Flash Pulp 005 – The Neighbourly Farmers
Welcome to Flash Pulp episode five.
Tonight’s story: The Neighbourly Farmers
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/skinner/FlashPulp005.mp3](Click play to listen or subscribe via libsyn RSS or iTunes)
Tonight’s episode is brought to you by codyskinner.com. Visit to see a guy’s resume, or watch the award winning documentary “A Day In The Life”.
That’s http://codyskinner.com.
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – 400 to 600 words brought to you Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Next week we will be presenting our first multi-part serial, introducing a new character to the Flash Pulp lineup, Thomas Blackhall. The stories of Blackhall, coloured in shades of Robert E. Howard and Sir H. Rider Haggard, will allow the show a more historical, and somewhat mystical, perspective.
As for this evening’s episode: it opens on two farmers, long time neighbours, ruminating on their lot in life from the saddles of their tractors.
The Neighbourly Farmers, Part One of One
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
It was the second day of Alfred and William’s thirty-first harvest as neighbours. Both hoped it would be their last – as they had for decades.
Their time was evenly divided.
Half was spent staring at the other, either in the eyes or in the back, droning along their rows of wheat. The other half was a blessed relief as their tractors carried them away to the furthest ends of their fields.
Unknown to either, they had each spent long hours prowling around the other’s home, shotgun in hand. In the end both men were too stubborn to surrender by being the one who pulled the final straw.
Without warning each man’s engine stalled.
At that same moment, in a small off-off-Broadway theater, the men’s ex-wives were holding hands and watching a terrible play. Despite the poor acting and pretentious script, they were smiling.
In the distance dogs and cows began to howl, in Alfred’s chicken coop his two dozen hens dropped dead.
Hay bails were tossed into the air and became grassy bombs as they shattered on the earth.
A flood of mice streamed out of the fields, abandoning their burrows in futile exodus.
This day, their last, both men would know the horror of Kar’Wick the Spider-God.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
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