Escape Pod 22: Don Ysidro
Show Notes
Rated PG. Contains death rituals with possible disturbing imagery, and numerous pot references. (No, not that kind.)
Referenced sites:
Short-Short Stories
Podiobooks
Don Ysidro
By Bruce Holland Rogers
On that last morning, anyone who came to visit me could see that I was dying. I knew it myself. As if I had cotton in my ears, I heard the voice of don Leandro saying to my wife, “Dona Susana, I think it is time to fetch the priest,” and I thought, yes, it’s time.
We don’t have our own priest, or even our own church, so someone has to drive in a pickup truck to get the priest from El Puentecito. But don’t be fooled by what you may hear in Malpasa or in Palpan de Baranda. Here we remain Catholic. Yes, we make pots in the old way. That’s why tourists come here. And it’s true, as is sometimes whispered, that we have restored certain other practices from the past. But not as they were done back then. Those were bloody and terrible times, the times of the Mejica. They say that the sacrificial blood covered the sun pyramids from top to bottom. Thank the Virgin, we don’t do anything like that.
About the Author
Bruce Holland Rogers
Bruce Holland Rogers is an American author of short fiction who also writes under the pseudonym Hanovi Braddock. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, two World Fantasy Awards, the Micro Award, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and Spain’s Premio Ignotus.
The 2001 short film The Other Side, directed by Mary Stuart Masterson, was based on his novelette, “Lifeboat on a Burning Sea”.
He is a member of the Wordos writers’ group and was a member of the fiction faculty at the MFA program in creative writing of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. He has taught fiction writing seminars in Denmark, Greece, Finland, and Portugal. In 2010 he taught at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest on a Fulbright grant.
About the Narrator
Evo Terra
Travis Unwin, known professionally as Evo Terra, is an American podcaster, author, radio broadcaster, and businessman based in Bangkok, Thailand. Terra is the author of Podcasting For Dummies, originator of The Beer Diet, a travel blogger, and an early pioneer in podcasting.
