooth. I'm a writer from England, from the
northwest of England, writing mostly speculative fiction. I write a
lot of horror, folk horror, literary fiction, whatever that means.
So yeah, I've got a few books out, have been
mostly mostly self publishing at the moment, but I've had
(09:45):
loads of short stories in various places, so that's me. Yeah.
So cats eyes, I think now we don't really call
them cat's eyes over here anymore either. It's kind of
an archaic term that known as road studs now, I think.
And they're like square plastic things now. They're not the
(10:06):
the round of glass ones that I'm writing about here.
So really, I wrote this as kind of a nostalgia
thing for me about childhood, because I always used to
love being driven at night when I was a kid
and seeing the cat's eyes and spotting all the different
(10:27):
colors because they'd have I don't know if it's the
same in the US. I assume it is. They're white
ones to mark the lanes that there's green, there's amber,
there's red, to mark kind of like slipways and stuff.
In the past. They were these little round basically glass
balls in casing that would be copper for the older
(10:52):
ones that I think got sort of phased out in
the eighties. I believe after that they were just like black,
like painted metal or rubber. I don't know how much
to it, how much to share of my personal life here,
but when I was a lot younger, When I was
(11:14):
a lot younger, when I was about twenty, my partner
at the time knew that I had a bit of
a nostalgia thing when I was a kid, and he
went and he got me a cat's eye basically from
a road and gave it to me as a gift,
which was probably massively illegal, but it was a siding one.
(11:37):
It wasn't like, it wasn't dangerous. I think they get replaced,
or they got replaced quite frequently anyway, as they'd sort
of break or get dirty as traffic went over them.
And so I knew what these things looked like when
they came out of the casing. So fast forward sort
(11:58):
of twenty odd years and they're all getting removed, and
all these signs start appearing in the UK, say warning
cat's eyes removed. And apparently these signs didn't last for
long because sort of visitors of the UK, we're getting
really distressed by these signs, not knowing what cat's eyes
(12:20):
were and going what cat's eyes removed? What on earth
is what does this mean? And thinking it was some
kind of like an animal cruelty term or whatever. So
that's where the title came from, and that's where the
where the inspiration for this story came from.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It's really funny that you say that they had to
take the signs down because I know I'm also going
to have to put clear disclaimers like all over the
issue because in the US we don't have that term
and we don't know what they are. So I know
there are going to be a lot of readers see
that title and automatically or like is this a story
about cats being armed?
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Which it's absolutely not, But like I'm wondering if that
was a good title to give it now, But that's
the reasoning behind it.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I think it's fine. I think it's fine. So that
was the history of you with cats eyes and the title. Now,
since that you said they removed them all a few
years ago and you you collected a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yes, So basically fast forward about twenty years and they've
started removing all of these old cat's eyes, replacing them
with the like plastic road studs. So I was wondering
where they went, whether I could get any more like
this one that I'd kept since I was young, and
(13:52):
I went to look if anyone was selling any and
I found one guy who works in roads but was
saving all of the world that would have been basically
thrown away and selling them on to collectors. And I
bought a bunch of the copper ones off him because
I thought they would make really wonderful travel talismans basically
(14:16):
for safe travel, and they're also very beautiful. I think
they're very beautiful. So I started producing these little pendants
that are copper and glass. And what I do is
I get these eyes, I clean them all up, a
polish the copper, I take the pins out so they've
(14:37):
got a hole through them from where the pins are,
and then I make copper bales for them so that
they can go on. They can go on a key ring,
they can go on a pendant, they can hang from
your rear view mirror. And yeah, I first started producing those,
and they're getting hard to define now because they are
(15:03):
all being replaced now, so it's a finite resource. And
that's kind of what I was thinking of when I
wrote this story, of sort of setting it many many
years in the future, I'm wondering, will there still be
any left in the roads in situ?
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about your story.
It's a really interesting story. I read it a few times,
sort of trying to decide whether or not I felt
like it was a good fit for Worlds of Possibility,
which is fundamentally like trying to invoke this sense of
like hope or comfort. And the story definitely posits like
(15:45):
a world where some kind of apocalypse has happened and
we no longer have cars, and people are not able
to go very far in the world. You say that
they only travel on foot, so it's a very different
sort of world than the one we're currently living in.
And I was like, is that too dark or is
(16:08):
that okay? And I came down on the side of yes,
obviously it's okay because I took it. But part of
the reason was because I felt like, at heart this
was sort of a cozy apocalypse where everybody in the story,
which is only two people, are having a sort of
emotional bond that strengthens over the course of the story
(16:30):
and really kind of embracing the world that they live
in now. The whole conversation about whether they miss the cars,
but no, actually it's it's quieter now, and they like
that sort of felt like, Okay, this is kind of hopeful.
It is kind of comforting, even though something some kind
of great change has occurred and that must have been
(16:53):
traumatic and life must look very different now. So I'm
wondering if you want to tell me a little bit
more about out why that specific world and what exactly
you and vision for how life works at that point.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I mean, I think I've written this knowing the world
we're living in now and how things are going and
how it's all like a lot of the problems that
we're facing now are I wouldn't say due to, but
definitely being exacerbated by and sort of facilitated by motivated
(17:35):
by tech, big tech tech billionaires, and this push towards
bigger tech controlling all of our lives, pushing people apart,
and the world seems to be getting sort of worse
(17:56):
and worse in that respect, and also the kind of
environmental impact of all of this as well, and so
I'm thinking this is some kind of apocalypse in which
the aftermath allows the environment to recover. And also more
(18:16):
than that, I'm thinking of, well, this is a story
emphasizing the need now to really emphasize community and to
be there for your immediate community and for your friends
and create these like smaller communities that exist in the
real world and building lasting friendships like these characters have,
(18:41):
and the fact that this is queer friendship as well
that has lasted from childhood right up to you know,
later middle age, as these characters are now. So that's
what I really wanted to explore and emphasize with this
is just community over big tech. I suppose that kind
(19:06):
of comfort in we can have our friends and we
can have our communities and that will get us through
and we will get through this and survive and rebuild
after all of this.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Yeah, I love that message, and I feel like that's
at the heart of why I eventually was like, yes,
this story absolutely fits for what World's of Possibility wants
to do, which is kind of remind people that there
is hope even in times when things are a little
bit tricky, and definitely we're living through them, and I
think the emphasis on community and really you are your community.
(19:44):
You have to build it yourself and tend to it.
And this story is very much about the small moments
of tending to your community.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, exactly. This is why I love Worlds of Possibility.
Is there's so much emphasis now thinking fiction, a lot
of fiction on like dystopia.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right, yeah, and so on.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
And I love that you're putting together something that's you know,
reality imitates art. So let's just hope.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, I mean, certainly, let's let's make it happen. I
feel like we are we are the people who are
going to have to rebuild, so we we've got to
start somewhere, and this is what I can do.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
You mentioned that it's a queer friendship and that these
people have been lifelong friends. They're now middle aged. This
is also part of the June issue. June in the
United States is Pride Month. Many of the pieces in
this issue feature queer narratives of some kind. For me,
that's very important because I'm myself and queer, but I
(20:57):
also really love to highlight a lot of different kinds
of queer voices. And I know that in your writing
you also highlight a lot of different kinds of queer voices.
Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Sure. I mean when I first started out writing, I
was writing sis hat horror, sort of the same sort
of stuff as I'm writing now, But it was always
kind of like straight couples or straight people, because really
that's all I'd ever read, and I didn't realize that
(21:31):
you could write anything else. And when I realized that
I can, just you write what you know, You write
the people that you know, you write about your community.
And once I realized that my default could be the
(21:52):
default for my writing, you know, it's like, why would
you write like every single character being queer? And it's like, well,
most of my friends are, so why wouldn't I write that.
So I've just sort of tried to write as much
and as diverse representation of queer people as possible, and
(22:14):
I'll continue to do it to do that because I
don't feel like I have all that much power in
today's society, in the world, and I feel like one
thing that I can do to make things a little
bit better and a little bit more equal is at
least just write loads of queer stories. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Absolutely, And I mean, I think everything that you're doing.
Every time someone else writ it's a queer story and
it gets published, and it gives a chance for someone
else somewhere who maybe hasn't seen that written before, to
realize that that's a possible way of being. Certainly, when
I was younger, there weren't I wasn't allowed to see
(22:58):
the variety of queerness in the world around me that
I can now. And I think kids in today's generation,
like they have so much more just accessible to them
in the mainstream, that it did not exist when I
was a teen. I was just this tortured, closeted person.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Same, And I think if I had seen the possibility
for all the different ways of being that I could
see now, I might have had a very different experience.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, I add exactly the same experience. So there was
just nothing. And then I think I was about seventeen
and discovered Poppy Bright and realized that there was media out.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
There so much as context dependent. It depends on because
in some ways people are always like, oh, well, we've
queerness has always been here, and there's always been curer
culture and there's always been queer media. And that's true,
but It's also very context dependent on who you are
and where you're raised and what kinds of things you're
exposed to, and whether you realize that something is actually
(24:05):
part of queer culture.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and whether you go to a church school in
el Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
So but hopefully by putting this all out there, we're
adding to the collective, and hopefully that will create more
opportunities for other people to see them. One of the
other stories in this issue is about book burning, and
it does not go as the people who burn the
(24:38):
books intend, and instead the stories spread farther than they
ever have before.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
I love that that idea, sort of like you can't
you can't burn it because it will keep spreading.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Fantastic.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
You make these travel talismans of the catsize. Yeah, this
is a second form of creative expression. So the first
one we'll be writing. The second one is this like
physical crafting. Are those your two main modes or are
you multi creative in other ways as well?
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Oh? I do everything. I do a little bit of everything.
What do they say, jack of all trades? Must you're
not mainly writing? I do? I do metalwork in make jewelry,
do a bit of wood, carving, do a bit of sewing,
do a bit of illustration, drawing, So anything, really, I
(25:38):
just anything creative. I love just producing physical things, analogue things.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
You've just always been drawn to creative arts in general.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Everything everything, I love it.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
That's wonderful. And you've mentioned so many fascinating things, but
the one that pops out to me is wood carving.
How did you get into wood carving?
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Really just through walking, Like I love walking in nature,
That's one of my favorite things to do, and just
like picking up interesting sticks and going what can I
make with this, and just kind of playing around and
making stuff. It's all. It's all very professional, as you
(26:21):
can tell.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
So it's not something like formal lessons. You've just decided
like I think wood curving could be fun, so I'm
gonna try it.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, that's everything with me. I don't think I've had
a formal lesson in anything. Oh my mate taught me
to crochet. I'm terrible at that though.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Okay, Well, tell us a little bit about your books.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
I've self published one novel, which is Spirit Houses, which
is way back in twenty thirteen. Now, that was like
my first solo thing I published. I had one co
edited anthology that me and a friend produced before that,
(27:08):
which we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
We just did it for the love of it, and
that was fun. That was called Revamp. That's out of
print now though. But my first one was Spirit Houses,
which is sort of an adventure horror novel. That's a
Kingdom hospital crossed with The Mummy, the Brendan Fraser film.
It's quite an adventually kind of soft horror. I've got
(27:30):
a few collections out. I did one called three six
y five Lies, which I wrote a flash fiction every
day for the whole of twenty twelve. I think it
was No. Twenty thirteen, it must have been twenty thirteen,
and then that came out in twenty fourteen. All of
the proceeds that go to the Most in your Own
(27:51):
Disease Association. And I've got two short story collections. One's
called Making Friends and one's called My Glasses Run. My
Glasses Run is horror short stories, and Making Friends is
a terrible mixture of genres of horror and literary and
just general just weird little stories, weird queer little stories,
(28:13):
I think I called it. So they're all available, and
I've got a novella called cool S, which is my
most recent release. That's about the s thing we all
drew in school and what it means and why it's
terrible and cursed basically. So that's my back catalog. I'm
hopefully getting my first traditional publication next year with a
(28:38):
really good publisher who I really admire. That'll be a
collection of short stories or with transgender and non binary protagonists.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Oh, that's exciting.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
So that should be twenty twenty six. But I don't
want to say who it is because it's not all
all set in stone yet, but hopefully that will come out,
and it'll be out eventually anyway, one way or another.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Well, that's really exciting. So for anyone who's listening who
is curious because they haven't actually encountered your work before this,
where should they go to find more?
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Well, I have a website diabooth dot WordPress dot com.
It's got all information on there about all my published
works where you can get everything from. And also there's
a page that's short stories that has links to all
of my published short stories and there's a lot of
(29:38):
them on there that are free to read online. So
I would say if anyone wanted to check anything out.
Then I have a read or have a listened to
one of my one of my stories that has been
featured on Worlds of Possibility as well, this one and
my previous one, What it Takes to Stay Wild. That's
a weigh in, I think.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
Well, thank you so much for coming and talking to
me and reading your story. It was lovely getting to
hear a little bit more about your background and the inspiration.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Thank you so much for speaking to me today. I
really appreciate the opportunity and it's just lovely to actually
get to talk to you. We've worked together a few
times and it's really really nice to get to chat
to you, and I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Thank you for listening to die Booth narrate his story
and talk to me about his creative process. If you'd
like to read the text of our conversation and the story,
you can look inside the June twenty twenty five issue
of Worlds of Possibility or read it for free online
at Julia Rios dot com. This is the life last
(31:00):
magazine issue of Worlds of Possibility, at least the last
regular one. I'm not ruling out the fact that I
might do a zine or something in the future. I
do still plan to release at least one, but probably
two more volumes of Worlds of Possibility as a book,
and that's before we get into any future things. That's
just counting all the stuff I already have collected, and
(31:24):
I will be putting more of the contents of previous
issues up online for free. I basically haven't had the
time and energy to do that, and one of the
reasons why I chose to wrap up the magazine was
so that I could actually have more time and more
energy to do things like getting some of those contents
out for free and also writing some more of my
(31:48):
own things. So you haven't heard the last of me,
but this is the last of these issues. Thank you
so much for coming along for the ride on this one.
I really appreeciate everyone who has been a fan, who
has bought the first anthology, who's been a subscriber. All
of you are wonderful. I know that all of you
(32:08):
are also interested, like me, in seeing a way to
build a better world than the one that we're currently
living in, and I absolutely love that. So again, a
heartfelt thanks for me, and until next time,
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