Matthew Kirkpatrick

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we go underground with Matthew Kirkpatrick. In "Crystal Castles" a little girl who falls into a well and becomes a media-sensation meets her neighbor the mole, who eats dirt in variety of familiar ways and plays Atari. In "Nevada," Kirkpatrick takes us deep below the surface of the Silver State to the site of an underground nuclear test. What happens from there you have to hear to understand. A transcript of "Crystal Castles" is published at Action Yes, but only Apostrophe Cast can capture Kirkpatrick's voice, which is as stony as the Utah landscape he calls home. Please enjoy Matthew Kirkpatrick.

Jane Sandor

Since Thanksgiving and leftovers are only days away, for this installment, we bring you a short, salty bite of malls, celebrity, and music that will cheer you up if the economy, or all the pie, is getting you down. Jane Sandor is haunted by ghosts. Very well dressed ghosts with lots of money, syndications, and entourages. If we were to connect the dots in Sandor's version of LA, the famous (and the legion of the once-famous) are persistent specters that insist on behaving as if their world is normal. She explores what it means to be from a city where shine and any-minute-now success are common enough that instead of staring, one constantly curses for having to squint from the glare. Where childhood friends marry Tom Arnold. Where Rachel Hunter dances and dances and dances. And where everything is true in some form of perfection, imperfection, and the blur of the rewarded and the special. And, also, Ice-T is at the mall. Please enjoy this excerpt by Jane Sandor, with music by Jesse Toussaint & Dent Sweat.

Josh Maday

This episode we are pleased to present a short story by Josh Maday. In Josh Maday's work, something is not quite right. It keeps you mesemerized and guessing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes funny, but constantly creeping up on you with the sense that this skewed reality is heading somewhere you have always been afraid to go. When we finally understand his design, we realize that it is not Maday's work that is off, rather that he has discovered something wrong with the world. Please enjoy "Work Release" by Josh Maday.