I am currently engaged in a long-term listening project of trying to hear every episode of the horror-fiction podcast Pseudopod, which has some pretty good stuff. Also, even the most horrible of horror stories make a welcome distraction from my daily commute, so it’s a good bargain for me.

Starting sometime vaguely in Pseudopod’s present (they’re now up to Episode 434) I am listening in reverse order. Sometime in the pre-dawn darkness today I reached back to Episode 108, which features a story by written Paul G. Tremblay and narrated by Mur Lafferty, “The Teacher.” I don’t want to give away the story, but there’s a rather sinister high-school teacher named Mr. Sorrent who takes his small group of advanced students for a most interesting lesson:

Jake sits in a chair at the front of the room. Jake is elderly and has no hair. His face is a rotting fruit, and he moves like a marionette with tangled strings. He grins. Big yellow teeth break through purple lips. He wears only a hospital gown, blue and white socks, and brown slippers. None of us want to be here. Jake says “Thanks to the loving support of family and friends, even if I don’t beat this disease, I’ll still have won. You know what I mean?”

We don’t know what he means. We couldn’t possibly know. He says more heroic things, things that win us over, things taht speak to the indomitable human spirit we always hear about, things that inspire us, that make us want to be better people, things that make us believe. Then Mr. Sorrent says, “Okay, Jake.”

Jake drops the curtain on his yellow teeth and he slouches into his chair, his marionette strings cut. He tells us everything he just said is bullshit. He tells us to fuck off. He hates our fucking guts because of our health and our youth and our beauty. He hates us because we expect and demand him to be brave in facing his own withering existence, because we expect him to make our own lives seem better, or more tolerable. He tells us that we’re selfish and that he’ll die angry and bitter if he wants, that he’s not here to die the right way for us.

“Fuck you, you fucks,” he tells us. And he doesn’t give two shits about us and he tells that we’ll all die the same way he will, alone. He limps out of the room, limbs shaking and moving in wrong directions.

You go old man! That’s a real lesson that everyone should get early in life. If you want to get it yourself, look here for the episode and its associated notes.