---

Open 27 Hours

By L.P. Kindred

“It had pops of habanero-like spice immediately calmed by the subdued dulce of roast sweet potato. You got lemony shots of citric acid alongside amandine crunches. The dish was studded with cubes of meat I was too young to name then and I’m now too old to recall. Nobavgo casserole is the single most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted in my entire life.”

D’Sheadra laughs a laugh that starts in her pinky toe. Her hands flail around the leather-clad booth before slapping the dark-grained table. “What the fuck is a nagabovgoat?” she wheezes.

[The full text for this story has been temporarily removed at the request of the author and the original publisher. It will become available again in mid-December. If you would like to read it, please visit Speculative City.]

 

---

Host Commentary

L.P. Kindred has this to say about the story: “The prompt for it was writing about A Memorable Meal. Johnie’s, a Los Angeles diner that only exists to be filmed, is an anachronism. Gladys’ was a real dinette in Chicago with photos of its famous patrons like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Lou Rawls, Redd Foxx, Governor Jim Thompson, Della Reese, Reverend Jesse Jackson and Gladys Knight. Until 1997, Miss Gladys paraded through the dining room, watching kids become adults. My Mom took me there as a teenager and I could taste the history. My Mom died when I was 17.”

What an incredible story about the power of memory and how time is ultimately an illusion when it comes to matters of the heart.

Escape Pod is a production of Escape Artists Inc, and is brought to you with a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

If you’d like to support Escape Pod, please rate or review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. We are 100% audience supported, and we count on your donations to keep the lights on and the servers humming. You can donate via Patreon.com by searching for Escape Artists – or via Paypal through our website, escapepod.org. Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Octavia Butler, who said “Writers use everything. We can’t help it. Whatever touches us touches our writing.”

Thanks for joining us, and please continue to actively seek out and support Black Science Fiction!