It Could Happen Here - Thank You For Your Patience, Ft. Rebecca Campbell

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Author Rebecca Campbell (@canadianist) comes on to read a short story about a working an office job amidst a climate disaster. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Garrison, start the episode. I don't trust Robert today.

Me? You want me to start the episode? Yeah, I don't trust Robert today. It's time, Garrison. It's time for you to learn. Wow. My advice is atonal shrieking. I am not doing that. Everyone's going to be like, oh, Garrison. It's time for you to learn. Wow. My advice is atonal shrieking. I am not doing that. Everyone's going to be like,

oh, Garrison's just copying Robert's tone and cadence. Oh, yeah, right. You mean they're making sounds with my mouth? Yeah, that's how communication works. Start the episode with that and trigger everybody. Like me, you use a microphone. It's very real cringe Like me, you use a microphone. It's very real cringe. Yeah, you thief.

We're recording. Let's do this. Hey, it's time for stories. We love stories here at Etiquette Happen Here pod, the podcast about how things are kind of falling apart and maybe some ways to put them back together. I'm Garrison. I'm starting this episode today.

I'm not sure why. Robert's here. Because I'm real hungover. Robert is real hungover. Because I didn't trust Robert to do his job today, but I trust you, Garrison. You should generally not trust me to do my job. I know.

That's how I live. That's fun. We also have Christopher here. Yay! I trust Christopher to do his job, though. And we have writer Rebecca Campbell. Hello! Yay!

And why don't you briefly explain who you are and what's going on today? Okay. Well, I'm a Canadian writer, and sometimes I'm a teacher, but mostly I just write really sad stories about climate change and ghosts and AIs and near future stuff like that. This story I'm reading is called Thank You for Your Patience. It came out in Reckoning 4, I guess, last year. And it's based on my partner's time when he was working in a call center. And the kind of nightmarish stories that I heard from him every time he came home from work.

But it's also about me being on the other side of the country from the part of the world that I love the most, which is the Pacific Northwest. And, you know, watching Fukushima a few years ago and watching wildfires a few weeks ago and being separated from the things that are important to you as they're all falling apart. Well, I'm just excited that this podcast is now two fifths Canadian. So that's,

that's the main thing I'm excited about. Oh no. Oh my God. I just, a Tim Hortons cup just appeared next to me. Terrible donut holes. I have, I do have a Tim Hortons cup just appeared next to me. It's one of those terrible donut holes. I do have a Tim Hortons cup in my kitchen. Of course you do, Garrison.

Of course you do. Anyway, let's start this reading. Let's eat this popsicle stand. As they say. Wait, that's not a thing. Please continue, Rebecca. Let's eat this. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for your patience.

I'm lucky because they replaced a bunch of chairs last month and I got a new one. A good chair is important when you spend 10 hours a day in a cubicle talking to strangers about their problems. I've been here three years and worked on most of Western Morgan's services, which means I can, with no thought, help grandma set up her Wi-Fi or troubleshoot banking software, or set up your cell phone plan or help you with some app designed to find your soulmate that nevertheless fills you with hopelessness. I can't help you with the hopelessness. It's non-standard, but I'm Western Morgan's floater, and Geordie or Kirstie just drop me where the calls are heavy or turnover is high.

On Twitter, I can answer questions within five seconds of some asshole in Toronto saying, what the fuck, my TV doesn't see the house network. And I respond, I'm sorry to hear that Toronto asshole. Let's see if I can help. I'm impossible to rile because I've heard everything, every possible stupid question, every strange request regarding lapsed policies and missed payments, every paranoid rant, every sort of impotent rage. The management is shitty and the customers are irritable, but there's beauty in problem solving. The really bad stuff started at the end of last month when I had to do a one-on-one with Jordi, team lead for the floor. I'd been fielding a bunch of questions regarding a recent

patch that had broken everything. I had this rhythm hitting my 30-second AHT and typing without thinking, Mark here, how can I help you? But one-on-one is mandated interruption, so I listened to Jordi brainstorm about improving morale. They stopped having barbecues because it was too expensive, even when the burgers were sawdust and soy. Also, no one wanted to be outside because Detroit was still burning and the PPM up to something like Beijing. Listen to this. Western Morgan Idol, Jordi told me. We judge three of the top-ranked calls, and we have a thing, and someone walks away with a Timmy's gift card, like 50 bucks.

Jordi said that like it was a good thing. What about a key fob, I asked. We can't get out without one after hours, but only management can hold. Or the winner gets to wear jeans or keep their phone for a shift. That didn't rate an answer. The most frustrating thing about Western Morgan is that team leads have to hold your phone, like you're an untrusty teenager who's been grounded. I feel like I'm lost in a cave or space station. When I do a lot of overtime, I arrive when it's dark and I leave when it's dark. And while sometimes I go around the corner for coffee or McNuggets, it always feels like I'm just visiting the world. I don't know what's happened, if a government's fallen

or if an ice shelf has collapsed, if Detroit is burning again, or maybe California or the Great Lakes are dying at a slightly faster rate than they were before I left for work. Never knowing what's going on outside, I sit in my good chair and say, that sounds frustrating to everyone, no matter who's talking or what they want. Let me see if I understand your problem. You could judge, Geordie said, still talking about morale. You're impartial. You hate everyone. I don't hate everyone, Jordi, I said reflexively, though to be fair, I hate a lot of people here.

After my mandated 15 minutes with Jordi, I saw that Misty had a problem with my documentation, which has been rough since they changed policy on me. She's in the Philippines, where most of the real work happens. Upper management is all in India. They only have us because they need Canadian accents on the phones and they get tax breaks bringing jobs to one of the more desolate parts of the country. Downwind from Detroit, rampant West Nile, and 90% of the province's heavy metals processed at the plant out by the mall. 70% of the babies born here are girls, something to do with residual BPA. Misty is on the other side of the Pacific, in Legazpi.

But you'd think she was right here, considering how aggressively she organizes us. You're shit at filling out forms, Mark. The write-up is going to kill your rank. We're stack-ranked every shift. It gets you points you can redeem, which honestly is worth it for the grocery store gift cards. Just tell me what I did wrong, Legazpi. We were in the middle of a rough month. The flu hit everywhere at once, and no one could afford to lose the work, so we had a bunch of people come in sick. Coughs and juicy sneezes all over the floor, and half the time, you got in the elevator and everyone was gray-faced and weaving. I came in over the weekend to cover mobile because they lost half their staff, so I'd

been on for eight days by Monday when Jordy was manic trying to call people in so he wouldn't have to go on the phones. He always says when we're smoking outside and he's pointedly not looking at the place where the GM building used to be. It's not the extra 50 cents an hour, it's the fact I don't have to deal with people. He hated taking calls. He offered me overtime, so I started coming in at six and leaving at 10, and I didn't even notice the weekend. I do remember going home those nights and thinking how hollow my room felt, with my roommates playing Call of Duty in the living room, and how my body seemed to vibrate. Caffeine, maybe, or pseudoephedrine. I heard phantom time warnings and chimes, and when I closed my eyes, I could see the screen and call after call flooding the queue. By Saturday, Western Morgan was a haunted house, but I still wasn't sick. That sounds frustrating. Let me see if I can help.

I was dealing with this woman on Vancouver Island who couldn't generate invoices. We'd been at it for two hours and I could feel her getting upset when I told her to wipe the whole system and start again. I could help her with that, but she was like, no, we'll lose two weeks of work. There's nothing I can say to that. So we keep troubleshooting even though it's pointless. Okay, I can say to that, so we keep troubleshooting even though it's pointless. Okay, I said, you can go back to your root invoice and try. Oh, she said, what? And that was it. I didn't hear anything but the line itself, which just went dead, that kind of absence you get when someone hangs up on you. Are you there, ma'am? I called back, but I got a reorder tone, not voicemail or an old-fashioned busy signal, but the one that means the whole system is busy or blocked or down.

I dropped out of the queue then, which you're not supposed to do, obviously, and went looking for Jordi, who was chatting with Kirstie about Western Morgan Idol. I asked if they knew anything, but of course they didn't, and when I asked if I could at least grab my phone to see what was happening, Kirstie did a kind of elementary school teacher sigh. Documentation for 3-9-9-0-1-8-0, you're overdue, Mark. Caller dropped. Saw that explanation. Happening across the board looks like the problem's at their end. I didn't find out until Mo came back from break, streaked wet in the way you are if you run out into that rain blowing in from Detroit because you don't want it to touch your skin saying earthquake on the west coast you know anyone out there I

thought about the woman trying to get the invoice together for a tiny order of sea salt from some equally tiny place on Vancouver Island her business so minuscule it's still fit into our cheapest subscription. In my unsubmitted documentation for Misty, I had written that her voice sounded like a hopeful but slightly overwhelmed great aunt trying to make the remote control work. No one, how bad? Like 9.6, the worst since forever, like for hundreds of years. Jesus, I said, Jesus, Jesus. I've had similar moments on calls when the shooting happened in Montreal, not Vieux Montréal, but the one where the kids ran downtown from McGill and the photographer caught the girl as the bullet tore out her right kneecap. I was on the line with this dickwad in a co-working place on Maison Neuve who was asking to talk to my supervisor.

Then, mid-wine, he stopped talking, like he suddenly didn't care about my attitude. I could hear his phone pinging. Sir, are you there? Can you hear that? It's happening on the street. I can see a faint popping, voices raised and doors slammed. Then he cut the call. I kept in the queue. I helped someone update. I did a subscription renewal. The next person, though, needed a backup, and that took forever, so we chatted about hockey until she said, did you hear about Montreal? No, ma'am, I said, thinking about the sound I maybe heard before his phone cut. Firecrackers. Backfires. Some guy shot up the whole downtown. I think it

was terrorists. Who knows? FLQ. Or Muslims, maybe, Red Power. 50 dead, but it was going up every single time I refreshed the page. She kept going on like this while we did a backup, and then I made sure everything worked, and it had been like three hours at that point, and I kept thinking of the guy and his silence, and what was going on in the streets while we talked about his login and how unprofessional I was. I don't have any friends in Montreal. I went there once to drink when I was 18, but that's it. I just had that guy and the thump of footsteps fleeing the co-working space. When I took my break, the rain was falling again, the faintly gray kind that runs down the sidewalks and the gutters, and when it builds up enough, you can see it's a little

milky because it's full of ash. If you think too hard about what's running into your eyes as you stand outside smoking until your pack is empty, you go eat a 24 box of Timbits or six Big Macs, or you stop for one beer on the way home and only leave when they push you out the door. Jordy was outside. I gave him a cigarette, even though he doesn't smoke either, and he said, it doesn't seem to be getting cleaner. Wasn't it supposed to get cleaner? He grew up in Detroit, though he was already over here when it burned last year maybe it's safer the hum is worse i thought the hum was supposed to go away when

they sent in the cleanup crews we watched the warm ash-colored water run down the gutters until it was ankle deep this city is a wetland and there isn't far for water to go so it ends up in people's basements all that ashy bony water running through foundations and drains a constant trickle in the background sort of like the faint pop you might hear while you're on the phone with a guy from montreal who wants to talk to your manager does it feel, Jordy said and lit another cigarette. What, Jordy? I hate how often he doesn't finish his sentences. Does it feel like it's happening more now, this sort of thing? I dropped my smoke into the rainwater and I shrugged. Then I said, I wish I knew what to tell you, which wasn't a real answer. And I used my tech support voice when I said it because I didn't want to have that conversation.

On my first break after the earthquake, I smoked and watched the rain and videos on my phone, someone live streaming the moment it hit. Bored to talk about food or weather. Then a strange look on their face. Their eyes dart upward. Then the phone falls. Overhead footage from helicopters of downtown Vancouver, all those green towers swaying and falling, and the bridge swinging until the cables snap like rubber bands, the worst in recorded history, worse probably than the last megathrust in 1700. I just kept thinking of that woman and the sort of quiet shock in her voice, her, oh, is that? And then nothing. And I was standing out in the rain, still warm, when it occurred to me that I might have heard her last words. I kept thinking about the texture of the silence after the call dropped,

and what had happened the moment after that, if that had been the worst of it, the shock of the whole world rumbling, or if it had been worse for her after that, or right now, or tomorrow. I only had 10 minutes because call volume was increasing. My throat started to tickle, and the world just suddenly, out of nowhere, started to look glassy. The light thick from the ceiling squares and my skin prickled when I ran my hands over my arms, which were covered with goosebumps. The floor was nearly empty except for Geordie running around supervising and not taking calls and the queue was packed. My first call was from way north along the coast, Prince

Rupert, a woman calling about a password reset. I want Mark, she said. He helped me before. Can I talk to Mark? While I was documenting, I thought, fuck it. I'm going to tell Misty what the old woman told me while we were waiting for the password reset email about how when you're that far north, you don't notice time passing, and you feel good in an unimaginable way in summer, luminous and hopeful, and how in winter, all you want to do is die and drink yourself into a coma, so you know it balances out. After that, I reopened 3-9-9-0-1-8-0. An elderly woman, I wrote, on a phone, trying to print invoices for locally produced sea salt, looks over at the rack of glass jars in which she keeps her stock because she hears a rattle, then another, then she says, oh, is that? And nothing else, because at that moment, the

force of 25,000 Hiroshima's lit the Cascadia subduction zone, on which Vancouver Island rests like a cork in a bottle. Centuries of continental tension released. I typed that, then I hit send, then I added a secondary note on her file. At 8.32 PST, a 9.8 hit the Cascadia subduction zone. And Misty was right there on Chat Hive, not telling me it was inappropriate. She wrote, rest their souls, and I was comforted by those temporary words, which surprised me. My grandparents were on Mindanao in the 1976 earthquake. You got anyone there? No. I heard the hum from Detroit. It was somehow a relief to know that across the world, Misty was in a similar room

among people evaluating documentation for apps and ISPs and accounting software. People saying, that must be frustrating. Let's see if I can help. Something occurred to me. You hear anything about tsunamis? No word so far. Do you have your phone so you can get the alerts? They'll let us know. We're so bad, I'm taking calls, so I won't be fixing your dock until tomorrow. I wondered if Kirstie would let us know, or if she would dither about it until all we could do was climb to the top floor of the building and watch a wave consume what was left of Detroit before it swamped us, too. Five more calls and I refilled my water bottle, the one with the slogan on it, fueling small business with the tools to succeed, that some now lost Western Morgan contract brought

in. And I was looking at my skin reflected in the sink, which was the color of those pale, lumpy smokers you see outside the entrance, the color of a raw filet-o-fish. I felt adrenalized, like a moment before I'd been terrified, but I could not remember how or why. I wondered what it was doing to me inside all those cells now remade into virus factories, turning to goo and mush and sloughing off while the virus proliferated through my system, and I left traces of it on everything I touched. The water ran over the top of the bottle, clear. So far the ash hasn't worked its way in through the city's water system, or maybe it has and it was invisible,

like the microplastics in the lake. So you gonna judge? It was Jordy. We're gonna do it next week. I was thinking we'd set a time limit like five minutes. You and me and Kirstie judge it. I'll grab a 50 for the Timmy's card too. Man, I said. Jordy just stared at me. You getting sick? You know what you need to do? He went on about echinacea and flu effects, and I thought about the tsunami that was or was not traveling across the Pacific. Or just hammer your system with antioxidants and take a double dose of NyQuil. Without thinking, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. You know you can't have that anywhere on the floor. I was already googling Pacific tsunami alert, and it was rolling rainbows,

and I stared at it so hard that it seemed to take over the whole world. And then I shivered, but Jordi was still talking. Don't make me write you up. I don't want to deal with it. Okay, I said. It's about privacy for our users. They need to know that they can trust our integrity, our word, and our system. The poster on the far side of the break room said integrity, word, and system. I saw that the alert had been the break room said integrity, word, and system. I saw that the alert had been issued for Japan. That's when he took my phone. You fuck the dog, I have to write you up. I don't want to write you up. Japan in six hours, 8 p.m. I'd still be on then, while very far away, a wave crested on the seacoast, filling the river basins and the car parks.

coast filling the river basins and the car parks. I know you don't have to surrender your phone, even if they can require you to leave it at home. I know they're not supposed to lock you in, either, or let you smoke within three meters of the door, even when the ash is falling. They're not supposed to pay you in points you can then exchange for grocery store gift cards, which you need because the new minimum wage wasn't even covering rent. But I needed a job. The next call I got was farther south, closer to the epicenter.

The first thing I did was ask about the earthquake. Oh, we felt it, and there's a tsunami warning. But we're far enough inland, it shouldn't be tsunami warning? So when I try to log in, tsunami? I keep getting the same error. It says my account's frozen. What does that mean? I need to do some invoices. And yeah, I just got the text like half an hour ago. Landfall is like an hour. The account was frozen due to missed payments. So I pointed that out. And the guy insisted, no, he set up an automated transfer. And he kept me on

the line while he chatted with the bank's tech support on another line to sort out the direct deposit. And then I reactivated his account all this time, the tsunami traveling toward the coast, while the shallower bottom would raise the wave's height by narrowing its length. Because the last time I'd been outside, I'd looked at a GIF on Wikipedia that demonstrated how tsunamis crest as they travel through shallow waters. through shallow waters. The last thing he said wasn't thanks. It was, there it is, the tide's going way out. I hope everyone's out of downtown. Then he was gone, and I could imagine it, the water running away from the shore like a huge exhalation and then collecting into a rising wave that would destroy them all. The tsunami warning? I wrote in chat hive, hoping Misty was there. Kirstie responded instantly. That is not appropriate. Chat hive is for important work stuff. We haven't heard anything, but we were swamped, so who knows what's going on outside? Chat Hive channel will only be used for appropriate business-related business. Maybe you should get out. Chat Hive channel will only be used for appropriate business-related

business. I'd been there for 16 hours, and I couldn't remember the last time I slept a full night at home when I hadn't been buzzed on cold pills and exhaustion and the sound of Call of Duty from the living room. That week when I did sleep, I kept saying, this is Mark from MagnaCore, or this is Mark from wherever I am right now, and heard explosions and the way voices carry over from the river from Detroit, the screams and the crowds and the gunshots. Or maybe I was never actually asleep. Maybe I was just off my head. I shouldn't have washed the pills down with beer. But there's that thing that happens when you stop in for a beer after work and the inertia of the whole thing, the job, the shitty beer, and the

fact that a person brings you food, even if you can't afford it, it sticks you to your seat. It was bad last summer when we couldn't afford to run the AC, but the bar on the way home could, and it was full of familiar guys, broke and lonely, and trying to avoid looking at what was left of the Detroit skyline, or the gray-green clouds boiling to the north, and the hail, and the lightning storms every afternoon like clockwork. The summers are definitely hotter, and the mosquitoes are definitely worse, and the last summer I noticed that the birds don't sing anymore. All their whistles sound like video game lasers. stupid Western Morgan idol, piles of bright pink and green and blue post-it notes all over his desk.

I need to go out. The doors are locked for the night. I need to go out. We lost another girl from online. You'll have to take over social media if we lose anyone else. Take your break here. I just kind of stared at him and my skin prickled like all the pseudoephedrine I'd taken had rushed to the surface and was blasting every single nerve ending in my body. I need to go outside. You can't, like you physically can't. I kind of stood there and I'm ashamed to say I wanted to cry, like a little kid who isn't allowed to use the bathroom, who just wants to sit with his dad but keeps getting dragged away by unfamiliar relatives. The kind of crying you see on the bus at rush hour when some little kid coming back from the mall loses it and lies in the aisle wailing, cramming road salt in his mouth, and you

just think, you and me both. I didn't actually cry. I hate myself because I just said, begging, can I please have my phone back, please? Geordie looked at me like I was an idiot, him in the middle of all the post-it notes that read, Congratulations! And you're a winner! And Westermorgan Idol! I didn't say anything. I left. At first, I just sat in the lunchroom, shivering and nauseated, staring at the plastic solo cup left over from the barbecues they used to give before the ash. There will be worse moments in my life, no doubt, more pain, more sadness, but I can't imagine anything so wide-ranging in its

desolation as that moment. The only thing I could focus on was telling Misty to get her phone back and watch the horizon and be ready to escape. A girl from online staggered through, sweaty and pale, and I knew that Jordi would be there in a minute to ask for another eight hours overnight answering strangers' questions so perfectly that they they treat me like a shitty customer service AI built to serve. There aren't a lot of choices in life, are there? You can choose to have kids or not, to leave your hometown or not, or to stay in a terrible job you are, for some reason, very good at. But other than that, what is there? Just a lot of compliance and non-compliance. This moment didn't feel like a choice.

I said to the girl, we need to get out of here. And she nodded. Then we headed down to the lobby. The doors were locked and no one carrying a key was in the building. And the girl just looked bad. But when I went to the fire escape, she still said, no, no, we're not supposed to. We need to get out. They'll fire us.

And I could hear the fear in her voice. And I wondered how badly she needed this job, that she was here in the middle of the night so sick she could hardly stand. Tell them I did it, I said and hit the bar. Only it didn't move because the fire escape was locked too. The next thing I did was stupid, but I don't know what else I could have done. I walked back to the lobby and picked up a garbage can and began slamming it into the glass door. Behind me, she was coughing and coughing and said, maybe stop, stop. But so faintly, I could ignore it. Then we were out and she was staggering toward the emergency room on Ouellette.

And I was alone in the rainwater, the same temperature as my blood. Then I went looking for a payphone because the only way to sort this out was to call in. But I couldn't remember which of Western Morgan's departments Misty was assigned to, so when I finally found the city's last payphone in the bus depot, I called them all, all the sad voices of men and women here and on the other side of the world. Welcome to Kyphos Business Systems. Jane speaking. Can I help you? Welcome to Tesla Mobility. Can I help you? Welcome to Kyphos Business Systems. Jane speaking. Can I help you? Welcome to Tesla Mobility. Can I help you? Welcome to Roscommon Account Services. Welcome to Lighthouse Mobility.

I'm looking for Misty. She helped me before. I'm sure I can help you. What's your user number? Misty. Misty knows, I said, my voice queerless and elderly. Put on Misty. I could hear the exhaustion in his silence, then the compliance. One moment, I'll transfer you. Hey, Misty, I said. Misty, Misty, you need to get to high ground. What? Who is this? Just promise, okay? There's no tsunami warning. It's on its way. It's passing Japan and Hawaii. It hit the Aleutians, California. I hope she didn't mistake me for what I felt like right then. A crazy old man, mad with loneliness, longing to hear a voice in the void,

even if it was only to harangue them for the weakness of their service and the terrible nature of their product. Mark? Another six hours to landfall. I know you'll still be on shift. Promise. I waited for her to disconnect, which was okay, because at least I told her. Then I think maybe she said, Thank you, Mark. Or maybe it was just the noise in my head. I held the line another moment, then hung up. I felt okay, because I got through, because I wasn't in a cubicle anymore,

because I could walk home and enjoy the silence before Call of Duty marathons in the living room, enjoy the ashy rain falling across my slowly cooking skin. I walked home, Misty. I walked home, hoping Misty said, thank you, Mark. It felt like I was slipping through a gap in the world between noises, a kind of silent passage, the way kids slip along the abandoned rail easements in town below grade, the corridors of grass and rats and squirrels and birds, between the noise of the phones and call of duty, between heartbeats, between cresting waves, the silence you hang on to for just a moment when someone hangs up before you go on to the next call because there is, temporarily, a respite from the tyranny of the queue.

The silence after a bullet connects or a wave hits on the other side of the world. I just hoped, harder and harder and harder, that Misty would insist they unlock the doors and break the windows and they would escape before the wave arrived to wash the rest of us away. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I don't know how to add a clapping sound effect without it just sounding horrible in the audio. Airhorns. You know what? Danil. 40 straight seconds of air horns or or or not um i think the air horns are good that was beautiful yeah that was wonderful yeah it's really incredible thank you so much and particularly relevant now yeah yeah. Yeah, that is extra relevant

from what happened the past week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is... It sucks. If people want to find more of your work or if there's anything you would like to plug now is the time okay um i have a website it's called where is here.ca um and i have uh

geez links to a bunch of my different short stories there i have a novella coming out next year a few years ago i published a novel um but if you're interested in the climate change stuff there's probably one i'd recommend called um an important failure that was in clark's world it's available to read online it's been translated into polish It's in a couple of different collections. And if I'm allowed to brag, which I'm going to brag. Please do. It won the Sturgeon Award last year, which is a science fiction award handed out by an academic organization in the U.S. And it's about climate change. It's all set on Vancouver Island in Vancouver.

I've heard you also have stories about ghosts. Yes! I have a genre I'm trying to establish that I call obstetrical horror that I started writing when I was pregnant. Oh, shit.

Giving birth is just such body horror. So ghosts, childbirthbirth all that stuff uh yeah i read a lot about ghosts as well you can find like i say a lot of that stuff's on my website and links to anything that's available for free online so yeah where is here.ca and i'm on twitter at um at canadianist but i i don't really use it that much. I am excited for the combination of climate change fiction with horror fiction. And by excited, it's like half

actually excited, half dreading because a lot of it's going to probably be horrible in terms of people being like, you know what's scary? Climate change! And you're like, okay. But... Yeah, but... Oh, sorry, go on go on i don't know but i think there definitely is a good way to combine the x the existential elements of both of those things

into something that actually is really impactful that plays on human fears and emotions and how we can get over those fears and move towards something useful yeah and it's also that horror going back for well however long you want to, we've been telling stories has given us a series of structures to kind of process that. And I think that's really valuable that there are patterns we can use to work through. And I mean, writing climate change fiction for me, I just finished another novella that's specifically about like near future stuff and about the wildfires a lot. But having a story to tell about it

as a way of processing all the research I was doing was really valuable. It's super useful. Yeah. And just, I mean, you can call it therapeutic if you want, but I don't think it's that. I think it's organizing information in your head that is just simply too large for you to actually grasp.

I mean, I can't actually grasp this stuff, but you can't it's too big yeah exactly exactly oh yeah um trying to i mean yeah horror does that probably better than almost any other genre in terms of i mean look what it horror does with um adolescent anxieties or um you know all sorts sorts of different, the fear of dying, the fear of aging, the fear of illness and stuff like that. So, yeah, I think we have structures in place with horror fiction and with sort of science fiction horror that kind of are going to let us start to process things that are otherwise just too intellectual. Or not intellectual, but too abstract.

It's too, yeah too yeah abstract is i think is the right term because i mean like my guess my fear of that is that like climate change fiction is just gonna resort to like the disaster story and it has very like glamorized weird versions of like apocalypses and disasters and like collapse in very like big ways that impact everything around you when in actuality the effects they have are very localized and small and are still horrifying but the way that they're framed is always frustrating in films you'd look at like you know a typical you know like apocalypse themed movie i think is i i'm afraid that the bigger you know if you're talking about like big movies how it's going to frame in that way instead of these more kind of personal stories of like the

horror of being trapped inside a warehouse as a tornado comes and you're not allowed to leave which is way more horrifying than oh look all of new New York City is crumbling because of this tsunami, which is so big and, like, possible, I guess. But, like, that's so big, you can't feel that. And what's more likely to happen is people getting trapped in buildings and not being allowed to leave. And that's, like, that's actual horror. Yeah, and it's intimate, too, right? Like, it's not a distant idea. It's intimate. It's the particular consequence of something for a community, for an individual, for relationships. And if I can go on on this,

there's an entire genre of apocalyptic fiction that kind of comes out of the early Cold War. And there are always these weirdly cozy apocalypses where one white guy survives. And in the new world, he builds this kind of feudal fantasy. So I've actually, this one called The Last Babylon, where a character says, of these two spinster ladies that were miserable before the nuclear war, after the nuclear war, they're really happy because their lives have meaning now.

And those are the apocalyptic stories that we've had. We need a new kind of story, a new kind of horror that I think that does exactly what you're talking about, that doesn't default to that weird heroism and one guy surviving kind of thing. There's a wonderful Cory Doctorow short story that I think pivots off that idea nicely in his book. Unauthorized toast, I book. Unauthorized Toast, I think. Unauthorized Bread? No, Unauthorized Bread is one of the stories in it, but the book is a different. It's a collection of his short stories, but there's a post-apocalyptic story

that kind of follows a bunch of tech bros trying to do the traditional, like, survive the apocalypse makes everything better you know, better for me. I get to be a cool warlord thing. It's good. Yes. It doesn't end well for them. Yeah, I think the thing that is important to do is, like, focus on the horror of the little things.

Like, the little things on things on like a global scale. Like the thing that is so frightening about climate change is that all of these, the, the terrible things it's bringing are going to hit the same way mass shootings do, where it is a calamity for a community and people 50 miles away, uh,

try to pretend it didn't happen and, and get to doing like their daily stuff. Like that's what's so scary about it. It's not, like you said, it's not the buildings in New York collapsing from a tidal wave. It's the birds stop singing and you still have to go to work. I'm writing a script right now for probably this show about how climate change is hard to think about because of how big it is. And one of the models that I'm trying to draw a comparison from is like,

it's almost like climate change is like a type of Cthulhu, in terms of the way it affects you, but you'll probably get by. It can affect your neighbors, and you can watch it, and you can watch it affect other people, but it doesn't mean that your life is going to end this way because it's so big and uncaring. It can attack so many places at once, but

you don't know how big those effects are and how and what the scale of them will be on your local area. So it's like this thing that is way more existential than anything else because it does not care. It has no morality.

It's not out to get you specifically. It's this weird thing that's just getting imposed upon us now. And that type of horror in fiction, I think, is something that at least I want to explore in my next few years of writing. And I'm excited to read other people's work who kind of cover that similar side of horror and combining with climate change and the small ways it's going to start affecting us and places around the world. I think that what you said, and isn't there someone who talks about the Cthulhu scene? I don't know.

Yeah. That's Donna Haraway. Donna Haraway. That's it. Yeah. But also just how weak some of our previous narratives, like you can't bring in Judeo-Christian apocalypses to this kind of thing because we we can't, there's not, you can't, we can't have that kind of moralizing in it.

Yeah. That we need, and that's honestly, Cthulhu's really handy for that cosmic horror. Yeah. Because it forces you to, as you say, face something on an existential level, that how you feel and who you are and your individual experience does not matter. So, Frick, a lot of people

like, you know, us, we're watching what's happening in Kansas right now. And, Frick, a lot of people like us, we're watching what's happening in Kansas right now. And I'm like, I'm not in Kansas. I don't know anyone in Kansas. I'm looking at this calamity and it's so distant from me. But yet it's also very close. And that's a weird feeling to deal with. And I can see, oh yeah, corporations are contributing to this specifically like climate

change as in general but like like amazon trapping people inside inside inside these warehouses it's like i can there's ways to fight extensions of this but you can't fight it you can only fight its extensions and that's and yeah it's it's a super it's a super interesting thing that I'm going to, I think we are going to see this idea get dealt with more and more as these things start happening more and more. And yeah, I mean, climate change, cosmic horrors, maybe the way to go. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good line to end on uh or at least a good thought to end on well thank you so much rebecca for coming on and sharing your story would you mind plugging

your website one last time since we've talked an extra like 15 minutes oh sorry no no no no that's good i just want you to people may not have noted it last time before the conversation. We should give them another chance. Okay. So the website is whereishere.ca. So W-H-E-R-I-S-H-E-R-E.ca. Excellent. All right.

Well, thank you very much, Rebecca. Until next time, everybody, lose your mind with the cosmic horror of something. Something. Anything. Any kind of cosmic horror that causes you to, your mind to scramble and you to begin worshiping in the dark corners of the world. Anything that does that is good.

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. Very, very happy to have you. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.