SMNTY Fiction: Delete Culture

A deal is made, a contract signed, time unravels, a birthday arrives and the bill comes due. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha. I don't put to stuff.
I never told you a protection of I heart radio.
Oh my voice kind of gave out and that it
true things to come. What I'm just kidding? What Please

(00:27):
don't put a curse on my my money maker, moneymaker
and my money maker. So this brings us to another
edition of Sminty Fiction. I have a little teaser for
you all. We're at the end of my one shots,
which means we're going to move into a longer form,

(00:49):
continuous one what yes, which I'm very excited and nervous about.
Kind of nervous putting the us out there, but I
am excited. I think it'd be great, as always is.
If this is not your deal, totally cool. We only
do this once a month. It won't hurt my feelings. Um,
if you're like nope, not for me. Also, as always, Christina, amazing,

(01:09):
Thank you. These would not happen without Christina. She brings
it to life. Love it she does. So Samantha and
I have a lot of stuff going on in personal lives.
I know we've alluded to some I know everybody does.
But so this one might be a bit shorter because
there's some moving, there's some vacation perhaps. Yeah, yeah, so

(01:37):
a lot's going on right now. This one might be
a bit shorter. So this one is interesting for a
couple of reasons. We've talked before about dreams and dreaming, uh,
and how women's gender differences in dreams, but also how
in the pandemic my experience has been my dreams have
become more vivid and more wild than they ever have been.

(02:02):
And as of late, I've noticed I have a lot
more sleep paralysis happening where dreams are happening with the
sleep paralysis, and it's terrifying. It's so scary, but I
do get what I feel like, and I know that's
kind of a trope, and people make kind of it

(02:23):
really good ideas from my dreams. Hey, that's even better though. Yeah.
There's been so many I've written down where I just
have like the title in the basics and they are
in our like spent fiction folder because it might come
back to them. I had one last night where Sebastian
stand trying to kill me, but then no, I didn't.

(02:47):
I didn't, and then he became best friend. He was
mad about Winter Soldier costume, and so I guess that
was the grounds to kill me. And then he became
best friends with my my one of my best friends,
and I became very jealous. But anyway, this story comes
from that because this is actually a really vivid dream

(03:08):
that I had and my love of time travel horror.
Do you have any like thoughts opinions on time travel?
I love, I love a good trouble on time travel,
for sure. I like. I like that whole perspective because
I I really lived wishing we're And again, this is
very much may being a part of white culture, not
realizing how damaging it was. But like in the nineties

(03:30):
forties because I love the old school musicals, I love
so any of that, and I think fifties really wanted
to be a part of that, um not realizing as
an Asian woman, I wouldn't have done much. But yeah,
like their moments. And then also because the unknown of
way back when it like interesting, like you can get
some good stuff like Witchcraft and all of that, like

(03:52):
and it's just today and we know the good horror,
but when we talk about the vetch and stuff like that,
but it throws it back, it feels even more ominous. Yeah, yeah,
and I Also, I'm somebody who loves puzzles, and I
feel like a good time travel movie. Our story I
like trying to put together like the pieces, and I
think there's a horror in thinking you can go back

(04:13):
and fix something and then it makes everything so much worse,
even worse. Okay, So with all of this in mind,
let us get into the fiction portion of this episode.

(04:37):
When I was eleven years old, a man knocked out
my door for crisp demanding knocks, and goose bumps broke
out over my skin. The hair on my arms stood up.
You are a long black coat. The skin was pale,
strikingly so. His eyes dark, had no hair, col permeated

(05:00):
the room, the heavy kind of cold that froze everything
in its tracks, that slowed time itself. My mom, a small,
petite woman, was swallowed in his shadow. He smelled like vinegar.
It was overwhelming. He looked out of place in our

(05:22):
small apartment. A specter looming in the doorway. They spoke
in hushed tones, his voice avoid I watched out up
the corner of my eye from behind my couch. I
thought he might be a tax collector, or there to
evict us. There was a seriousness about my mom's shoulders.

(05:43):
That reminded me of how she held herself when she
spoke with a bank on the phone. She stepped back
to let him inside. The way he moved was unnatural,
as though he was gliding. They went into the small kitchen,
my mom taking a seat at the table as the
man stood in the corner. The harsh fluorescent light of

(06:04):
the kitchen painted shadows on his face, of scaring his
features from his jacket. He produced a piece of paper,
sliding it onto the table, followed by a pin. I
watched my mom as she read it, her head in
her hand. He stood in silence, watching, waiting. My mother's
shoulders slumped. She signed the paper in the corner. The

(06:27):
man smiled, a thin, garish smile in the light. Something
shifted in the air shivered. I couldn't see his eyes,
but I knew he was looking at me. He collected
the paper with reverence, pocketing it in his long black jacket.

(06:49):
He murmured something, stepping out of the kitchen and into
the dining room. My mom followed behind him, her arms
wrapped around her middle. For the first time I looked
into his eyes. They were empty, though I desperately wanted to.
I couldn't look away. Ten years from now, your life

(07:12):
is going to change, he said. The statement was flat, lifeless.
The moment passed, he showed himself out, walking out of
our lives. I assumed forever. I hoped forever. I stared
at the door until my mom came and knelt in
front of me, blocking it from view. Happy birthday, sweetheart.

(07:37):
Over the years I asked my mom about this incident,
but she just got the same guarded smile, with a
vague explanation about a mortgage before she changed the subject.
Not one birthday went by I didn't think about it
my twenty one birthday, and the life changing promise loomed
a larger and larger the closer I got to it.
That wasn't the only reason I could never forget that day.

(07:59):
I saw him the man. I saw him everywhere. Sometimes
it was just a flash, a reflection in a window
and the TV. Others it was more of appealing, a
pervading sense of dread and cold, always accompanied by the
strong smell of vinegar. Once I was in a movie

(08:21):
theater and this presence was so strong I swore there
was a hand on my shoulder that I could feel
his empty, vacuous smile next to my ear. I ran
out of the theater. My friends made fun of me
for it for years. Sometimes I saw him, not a shadow,
not a reflection, standing there, watching, smiling. I pretended I

(08:47):
couldn't see him until he went away, but he never
truly went away. I jerk awake in the middle of
the night, convinced someone had been standing over me only
moments before. I only told one person about this, my
best friend Katie. We jokingly called the apparition fine car.

(09:10):
There are things you don't question as a kid. We
moved into a house, a big one, after so many
years in a small apartment worrying about money. It was
the height of luxury. My mom became increasingly distant, hurt,
but her armor was seemingly unyielding. Soon after the move,

(09:31):
my friend Katie bought Awuiji board over for a sleepover.
With nervous anticipation, we laid it out, giggling, unsure what
to do. We asked it about boys, jerking away and
laughing at the first signs of tentative movement, asking each
other if the other moved the cursor, and both the
humanly denying it. Let's talk to fine car, Katie asked,

(09:55):
excited to her, the specter that followed me around was
a source of morbid curiosity, or she felt excitement. I
felt fear. I wanted to know more about him too, though,
And whatever he'd spoken to my mom about, whatever contract
they signed that left me with his shadow, is fine

(10:16):
gard here, she asked. The cursor stayed resolutely still. My
friend tried again. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then slowly, surely,
it slid across the board, the window, coming to a
stopover Yes. We both stared at it, then at each other,

(10:40):
shaking our heads at the silent question. Neither of us
had moved it. What do you want? Another pause? We
waited with bated breath. The familiar cold settled heavy in
the air, the faintest sound of a whisper, the smell
of vinegar. We read the letters aloud as the cursor

(11:02):
skittered across the board, as oh oh, and my stomach
clenched with fear. Then the cursor twitched and we both
kerked away from it. As it burned. It began moving
erratically on its own as we watched, and growing horror

(11:23):
with jerky movements. The indicator darted and halted over a
string of numbers the date of my twenty one birthday.
Suddenly he was right behind me. I knew if I
turned around, I'd see his two pale face and two
empty black eyes. I frozen terror, the cursor's movements growing

(11:45):
even more frantic, My heart pounded against my ribcage. Racing
out of control. Panicked, I threw the board against the wall.
Silence descended, interrupted only by my gasping breaths. Then my friend,
um awesome, she declared it. I never used the Wigi

(12:05):
board again. By the time I was twenty, my mother
and I may as well have been strangers. My impassioned
fee for her to talk to me, to look at me,
was met with silence, her expression unmoved. The specter was
an almost constant, now a shadow I'd been forced to accept.

(12:25):
Dread saturated my life, and I became a shadow of myself,
a certainty taking stronger hold every day that I was
getting closer and closer to my execution. And then scientists
announced that they discovered time travel, that they were working
on a machine and training their first travelers, as they

(12:48):
called them. Everything was about to change. They said, jubilant.
They set the date for the first voyage, the same
date as twenty one birthday. I was in my apartment
when I found out. My stomach dropped, tried to swallow

(13:09):
and couldn't. This couldn't be a coincidence, couldn't The news
reported on their progress. As the day ticked closer, they
speculated about the date they'd go to forward or back.
I already knew what date they choose, ten years earlier,

(13:30):
the same day the mysterious specter first knocked on my door,
but my twenty one birthday arrived at the entire world
watched with excitement as they powered up the machine, wires
and coils whirring, a city hum filling the room as
scientists gave updates on the status of machine. The travelers
stepped in the glass case, four men and women, excited, nervous.

(13:55):
The term I count down blaired or the humming intensive,
then zero. A tearing sound d the air, one that
you could feel in your bones. The travelers were screaming
horrific primal sounds as they were ripped apart and reassembled

(14:18):
again in again, until they seemingly were shorn out of existence.
The broadcast cut out the world ended that day. I'm
not sure how long I stared blankly ahead, waiting. There
was a knock on my door, four sharp knocks, dream like.

(14:43):
I answered it. The man who had haunted me for
years stood there fully corporeal, just as he had a
decade ago. Behind where once the landscape had been burdened,
it was now desolate, the sky purple and angry, even
though it was the middle of the day. Strange creatures twisted,

(15:04):
all teeth and claws and tentacles, snarling, shambling and galloping
and screeching. The man smiles that lipless smile, his eyes
brighter than I'd ever seen them, some unidentifiable quality burning
within With purposeful movements. He reached into his jacket pocket
and pulled out a crisply folded piece of paper. He

(15:26):
held it out to me. Shock dictated my actions. I
reached out and took it. When I unfolded it, certain
words stuck out to me. Tethered fixed point, my mom's signature,
the date of collection, today's date. You're one of the travelers,

(15:50):
I said, as the fabric of reality was torn asunder
behind him. He smiled. Images invaded my head as he
stared at me, sharing his memories, images of a cavernous
darkness and screaming and pain of being reputedly torn apart,
impossibilities and monsters and demons as time lost meaning and

(16:12):
reality collapsed in on itself, gigantic creatures roaring, evolving and unnatural,
the answer to our summons, rushing into the tear we created,
watching existing, aging and ending pain, loss of self, mutating,

(16:32):
and then arriving finally to the location in time they'd
sought after, no longer quite human, aged and monstrous, unable
to return home, furious, Ten years to weight seemed like
nothing compared to the near eternity they'd spent in a hellscape,

(16:55):
exposed to so much horror as the world was unmade,
but they were unmore from time outside of it. Discordant
the contract was only meaningful, and that the intent inherent
in it provided a thread for a lost traveler to follow,
a guiding light my mother signing that contract rang across

(17:15):
the universe until it reached its terminus, a fixed point
in a destabilized universe. He'd followed me, shifting in and out,
a shadowy constant in my life, tethered to me as
I guided him back home. His energy manifesting and starts
and stops as he grew more powerful. The closer we

(17:36):
both arrived at our destined meeting at the end of
the world, and in return, I was not unmade, as
humans all around us screamed, transformed as their cells destabilized
and reconstituted into twisting, mindless, pained creatures. But now, I asked,

(17:58):
He smiled and held out his hand. Haven't we been
here before? Maybe we will be again and we're back.

(18:27):
I hope you enjoyed that fiction bit. Okay, So a
couple of things on this one. Like I said, this
was based on a very vivid dream that I had
and my love of time travel. So I believe I've
talked about it before on the show. But vinegar is
a real thing. I hesitated real, but it is something

(18:48):
that I believed that I saw as a child, and
I'm sure it was like the creepy child from a
movie who can see ghosts that they can't see or whatever.
I am very very confident that I was just dealing
with trauma. And also I had a friend who would

(19:09):
really prop up. We both liked horror, we both like
these kinds of things, and she would really prop that
up so I would smell this vinegar and I would
see this figure, and uh, my friends knew, they knew
about vinegar. And the Luigi board instant is also true,

(19:34):
and I just want to, you know, put out there.
I love horror. I don't particularly believe in ghosts or anything,
but I don't dismiss that I was going through something
and it felt real at that time. But yeah, it
did feel like something always hang over me and always
watching me. And I again, I think that was my trauma,

(19:58):
but that was part of the inspiration of this story too.
The title I got from again. I love these technological
um of applying these technological terms to these human, deep
human experiences that we all go through. Uh. Delete culture

(20:19):
is a term that refers to an idea that you
can just post something and then delete it and it's gone,
but it's never actually gone. And so this idea in
terms of like contracts and time travel, I don't know,
I just really like the title. I do think it's interesting.
The idea of a parent selling the future of their

(20:42):
child knowing that in like a ten years time in
this case, their life is going to go terribly wrong.
But in that ten years you're going to have your fame,
your fortune, or whatever it is. I find that really fascinating,
especially in our culture of and this is broad generalization,
but in our culture of seeing kind of like pushing

(21:03):
kids from a very young age to be Olympic athletes
or actors or whatever it is that the parents kind
of making this decision and then really pushing. Uh. And
in the best case scenario, that works out great for everybody,
but it doesn't always. It doesn't always. So that is

(21:25):
one thing that I've just been thinking about, I guess
on my mind and kind of that whole signing of
a contract and not worrying like we're not gonna worry
about that now. We'll deal with that later. We'll find
a way out of it. We'll find a way out
of it. And then you can't. And I clearly have
a whole thing about like knocking and somebody coming, like

(21:47):
somebody being there, that it's mysterious. So I'm getting like
vibes just thinking about it. But also, and I'm going
to be real honest to admit the because I bet
some of you picked up on it. I can't remember
how it ended. The dream. I don't remember how the
dream ended, so I made up like I remember all

(22:11):
the stuff leading up to it, but it's kind of
without an ending, and it felt appropriate for a time
travel story. Also, those are my nightmares when something doesn't end,
Like when something doesn't end on the movie. I need
an ending. I needed closure, which is one of the
ways I prevent from being scared from a movie is
I need to see an ending. So right, no, it is.

(22:32):
It's upsetting. There's no real ending, and I just wanted
to put that out there. I'm gonna be a real
honest because I'm sure some of you were like, wait
a minute, I'm not the only one that does it.
They're playing movies that just sort of end. So as always,
we hope you enjoyed, and yeah, I look out for

(22:54):
more interesting fiction content in the future. And as always too,
if you have suggestions for something in the public domain
we could read, that would be awesome, So police in
those are way our email step media, mom stuff at
iHeart nea dot com. You can find us on Twitter
and moms the podcast, or Instagram at stuff I've Never
told You. Thanks as always to our super producer Christine
making the magic happen us, and thanks to you for

(23:17):
listening someone ever told you. Subrotection of I Heeart Radio.
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