Dispatch

scott evers
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  • Fiction

Dispatch is a series of late-night transmissions that begin like ordinary phone calls and drift somewhere stranger. Part porch conversation, part comedy, part quiet reckoning, each episode follows companionship under pressure—dogs barking, rockets overhead, old memories, bad connections, and thoughts that wander into places they probably shouldn't. Funny and melancholy in the same breath, Dispatch is less about answers than the strange little sparks people keep passing back and forth in the dark.

  1. 1d ago

    Ask a Vampire

    The one about taking Halloween-night calls with a nine-thousand-year-old vampire. Dispatch 39 begins on the narrator's Mojave porch, where the trick-or-treaters have mostly gone home, the sound effects have been switched off, and the evening's special guest is answering questions from listeners. His name is Landau. He is a vampire, and after nine thousand years he has developed an entertaining, occasionally evasive, and not entirely reassuring perspective on his own species. The questions arrive from every direction. How does someone become a vampire? Do vampires live alone? Can they marry, have sex, or raise children? Do they eat ordinary food? What about animal blood? Landau answers some questions readily, avoids others, and occasionally seems more interested in correcting the narrator than satisfying the callers. Between questions, the narrator helps himself to Peanut M&M's and attempts to maintain something resembling order. But the conversation gradually reveals a more complicated history. For thousands of years, vampires survived by allowing human beings to mistake them for other supernatural creatures. Ancient Mesopotamian beliefs about demons and restless spirits provided useful disguises. Later, as frightened communities began opening graves and investigating the dead, vampires found themselves subject to a different kind of scrutiny. Even their ancient customs had to change. Landau moves between showmanship and something considerably older. He can joke about vampire manners and paperwork, then casually mention a river whose name disappeared three thousand years ago. Beneath the performance is a creature who has spent millennia concealing his nature, adapting to human fears, and living with appetites that remain difficult to discuss in polite company. As the calls continue, the questions become less amusing. What does feeding actually feel like? What happens when one vampire kills another? And what, after nine thousand years of existence, does Landau believe awaits him when he dies? At its center, Ask a Vampire is about the strange intimacy created when curiosity overcomes fear. An ancient predator becomes, for one Halloween evening, someone listeners can question about his habits, history, desires, and mortality. Yet familiarity does not entirely dispel the danger. When the calls end and the narrator takes his dogs into the desert night, he reflects on everything Landau has revealed—and on how much remains concealed. Some mysteries become more interesting the closer we get to them. Others may be worth keeping at a healthy distance.

  2. 2d ago

    What a Vampire Wants

    The one about a vampire who was turned by his mother at eight years old. Dispatch 38 begins with a violin playing somewhere beneath a distant storm and an unusual guest answering questions from listeners. His name is Landau, although he seems perfectly content to be called simply Vampire. He is nine thousand years old, and the narrator has invited him to explain something that has troubled human beings for centuries: why would a vampire want to make another vampire? The answers are not particularly reassuring. It isn't quite reproduction, companionship, sexuality, or predation. Landau describes an urge to make another of oneself, despite the terrible responsibility that follows. When a listener asks who made him, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Landau's mother transformed him when he was eight years old, believing he would otherwise die. The consequences separated them, leaving a frightened child alone with an unfamiliar hunger and no one to teach him what he had become. The story moves through the strange practicalities of vampire existence: learning to feed, concealing one's nature, lying about age and appetite, and acquiring the habits necessary to live among people who must never know the truth. But the narrator becomes increasingly interested in the emotional cost of these arrangements, particularly the guilt that even an ancient predator may carry. Then Landau remembers Anya, a woman he loved and wanted to save from death. Their courtship sounds almost ordinary, despite the extraordinary proposition hanging over it. She laughed when he revealed what he was, asked to see his teeth, and took seven months to decide whether she wanted to become like him. What followed raises a different question about love and immortality: does making someone capable of living forever give you any claim upon the life they choose to live? At its center, What a Vampire Wants is about the difference between love and possession, and the responsibilities created when one person irrevocably changes another. Landau's extraordinary lifespan has not freed him from the experiences that define an ordinary human life: childhood abandonment, hunger, guilt, longing, and separation. And when a final listener asks whether he ever found his mother, the answer reaches across four thousand years to something the narrator decides is better left unspoken.

  3. 3d ago

    My Friend the Vampire

    The one about a vampire, a séance, and two missing hours. Dispatch 37 begins with a telephone call from Roman Bly, a man the narrator has known for nearly forty years and insists is not his friend. Roman is a vampire. He is also someone with whom the narrator and Lisa once shared an extraordinary evening—one that neither memory nor the passage of time has entirely explained. The call begins with an ancient Egyptian tomb and a message left by a grieving son for his dead father. Roman sees a connection to their own history. The narrator is less interested in ancient parallels than in finally discovering what happened during a candlelit séance decades earlier, when he and Lisa sat with Roman around a small table and attempted to summon the narrator's grandfather. What he remembers is disorienting: a doorway full of stars, the sensation of being underwater, a view from above the house, and a terrible vision of Roman leading Lisa away from him. Yet Roman insists that the narrator remained at the table, talking for nearly two hours. As the conversation unfolds, Roman recounts things said that night—about the narrator's father, the children he hoped to have, and a private loss he cannot remember revealing to anyone. The encounter becomes increasingly intimate. Roman had been attracted to Lisa, and the narrator reluctantly acknowledges an attraction of his own, unlike anything he had previously experienced. Whatever occurred around that table left Lisa feeling inexplicably betrayed and Roman convinced that a connection had been formed that would last forever. At its center, My Friend the Vampire is about the uncertain territory between memory, desire, and the things we cannot explain about ourselves. A night that seemed impossible to understand at the time becomes no less mysterious after forty years. Roman remembers more than he should, Lisa carried feelings she could not name, and the narrator discovers that even the passage of a lifetime may not be enough to settle what happened between three people in a darkened room.

  4. 4d ago

    The Vampire Prince

    The one about Dracula, werewolves, and the rules of being a vampire. Dispatch 36 begins in Tucson, where the narrator has wandered into the Cathedral of St. Augustine and found himself on the phone with Fred, investigating the most famous vampire of them all. The trouble begins almost immediately: the historical Dracula was a fifteenth-century prince who committed extraordinary acts of cruelty, but apparently wasn't a vampire. As the narrator wanders among the cathedral's candles and shadows, the brothers attempt to establish a few rules. Could Dracula defeat a werewolf? What about several wolves? Does Superman qualify as horror? And if so, must they account for kryptonite in Transylvania? Fred's questions are not always helpful, but they lead to a surprisingly detailed examination of the original Count Dracula: sunlight, garlic, crucifixes, invitations, native earth, transformations, and a rather substantial moustache. The investigation turns darker when the narrator recalls the real people who once believed vampires were rising from their graves. Families devastated by illness opened coffins, encountered the unsettling processes of decomposition, and interpreted what they found as evidence that the dead were feeding upon the living. The familiar rules of vampire hunting were not always entertainment. They emerged, in part, from frightened people attempting to explain and stop something they did not understand. Then comes the larger confusion. Bram Stoker borrowed Dracula's name but left important questions unanswered. Later generations supplied their own answers, creating new histories, romances, abilities, and limitations. From Lugosi and Christopher Lee to Anne Rice, Coppola, and Twilight, Dracula has become a collection of characters sharing an increasingly elastic identity. At its center, The Vampire Prince is about the strange relationship between history, folklore, and invention. Stories accumulate around people until the inventions become more familiar than the originals, and even the rules we think we know turn out to belong to different tellings. By the time the narrator and Fred have settled their argument, Dracula has won a contest that was never particularly close. And somewhere inside the cathedral, a dark stairway offers one more mystery worth investigating.

  5. 5d ago

    A Family of Vampires

    The one about the vampire family Lisa and G met in New York. Dispatch 35 begins beside the fire, where the narrator is answering a question from his grandson Smith: has he ever met a vampire? As it happens, he has. Not one vampire, but an entire family, encountered on a Manhattan street many years earlier after an evening at the theater with Lisa. The Roșus were an unusually beautiful family—pale, dark-haired, elegantly dressed, and just a little too attentive to one another. When their daughter stumbled at the curb, Lisa caught her by the arm. The mother explained that the girl hadn't eaten. A small kindness became an invitation upstairs for a drink, and Lisa, who believed unusual people were generally waiting for someone to ask the right question, was delighted to accept. Their apartment was dark, expensive, and strangely domestic. Velvet furnishings, covered windows, Chinese takeout cartons, a child's shoe beneath the sofa. The family drank from opaque glasses and watched their guests with an intensity the narrator initially attributed to the habits of fashionable New Yorkers. Yet beneath their impeccable manners was something harder to explain: a longing that seemed to involve all four of them. When the Roșus graciously insisted that their guests stay the night, refusing began to feel impolite. What followed was an unsettling discovery before dawn, a hurried departure, and a memory that would take decades to acquire its proper meaning. Throughout the telling, Smith asks the questions any sensible child would ask. Were there fangs? Bite marks? Blood? The narrator's answers are less satisfying than expected, because the strangest part of the encounter is not what the family did, but what they apparently chose not to do. At its center, A Family of Vampires is about the mystery of desire concealed beneath civility. The Roșus offered hospitality, intimacy, and perhaps something more, while Lisa and G understood only fragments of what was happening around them. Years later, the narrator can recognize what they were without understanding what they wanted. And that, he suggests, may be the more interesting question.

  6. Trailer

    VAMPIRE: Five Nights, Five Stories

    Five nights. Five original vampire stories. Beginning October 27, Dispatch presents a new story each night through Halloween—a family, a prince, an old friend, and one vampire willing to take your calls. Follow Dispatch now to hear the complete VAMPIRE series as it arrives.

  7. Oct 20

    Nine Hamlets

    The one about seeing Hamlet for the ninth time. Dispatch 34 begins with three missing dogs, a cold house, and a man returning from his ninth staged production of Hamlet. He knows the plot by heart. What he does not know—and what keeps bringing him back—is who he will be when he encounters it this time. Beside the fireplace, the narrator revisits a character he has understood differently at different ages. Hamlet has seemed indecisive, grieving, cowardly, brilliant. Now another possibility emerges: perhaps Hamlet cannot fully enter the world because everything must first be resolved within himself. Every relationship becomes evidence, every person part of the investigation, until the self has grown so large there is barely room for anyone else. But it is Ophelia who changes the play this time. In Rhonda Zamora’s performance, the narrator sees not a fragile woman disappearing beneath Hamlet’s turmoil, but someone fiercely attempting to preserve herself while everyone around her assigns her a role. The contrast produces the episode’s central tension: too much self and we cannot reach the world; too little and the world consumes us. The dogs eventually return, bringing the cold night inside with them and restoring the household to its less metaphysical concerns. Yet the question remains. Nine Hamlets is about the strange way great works change as we do, revealing something different each time we return. Perhaps that is why we revisit old plays, books, places, and people even though we already know what happens. We are not always returning to see them again. Sometimes we are returning to discover who has arrived to meet them.

  8. Oct 13

    Failing

    The one about doing laundry and never quite being finished. Dispatch 33 begins in the garage, where the narrator has retreated with his oldest friend Oscar on the phone and the washer and dryer providing a small refuge of mechanical certainty. Folding towels offers something the rest of life rarely does: a task with an obvious method and an immediately recognizable result. Against that comforting order, the narrator tries to describe a persistent feeling that has followed him for years. Not that he has failed at something, but that he is failing—an ongoing condition without an identifiable offense. Work can make him feel he is failing the people he loves. Being with the people he loves can make him feel he is failing the work. Even rest carries the suspicion that something somewhere has been neglected. Oscar, predictably, wants to identify, measure, and correct the problem. The narrator resists. No one ever established the criteria by which this lifelong evaluation is being conducted, and a chart would merely provide something new to fail. Their disagreement is affectionate and revealing: Oscar believes important problems can be defined, while his oldest friend is beginning to suspect that some of the most powerful judgments we make about ourselves have no objective measure at all. Then the washing machine stops. The interruption provides the answer neither man has been able to reason toward. Laundry is never finished. Clean clothes become dirty. Towels return. Another load waits. None of that means washing them was a failure. There is only clean and dirty, work to be done, and the occasional satisfaction of being caught up for a little while. At its center, Failing considers what happens when we mistake an unfinished life for an unsuccessful one. The realization arrives without ceremony: perhaps the problem is not failure at all, but the expectation of someday being finished. The dryer continues turning, the dogs need food and water, another load will come tomorrow—and for the moment, that is enough.

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Trailer

About

Dispatch is a series of late-night transmissions that begin like ordinary phone calls and drift somewhere stranger. Part porch conversation, part comedy, part quiet reckoning, each episode follows companionship under pressure—dogs barking, rockets overhead, old memories, bad connections, and thoughts that wander into places they probably shouldn't. Funny and melancholy in the same breath, Dispatch is less about answers than the strange little sparks people keep passing back and forth in the dark.

Information

  • Creator
    scott evers
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © scott evers
  • Show Website
    Dispatch